The holidays in Florida

Sugar snap peas are delish right from the vine.

Starting from the point of the knife: oregano, curly parsley, garlic chives, purple & orange carrots, sugar snap peas.

It's two days before Christmas and the rains are headed our way, so it was time to harvest some of the Christmas dinner.  The rain will bring a cold front, but it's 80º, so my attire was tropical. Here's the plan for this harvest:
- Sugar snap peas: the young ones will be steamed with butter, while the older pods will be used in the pesto dip.
- Purple and orange carrots will be cut in thin diagonal slices for dipping in the pesto, while the rest of them will be steamed with butter.
- Lime basil, curly parsley, garlic chives, and oregano will be used in the pesto dip.

We'll be having a large pear salad as part of our vegetarian dinner, but I'll wait to harvest the lettuce until right before it's needed. My daughter and her husband will be arriving tomorrow night. As usual, the cooking will be a team effort. Fun!


Merry Christmas from Florida

The house is a decorated as it's going to be with a few poinsettias and a couple of stunning tropical sage bouquets!

See my two other posts today: The magic of the mistletoes over on the Native Plants & Wildlife Gardens blog.  One of the comments made me laugh: From Marilyn: '“…when we think about the magical and mythical mistletoe and how it stays alive even while its host appears to be dead.” And then, only to be shot down by some trigger-happy hemi-parasite poacher. Mangled movie title: “They Shoot Mistletoe, Don’t They?” Who knew? What a fascinating article.'


Wild things wreath!

The second post is Christmas is for the birds on the Florida Native Plant Society blog. My wild things wreath is the one you don't see in that post. But since I've added the cranberry chains, I have yet to see any birds investigate, but maybe I haven't been sitting at my computer long enough since then to notice or maybe they gave up.

I wish you and yours a wonderful Christmas and a joyous New Year.  Thanks for reading.

Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt

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Greens and clear mountains

A quick trip "up the hill" for a meeting found me admiring the clear view of the mountains and a lovely sunset.

late winter greens from a previous year

A bonus from this trip was collecting greens (arugula, mustards, kale and turnip greens) from my unprotected raised beds. It's rather remarkable how they've bounced back from sudden low temperatures in the low 20°s a couple of times already -- low temperatures are predicted again for tonight.  The kale isn't surprising, but the arugula and mustards?

The mache and creasy greens look great and I've left them for harvest later in the winter! They're quite OK freezing solid, amazingly.

The remnants of the broccoli stems (totally frosted)make me feel better about the woodchuck muching earlier in fall - I probably wouldn't have had a harvest anyway.

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Back to normal?

Finally, our curiously warm and wet days for early December are trending back to normal, after being punctuated (on both ends) by severe freezes.

It was 71° yesterday.  Very odd. It's triggering some early flowering, but not like last year oddities, that's for sure.  But I remember a Christmas Day (in Austin, while growing up) that was 80°F and in coastal GA, we had very mild winter days, too.

There have been plenty of falls over the last two decades, too, where we haven't experienced a hard frost (much less freeze) by the time we leave for winter break.

The Japanese cherries keep flushing out!   At this rate, it'll be interesting to see how many flower buds are left for spring.

At the Garden (where I work), our director spotted a Hepatica acutiloba in flower (it's normally one of the first flowers in spring, but December?)

Here's a post from several years ago, remarking on late February flowers.

Hepatica acutiloba

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A lovely hike

A gift of an unexpected Sunday afternoon in the mountains (thanks to a plumbing issue requiring Monday attention) was a lovely hike along a short segment of the Mountains-to-Sea trail, along the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Remnant snow made the trail slippery in spots, but the views were lovely.

Galax and mosses were nice, as were the abundant Christmas ferns.

Woody's pawprints on the road (Blue Ridge Parkway, closed currently at this point because of the pre-Thanksgiving snow), pointed the way home.

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