Fireflies

It's always a joy to see fireflies -- here in the Carolinas, it's June when we see most of them. 

I don't know that much about fireflies -- just that the males flash to attract mates; the periodicity is meaningful; and different species flash at ground level, mid-level, and up in the canopy.

We had a colleague years ago who studied them in the Smokies. He'd head off in June to lie on the forest floor at night and do counts and monitoring. (He had been a city dweller before we knew him, so he seemed an unlikely person to be doing this kind of research!)

Fireflies are definitely seasonal, and hmm, a quick google search brought up this; clearly fireflies are impacted by human disturbance as so many other organisms have been.

But they're still relatively common in the Eastern U.S. and elsewhere in humid areas of the world, apparently.

Read More

Harvest-based tempura and more...

The harvest for some tempura.

The harvest & recipe

I had some okra, but not enough for good-sized batch of fried okra, so I supplemented it with 5 little sweet onions, some zucchini, and not shown here, about half of a garlic bulb.

I don't have a deep fryer, but this method for tempura works pretty well.

Vegetables:
12 okra pods sliced
1/2 zucchini sliced
5 really small sweet onions sliced
1/2 garlic bulb (about 4 cloves sliced).

Batter:
2 large eggs
1/2 cup plain non-fat yogurt
1/3 cup water
1/2 teaspoon of freshly-ground black pepper

Dredge:
Yellow cornmeal
Grated Parmesan cheese
About 3 parts of cornmeal to 1 part cheese in a wide bowl with a flat bottom.

Whip the batter with a fork until fully mixed in a small, steep-sided bowl. Heat a large frying pan with about 1/4" of olive oil covering the bottom on medium high. Drop about 1/4th of the vegetables in the batter, lift  them with a slotted spoon, and then dredge in the dry mixture until coated. Spread the vegetables in the pan and turn after a few minutes. When first batch is light brown, slide it to the side of the pan away from the heat before adding the next batch of vegetables. When the second batch is light brown, turn over the first batch and slide all of them to the cool side of the pan and repeat for each batch.

After all the veggies are done, lift them out with the slotted spoon and drain on a double layer of paper towels on a plate and turn after a couple of minutes. Serve with soy sauce.

Crop-based tempura. It was yummy.

My Swiss chard looked like Swiss cheese!

The Swiss chard had gone by and was being eaten by bugs or slugs.

Chard is a beet and has a good tap root.
I checked them for nematode damage and there was none.

It was time to take action to extend the Swiss chard season. Some of the chard plants were really large with stems that were 2" across, but I chose 7 smaller plants and put them into a pot. This way I can remove them from their hot, sunny location to one with more shade and also remove them from those hungry herbivores.

Chard is a beet that has been bred for foliage and not the root, but that meaty tap root will provide the energy for regrowth for a few more harvests. I harvested the leaves that had not turned brown and rinsed them well before bringing them inside. They are holey, but that won't matter once they are finely chopped for salads or cooked for greens.  Stay tuned and I'll let you know how they grow.

I trimmed away all the leaves and soaked the pot in rain barrel water overnight.

More on my nematode experiment

Someone asked for a better photo of the roots, so here's a closeup of nematode-free broccoli roots.

I posted the results of my experiment that I wrote about last week on The Garden Professors' page on Facebook. People had some great questions and wanted more information on where I had found this information. So here is a summary of my answers:

I found out about using marigolds as a cover crop during a discussion with several UF professors when doing my research for "Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida." There is a whole group working on organic agricultural practices and they were quite generous with their time as we were writing the book. Here is the article on cover crops: Cover Crops for Managing Root-Knot Nematodes, and more specifically, Marigolds (Tagetes spp.) for Nematode Management.

One of the commenters said that it didn't make sense to him that if inter-cropping (planting together) didn't work to reduce nematodes, then how could growing marigolds for two months before planting be effective. What he missed in reading the article was that, by definition, a cover crop is dug under after growing. I learned from the professors is that most of the nematode repellent chemicals are in the leaves, so the marigolds work only when used as a cover crop and dug in before planting the next crop. It was an interesting discussion and several people said that they learned a lot, which makes me feels good.
  

A dark force lurks over the pollinators working the coreopsis.
The large dragonfly is probably a black pond hawk (Erythemis attala).

Pale meadowbeauty lives up to its name.

Summertime in Florida means great cloud formations. They were interesting in every direction on June 24th.

The summer skies in Florida can be amazing. Be sure to look up!

Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt

Read More

Poison ivy, Virginia creeper, and other condundrums

I've been allergic to poison ivy since childhood, so I'm very familiar with how to identify it and avoid contamination.  (I'm crazed about making sure our dogs - over the years - haven't picked up the urushiol from the leaves on hikes, etc. -- and if they have, it's always been bath time!)

So, it's with some humility, and annoyance, that I'm suffering through the worst case of poison ivy that I've had in years.  Most unwelcome, although happily it's not all over my face (that's the worst!)

The saga started about a week ago, with weeding Virginia creeper seedlings in our front woodland border.  There were LOTS of them this year, so I was glad to have the opportunity to pull most of them up, before they covered the woodland wildflowers that we're nurturing!

But, Virginia creeper seedlings can often have 3 leaflets as the first set of true leaves -- this photo from another blog illustrates this nicely, and we've seen seedlings like this in our garden, too.

They're "ringers" for poison ivy.

So, as I was blithely weeding Virginia creeper, I must have also pulled up a poison ivy seedling, or two, as well, thinking it was Virginia creeper.  And, unfortunately, even though I washed my hands after coming back in, I didn't do my usual thorough washing up (immediately) that would follow a potential poison ivy exposure.  We've been so thorough about trying to eradicate poison ivy from our landscapes, I wasn't even thinking about the potential for seedlings.  Hmm, since in a former life I did research in germination ecology, I should have thought about this!

Lots of (native plant and other) seedlings have become established this year, after a very good fruit production year last season.

Here's a comparison of Virginia creeper and poison ivy, from another blog called Identify that Plant.

Virginia creeper on the left, poison ivy on the right

So, I have bad patches on my arms, with secondary patches elsewhere.  Nothing too dreadful, but much worse rashes from the direct contact than I normally would have (from secondary contact).

A cautionary tale, for sure.  With itchy arms to show for it.

For those of you that are interested in the dermatology behind the reaction to the oils, this is an excellent explanation about contact dermatitis.

Read More

Swapping peas for beans

I never imagined that I'd be pulling out sugar snap peas, beet greens, and purple-podded peas just after the first day of summer. But I did that over the weekend, and we enjoyed the harvest.

It took a bit of scrambling to round up the appropriate bean seeds for their trellis replacement, too.  I had some of them at the ready, and thought that I had all of my seeds here, too, but apparently some of the warm season varieties are in a separate container elsewhere.  A quick visit to two local commercial sites took care of that!

I like to grow pole beans: Italian romano, lazy wife greasy beans (an Appalachian heirloom from SowTrue seed), and yard-long beans (which thrive in hot summers). I also sowed a fresh round of cilantro and chard, and planted another Japanese eggplant.  I planted some squash seeds, too, just for fun, and would have planted more, but the woodchuck is definitely too active in the lower beds to make it practical without barriers in place.

Here's my (very) first test audio snippet (too short to be called a podcast) recorded on Garageband and uploaded through Soundcloud.  I've done quite a bit of audio/radio over the years (even video), but with expert support as part of my work. 

This was unedited and not redone, so hardly a smooth piece, but... it's a thrill to see this work.  Magic!
 

Read More

Purples in the garden

fading Aquilegia petals

I've been amazed at the brilliant colors that the fading Aquilegia petals have become.  They're almost neon magenta.  A quite un-natural color, but it's still a true color!

Aquilegia, a fern, and rocks

 The corner plantings look lovely, because of them, and the robust foliage of ferns and celandine poppy.

developing Indigo Rose tomatoes

 The developing Indigo Rose tomatoes clusters look great  -- and hopefully, foretell some delicious anthocyanin-rich tomatoes...

purple-podded "soup" peas

And the purple-podded soup peas ("Blauwschokkers"--I think -- an old German/Dutch variety) has been beautiful, too.)  The fresh peas have been tasty enough, but I'm thinking that they're not worth the space in a small garden!

Read More

Results: the nematode experiment

In looking at all the broccoli & parsley roots, there was very little damage
by root-knot nematodes. Yay!

The problem...

For the last several years, the root-knot nematodes have damaged roots of several of our crops, but we were not aware of it until they were pulled up. Most of the time the crops had been producing well anyway, but why not take all the organic precautions we could to prevent the damage?

I took action last year and planted a dense cover crop of marigolds and dug them into the soil. See my post Nematodes, marigolds & crop rotation for the details. Last fall I planted my cool weather crops hoping for the best, because previously marigold plants scattered around the garden had not had any effect.

Success! Today we pulled the parsley and broccoli, both of which had been seriously affected the last few years. The roots were clean! No lumpy knobs caused by the nematodes.

While the experiment had a good outcome, this was a small test in my own garden. I'd be interested to hear results from your gardens, too.

Surprise visitor

My husband found a small black swallowtail caterpillar on the parsley as he was pulling it. Fortunately, I had planted some parsley in a pot and had only pulled out the one plant that had bolted. We transferred the cat to its new location. We hope it survives.

Also we had enough parsley for one last batch of tabbouleh. It's what's for dinner tonight—and the next couple of nights, too!

We found a small black swallowtail butterfly on our parsley as we were pulling it out.

Fortunately we hadn't pulled the parsley in a pot.

Garlic!

I had harvested the garlic a couple of weeks ago and had hung it in the garage to dry. This week my husband cut off the leaves and roots and pulled off the papery outside layers of the bulbs.

Both the hanging and this cleaning process prolong the shelf life. The garlic bulbs are now stored in a paper bag in the bottom of the pantry—a cool, dry, and dark place. The top of the bag is folded over and held in place with a clothes pin. The onions are also stored here.

In a few weeks we'll go through the bags and pull out any bulbs that have softened or sprouted. The onion harvest should last us a few months, but the garlic will last us longer than that. It's been a very good year.

Oooh garlic.

Cleaning up the bulbs.

Zucchinis & salads

A salad harvest plus some okra.

We harvest the unfertilized zucchinis as soon as we know that they are not going to grow.

The lettuce has gone by, so we are using store-bought lettuce after a winter & spring of beautiful fresh-out-of-the-garden lettuces. The salad harvest in the above photo includes some Swiss chard, parsley, the last of the come-again broccoli, basil, rosemary, oregano, garlic chives and the last of the carrots. I also picked the okra, but that was saved for some other use. So I used half of the zucchini, 3 previously-harvest cabbage leaves and the remainder of this harvest along with a few leafy green lettuce leaves from the store, for a lovely crunchy salad.

We've been having fun with out tiger zucchinis. They change how we cook while they are in season.

Squash flowers (zucchinis and otherwise) have male and female flowers. The female flowers have little pre-formed fruit under them. If the flower has been visited by at least 8 or 9 pollinators, it will start to grow, but sometimes that doesn't happen—too much rain, not enough male flowers in bloom, or not enough pollinators—the fruit does not grow and the blossom end starts to turn yellow. I look for these undeveloped fruits and use them wherever we'd use the fully formed ones. If the unfertilized fruits are left in place, they will rot, so it's good practice to remove them.

We've been enjoying the yummy zucchini bread.

Bottoms up! Small native bees go crazy in our blazing stars and seemingly never come up for air.

Front meadow & pond work

Yummy blackberries in the front meadow.

Yucky trash in the front meadow. It looks like Halloween candy.

The other day I was out in out front meadow removing some small trees and trimming low-hanging branches from the path. (See From lawn to woods: a retrospective for details on this area.) I rewarded myself with some of the blackberries that have grown out there, which was nice. I also found an old bag of Halloween candy that someone had thrown into the meadow over the fence. The animals had worked it over and all that was left were the foil wrappers and plastic bag, which was not so nice.

I also built up an area at our end of the pond to replant some Dixie irises I'd removed when we treated the pond with herbicide to get rid of the infestation of water spangles. (More on the pond later.) I used an iron rake to gather muck and sand from the bottom, piled into a mound and compressed it with the rake and my foot. I hope the irises grow roots quickly to keep the mound in place, otherwise it will slump into the bottom again.

I've been muckraking out in the front pond. More on that later...

The wet season in Florida (June through November) means great clouds.
I saw this is a morning thunderhead on my morning walk a couple of days ago.

The summer solstice is tomorrow. I'll be celebrating the official change of seasons out in my gardens, but of course it's been pretty summery here in north Florida for a while. Happy summer.

Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt

Read More

Deer herbivory pressure

Hmm, disappearing leek tops and parsley had me suspicious about woodchucks a couple of weeks ago in the Piedmont-- really, parsley eaten from the large container on the top of the front steps?

But, seeing two sets of does with fawns today -- one outside my study window, and the other near the Madren Conference Center where my SCBG colleagues and I do rotating gardening call-in shows on YourDay (we were on today), had me re-thinking this.

The Madren Center is adjacent to the golf course, and I saw the mom and two fawns right next to the main entrance road, leaving the radio studio.  It surprised me, but maybe it shouldn't?

I'm thinking perhaps deer ate the leeks, potato tops, etc, after all. I am truly sympathetic as a wildlife-friendly gardener, but these young deer families are RIGHT in the middle of town and campus!

Read More

More nature journaling and watercolor

I suppose I'm already a nature journaler, but adding sketching and watercolor is something new again, and returning to my "roots" as a nature observer, many years ago.

My scientist and observer skills serve me well, I've found, in trying to translate what I see in the natural world to paper, in the language of an artist, as my teacher, Robert Johnson, in a recent 4-day workshop described.

His work is wonderfully evocative of the natural world, extracting the essence of what he sees.  It was a great workshop and helped me build a bit more confidence in describing my observations through an artistic medium, beyond photography.

Here were a couple of the watercolor drawings that I did!

 Serviceberry fruits and leaves

native Geranium

Read More

Zucchinis, garlic, and kites: summer is here!

Oooh tiger zucchinis.

Changing seasons for our edibles

The tiger zucchinis are doing very well this year and I scramble to harvest them before they get too big. Half of one of these beauties was grated into a tuna salad, while the other half was sliced and was added last to a stir fry featuring onions, garlic, garlic chives, parsley from our garden, plus store-bought celery & 2 Boca Burgers (our favorite non-meat patties). The other one and maybe an additional one still growing in the garden will be the key ingredient in some zucchini bread. Yummy.

The last lettuce crop and the parsley have bolted and the broccoli is done after many months of come-again picking. My husband made a nice tabbouleh from the last of the parsley crop. I've allowed the plants to remain in the garden so their blooms will attract pollinators.

The parsley has bolted so this may be our last tabbouleh of the season. :-(

After a few days without rain last week, it was dry enough to harvest the garlic. It's now hanging in the garage to dry. The onions that I harvested last month had dried fully, so we cut off their leaves and roots and stored them in 2 cloth bags in the floor of the pantry. The garlic will also be stored in the same manner in a few weeks. The bulb that had split apart was used right away—it would not have been a good candidate for drying. I'll add some compost to the onion and garlic beds, cover them with pine needles and let them sit for the summer.

A bountiful garlic harvest this year.

One garlic bulb had divided itself and was starting to grow.

A gator adventure

We had an alligator is our pond for a couple of weeks.

The trappers used an underhand casting technique.

A few weeks ago, we noticed a small (30") alligator in our pond. We've lived here for 10 years and had never seen one before. My husband called Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission to report the gator and for information on what to do. We learned that a gator is not a nuisance until it reaches 4' and that sooner or later every body of water in Florida will host a gator.

A few days later we got a call from these gator trappers saying that a permit had been issued on our gator. They brought their fishing poles with heavy weights and treble hooks. This way they could hook onto the back of the gator and haul it to shore where they could haul it out with a noose-like tool. They deftly used an underhanded casting method to probe the pond. The gator was not found that day. They came back a few days later when they were in the area after trapping a gator from a golf course. Still no gator. We haven't seen it since then, so it probably has moved on—either back to the lake or to another pond in the neighborhood. We wish it well, but our pond frogs and fish are probably relieved.

A gator from a golf course.

Swallow-tailed kites

We love that our neighborhood supports these graceful birds. They are efficient flyers that use only a few beats of their wings when taking off, but then they glide with only twitches of their tails to keep aloft or to change directions. The Audubon Society's website says that they are our most aerial predators. They lift our spirits for sure.

A swallow-tailed kite on a snag.

Kites use very few wing movements in flight.

Fire in the sky

Florida's 5-month wet season begins in June.  This means that our cloud formations are more spectacular during these months. 

An amazing sunset. This is the season for Florida's spectacular cloud formations.

This sunrise  was beautiful when viewed from our front yard or reflected in our pond.

A reflected sunrise in our newly cleared pond. More on the pond soon.

I hope you are enjoying the beginning of summer whether you are enjoying the sky, watching birds, or working in your gardens. 

Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt

Read More

How 2's: Marigolds

Hey Kids, I've got another How To for you today. I though we would talk about Marigolds. Nothing is as beautiful as a flowing bed of marigolds. They are the flower that gives without giving up. By being drought resistant, disease tolerant, and ever flowering, this plant has become a staple in many gardens. Its common folklore that Marigolds will even keep out unwanted pests when planted around the garden. The flowers are edible and are also used as dyes and teas. So all together its a good flower that you should have in your yard. They are also really easy to start from seed!

By using a heat mat I got my seeds to germinate in 2 days! I am planting Queen Sophia, just because I love the full mum look. But there are so many different looks that are available. You all know how much I love Livingston Seed Co. there seeds are the best quality for the smallest price (no they don't sponsor me). Click HERE to see my blog comparison of seed companies. 

Marigolds are so easy to start from seeds. This tray that I am planting in has 72 cells/plants for $1.29 as compared to the flats at the nurseries that only have 24 cells/plants for $12-$16! Not to mention that in one packet of seeds I was able to plant 2 trays or 144 plants for $1.29. Now that's a bargain!

Read More

What is this

So check this out! I am used to seeing grubs when I am digging and planting, normally they are small maybe a half inch. While I was planting some noble giant spinach, I ran across this guy! look how big he is, almost half the size of the plant tag. probably 2.5-3 inches long! If I grew up in the Amazonian Forest, I would think that he was a tasty little meal, fortunately I am not. I found one like him two years ago. I have no idea what he is!!!!!!

I gave him up as a sacrifice the the robins who have some young little birdies in the nest. If you have any idea what he is, please let me know.

Huge Grub that I found in my garden, probably 3" in length. If you know what it is, please let me know.

Update 5/9/14:

I found out what this is. I believe it is a cicada larva! this year I found around 50 of them in the garden! Yuck!

This is only a portion of the grubs that I found. But let me tell you, that the robins really liked me a lot.

The robins were really happy with me. They would wait for me in the garden and when I found a grub I would throw one to them and they were ever so happy!

Read More

Fairy Garden DIY: Potted Succulent

Okay kids, I've got another fairy garden DIY for you today. This one is pretty easy (I'm getting all of the easy ones out the way frost before tackling the harder ones). Fairy Garden Succulent Planter, it's way too easy. You know if you have succulents in your yard how quickly they begin to reproduce. I simply found one of the tiniest tiny succulent out in the yard I could. If there are no tiny ones just stip the top off a larger succulent stip the lower leaves and plop it into a container of potting soil. Make sure to keep it constantly moist to encourage rooting of the cutting. 

Materials-

: thimble (or other small container

: succulent or other small plant 

: potting soil 

Directions-

1) find your succulent 

2) place it inside of the container

3) water

Go see see my other fairy garden tutorials:

Fairy Garden DIY: picture frame

Fairy Garden: tour

Read More