Tomato harvest

The freezer is starting to fill with roasted tomatoes.  It's a couple of trays each day.  It's maybe not the most energy-efficient way to preserve tomatoes, but they're tasty.  We came through this year with only two small bags remaining from last year's harvest, before the onslaught...

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Blogging with an iPad

No, I'm not on an iPad currently, but I'm interested in being able to travel with my iPad and camera on an upcoming trip, and doing an occasional blog post, without dragging along a laptop. I hadn't realized that the Blogger interface wasn't really iPad-friendly until I tried it.  It's not. There wasn't a way to upload photos via the browser interface.  Hmm. What's the point of that?That's...

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Cherry tomatoes

I've been harvesting tomatoes for weeks now -- big Cherokee Purple and Pineapple heirloom tomatoes, small plum tomatoes, and a hybrid Pompeii Roma tomato.  The Pineapple tomato is a yellow tomato, and quite tasty (MUCH better than the equally productive Garden Peach variety that I grew last year).But...

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Okra swales

I started growing okra a couple of years ago because it does so well in our summer heat. But it does best with some extra irrigation. To make irrigation (over and above the automatic irrigation) easy, I build swales just like I do for squash vines and plant the okra around the edges. First step...

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Heliopsis helianthoides

Hmm, this is a test post to see if traveling with an iPad, camera, iPad camera connector, Blogsy, and Picasa web albums might actually work. I don't know yet if my venerable Nikon D100 will work with the camera connector, nor is writing especially fluid on an iPad, but it certainly would be nice not...

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Squash, beans, eggplant, and tomatoes

There's a steady stream of vegetables coming from the garden now.  They're abundant enough now that I'm trying to get more creative with what I do with them.  (I roasted and froze a couple of trays of tomatoes yesterday).Mixing the harvest together for a vegetable medley is fine, but tends to be a bit boring after awhile, even with homegrown garlic and basil, so I'm venturing into single...

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Images from the Olympic garden plantings

These photos are linked to The Telegraph's photo gallery of Olympic park plantings (where they were downloaded).  They look like remarkable garde...

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Olympic garden plantings

I've been immersing myself in learning more about 'New Wave' naturalistic planting design in Europe (and the inspirations for them), and was impressed by the new plantings for the Olympics in London (following google hits for James Titchmough and Sarah Price).They're well worth taking a look at. Here's the Telegraph photo ess...

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An early morning garden tour

Just after dawn on Saturday morning in the garden...A male black swallowtail butterfly looks like a jewel with the early morning sun backlighting his wings.The same butterfly with the sun at its back. He must have been newly emerged because he stayed on this grass flower head for a long time.A...

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Rampant squash

I've had such poor luck in recent seasons with squash (even the squash vine-borer resistant varieties like Tromboncino) -- uh, woodchucks love it -- that I overplanted this year in the mountains.What was I thinking?The vines are rambling everywhere, down the slope, up trellises, through tomatoes, etc....

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Understanding plant communities & creating pocket meadows

The heading titles were my gardening companion's message and mine at the Cullowhee Native Plant Conference today.It's been such fun to connect with avid native plant people of all persuasions (novice to expert!) over the last few days.Learning is always good, at whatever point in the process of learning...

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The herb garden: a (mint) family affair

Spearmint is growing into the basil area.My herb garden faces WSW and is just outside the back door. It receives no morning sun, but lots of the hot afternoon sun. This location is really handy when I need to harvest something quickly as I'm cooking.Many of our classic herbs are in the mint family...

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Visit a wildflower hotspot sometime soon!

My gardening companion and I are off to a conference focused on gardening with native plants this week (in Cullowhee, NC).  It's a great conference, and long-running (25+ years, I think).  It should be great.  I've been a number of times, but not as frequently as I would have liked.Check out this recent article in the Wall Street Journal about Wildflower hotspots! Who knew that...

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Is gardening political?

 The White House's organic vegetable garden The other day I posted this photo of Michelle Obama out in the White House vegetable garden on my Sustainable Gardening for Florida Facebook page. I asked the question:"Do you think Michelle's garden has changed the nation's mindset about organic gardening?" I...

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Nectaring after the rain

front meadow plantingAn exceptionally rainy spell (three+ days) finally broke, with bright sunshine late this afternoon.Tiger swallowtail and bumblebee (notice how battered the flowers are!)The swallowtail just kept working the flowers!A tiger swallowtail was taking advantage of the dry weather to get...

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MORE meadows, pocket meadows, and prairie gardens

I've been immersing myself in learning more about meadow gardening (and prairie gardening) and naturalistic gardens as practiced by Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury and others. It's not an unfamiliar topic for me, but I've having fun revisiting it.I'm doing a pocket native gardening program at the Cullowhee Native Plants Conference next week, so I'm wanting to be up to date.It's so interesting that...

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The birdhouse gourd adventure

A 3-year old birdhouse gourd sprouts in the compost.Three years ago I thought it would be fun to grow a birdhouse gourd vine. They are not really edible so I'm not sure what my original motivation was. One of the vines did extremely well, scrambled into some nearby tree branches and grew to about twenty...

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Mystery squash, easy basil, and fall vegetables

I've been down in the Piedmont for a couple of days -- for an evening hike at the Garden with a bunch of fabulous Summer Science Research high school students and a vet check-up for Woody (his partially-torn crucial ligament is being monitored -- happily, he's improving again).Thankfully, we've had enough periodic rain that everything looks good, even though the lakes nearby (Lake Hartwell) and the...

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Maypop, a native butterfly & bee magnet

Passionvine, purple passion flower, maypop (Passiflora incarnata) is a beautiful perennial native vine with a wonderfully complex flower with crimped petal-like tepals. It dies back to the ground in the winter, but pops up in more places the next spring–in May usually.Like most gardeners, I love beautiful...

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The first beans, tomatoes, and squash

I was a bit late in planting some of the summer vegetables, but they've flourished in the initially cool late spring and now hot early summer temperatures.Remarkably, I've harvested peppers and tomatilllos, usually a no-show until late summer.There are LOTS of tomatoes developing and the first ones close to harvesting.  Woo-hoo!  And the various vining squashes are looking good, too -- no...

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Garden Writers: Who Are We Writing For and Why is it Important?

When I write about why I let some of my basil flower,who is listening?When we write online, who is reading and what are we trying to accomplish? Haven't you wondered, as your words fly off into the void of cyberspace, where your message will land? Will the readers even speak English; what type of gardening...

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Natural gardening, meadows and informal perennial borders

Natural gardening to me means mimicking nature, recreating the way that natural processes result in the plant communities and successional habitats that we see, encouraging plant combinations that work, look and feel like natural places.  It's what I like to see at home. Meadow habitats are particularly...

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