A beautiful spring day

Finally, a day worthy of real spring.  Clear blue sky. Temps in the mid-70°s. Redbuds in flower and dogwoods well along.

I planted sprouted fingerling potatoes this afternoon -- the woodchuck shouldn't like the above-ground parts, I hope, even though s/he seems to have snagged my collards already.

I weeded some of the abundant winter annuals (they are not tasty on the plate, regardless of what wild foraging folks write about, in my opinion).  Even with plenty of garlic and olive oil.

Lamium amplexicaule (Henbit)

Can I have just have mustard, spinach, or kale, please?

Hooray for spring and the end of winter, finally.

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Early flowering bulbs

In spite of a early spring dusting of snow this morning, and a howling wind, it was lovely to see hyacinths and grape hyacinths on my walk in the mountains this morning. 

a Wikipedia image of grape hyacinths:  they're everywhere in our historic neighborhood

It felt wintry, but the visible signs of spring were there. Tulip foliage is well up, too, and the flowers won't be far behind.  We enjoyed a lovely dish of fresh creasy greens from the raised beds, too, rebounding from winter's deep freezes.

In the Piedmont, the white bracts of dogwoods have expanded, and the warm weather predicted for the next few days will accelerate their progress.  They'll be close to "full flower" by the end of the week, I hope.

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Native woodland gardens

It was nice this morning to share thoughts about creating native woodland gardens  with an OLLI class (check out OLLI programs if you're in the US -- a great lifelong learning initiative).

It's been a lovely journey to transform lawn to woodland habitat over the last two decades, and we now finally have Christmas ferns, bloodroot, wild ginger, crested iris, green-and-gold, and pussytoes flourishing along our front pathway.

a giant bloodroot

It was all about creating a decent "forest" soil -- more full of humus, a bit deeper, etc. from the shallow, shade-stressed grass that grew there before.

And the water oak that anchors the driveway produces slow-to-break-down leaves -- not the best situation, but eventually they DO turn into humus-rich leaf mulch.

That's what supported the bloodroot expansion!

P.S. See the sidebar for a link to a pdf version of the creating a woodland garden presentation.

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Spring is here

In spite of a nasty cold northerly wind today, bringing yet more freezing temperatures, spring is definitely here in the Carolinas. 

It's welcome, for sure.  It's been a long cold winter for us; we're not familiar with the deep freeze (and snowy weather) that we've experienced this year.

But spring is still evident everywhere -- flowering redbuds and oaks, fruiting maples, flowering blueberries, and flowering winter annuals, too (not to mention all the Asian plants -- camellias, forsythias, and Japanese cherries).  The cherry trees are having a good year so far -- they're lovely -- we'll see after the mid-20's temperatures tonight.  Hopefully, they'll be fine.

I've just heard a few spring peepers, but lots of bird calls signalling that it's certainly breeding season!

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The magic of gardens

I have a friend who lost her house in a fire almost two months ago.  Everything was lost, and the house is currently being "gutted" and rebuilt.  She thought she'd never return, as she lost so much, including dear animal companions.

What has endured, though, is her garden.  The daffodils are flowering, the self-sowing poppies will be back, and spring is there.

How renewing a story is that? 

Her garden is pulling her back to new beginnings, and thinking that she can live there again.

That's garden magic.

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The last gasp of winter?

We have a chilly week ahead in the Piedmont (of South Carolina).  On Tuesday, the low is predicted to be 28°F --variable depending on the weather site consulted.

Traditionally, our last frost date here is April 15th, so we shouldn't be surprised.

But, it's been so darn wintry this year, I've been celebrating signs of spring big-time, from the daffodils, snowdrops, leucojum, forsythia, flowering cherry, and quince in flower (all Asian or Mediterranean early flowering species), along with our natives - redbuds and sassafras (and bloodroot, trillium, trout lily, hepatica, rue anemone, etc.)

The buds of flowering dogwood are expanding rapidly, and the rabbit-eye blueberry flowers are almost fully open, too.

Spring is here on the calendar, and is definitely "around the corner,"

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Harvest-directed cooking

I love this time of year because so much of what we eat comes from the garden. It's harvest-directed cooking.

A dinner salad from the garden includes a rogue blooming onion*, Swiss chard, 3 types of lettuce from the chef's mix blend, romaine, curly parsley, carrots, sugar-snap peas, come-again broccoli, garlic chives, meadow garlic, rosemary, dill, and cabbage leaves.

The meadow garlic is getting ready to bloom. So the growth has
increased dramatically in the last week or two.

*Blooming onion: I'm growing an assortment of short-day onions this year and normally they are biennials and form a bulb one year to store energy for flowering the next year, but once in a while a few will jump the gun and do it all in one season. Once an onion produces a flower bud, it's time to harvest it because the bulb will degrade to produce the flower. This was one of the sweet granex onions--see more at Short-day onions and more... I used less than half of it in the salad--the rest became part of the carrot soup the next night.

In addition to the rogue granex onion, the native garlic is also blooming now just as we've passed the vernal equinox. Plants are really tuned into the day length, plus we've had a lot of rain in the last two months, especially when it's supposed to be the dry season. In February we had 6" when the average is 3.1" and we've already had more than 3" of rain in March when 3.9 is the average for the whole month.

Ugly carrot soup

When I included this recipe in our Organic Methods book, I called it "ugly carrot soup" because sometimes the carrots come out funny. I didn't have any ugly carrots for this soup, but it came out tasting just as yummy. Every time I make it, it's different because it depends on what's available from the garden. In addition to my harvested vegetables (half of the blooming onion, rosemary, oregano, nantes carrots, curly parsley, meadow garlic, garlic chives, come-again broccoli, cabbage leaves), I added one store-bought onion, non-fat plain yogurt, freshly ground pepper, spaghetti, and olive oil.

The ingredients for the carrots soup plus 8 cups of water and a garnish of dill.

Brown the onions, garlic chives, and meadow garlic in olive oil until caramelized in the bottom of the soup pot. Add freshly ground pepper and stir in the rest of the veggies and saute for about 5 minutes. Add the water, bring to a boil and simmer for 20 minutes, then add the spaghetti or any other pasta and cook for 10 more minutes. Let it cool for 10 minutes and put it all in the food processor until relatively smooth. Stir in half a cup of non-fat yogurt. Serve in bowls with a heaping tablespoon of yogurt and chopped dill. Yummy!

Carrot soup is good hot or cold.

Tuna salad roll-up with lots of our fresh lettuce is one of our favorites. I also use parsley, dill, cabbage leaves, garlic chives, meadow garlic, and other greens in the tuna salad for more fresh flavor.

It's time to plant the summer crops now.  I'll cover my summer crops for this year in a future post.

It's not too late to get started with your edible gardens. It was recently shown that people who did their own cooking were healthier than those who eat out all the time. Just think how much that would be multiplied if you augmented your menu with crops fresh from your own yard. Get started today with your own copy of Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida.

Rain gardens revisited and removing invasives

A new spot for a magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora) next to the rain garden in the wooded area between us and our next door neighbors. The magnolia will eventually provide a little more screening in the winter.

Extracting invasive coral ardisia  from the wooded
area along our property line.

I moved a magnolia that had planted itself too close to an irrigation sprayer. I talked about this in my Plan Ahead! post over on the Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens blog. I also cleared out the rain garden I'd built to move water from the downspout French drain. Leaves had covered it.

While I was in the area, I spotted a few invasive coral ardisia (Ardidia crenata) shrubs. How did they get there? The neighbors grow them in their yards and the birds eat their bright red berries and deposit the seeds with a dollop of fertilizer below their perching branches.

The tuberous swordferns (Nephrolepis cordifolia) are everywhere. At first I thought they were the same as a cute fern up in Maryland, but soon found that I was dealing with a monster. So at least a couple of times a year I attack the invasives and eventually I'll get a better handle on them.

One of many loads of coral ardisia and tuberous sword fern.

The down spout rain garden history

Before the rain garden the lawn became a puddle.

I dug a dry well 18" in diameter and equally deep, filled
with gravel a covered with fake river rocks.

A rain garden revisited. The Asian azaleas are larger and the lyre-leaf sage (Salvia lyrata) is beautiful this time of year.

See my rain garden articles for a history of how I built and then expanded the rain gardens. As part of the expansion, the lawn in area of the landscape is gone and the excess rainwater is piped under the mulched path to a dry well. It's important for us to keep as much rainwater on our properties as possible to reduce pollution in our waterways.

Around the neighborhood

Canadian toadflax in a "Freedom lawn."

A study in male sexual organs! This should increase the traffic to this post, but I should mention that these were shed by pine trees and if they didn't fill the air with enough pollen, the oaks are now doing the same thing so the pollen count will remain high. I don't suffer from pollen allergies, but the yellow coating on everything is getting old.

A flatwoods plum (Prunus umbellata) or a chickasaw plum (P. angustifolia) in my neighborhood. I will be able to identify it for sure when the leaves come out. Either way, it's a lovely spring bloomer and it was abuzz with bees.

This is why you should leave snags in your landscape if possible--the hawks and other birds of prey love the perch there.

The weather is wonderful. Be sure to get out there to enjoy Mother Nature this spring.

Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt

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Bloodroot is in flower!

It's such a joy to see the bright white flowers of bloodroot after a long winter.  It's one of our early spring flowering natives, along with hepatica and trout lily.

It's done well in our emerging woodland garden, too.

clumps of bloodroot along the front path

After slowly amending the soil with mulch and leaves, our patch in front of the house is doing well, with companions of Christmas fern, green-and-gold, and pussytoes.

Happily, the large plant (transplanted from a shadier site in back) has been a prolific seed producer, and ants have "planted" new clumps around.  Even the small seedlings (with the abundant rain over the last year) have flourished.

parent with offspring

We now have over 9+ plants in front, including the biggest bloodroot we've ever seen -- testament to how natives in a more benign (garden)
environment can really flourish.

the original parent (transplanted from a shadier spot in the garden)

Bloodroot has been a favorite spring wildflower.

Here are some previous musings over the past 5+ seasons.

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U.S. Virgin Islands and local food production

view towards St. Thomas from St. John

A second trip to the Caribbean has me pondering (again) about local food, food self-sufficiency,  and vegetable-growing (hmm, where are they).  Not to mention supplies of anything else.

Apparently, between 95-99% of food is imported in the U.S. Virgin Islands (with dairy supplies coming from St. Croix, and an emerging farmer's market/organic farming culture there). We haven't been there, but it's flatter, with better farmland.

On St. John, it's incredibly hilly, rocky, and relatively arid (hard to imagine that sugar cane was profitably grown here for 150 years, but that was a different era, with enslaved humans, and in a time that sugar was truly a "cash" crop.)

But, surely, a few folks would be growing vegetables intensively?  In raised beds? On rooftops? Hydroponically?  But it's a culture driven by affluent tourism.  Water is in short supply, however, even if power (if solar) would be abundant.

Last year, in Dominica, a much, much less affluent place, I was amazed at how few vegetable gardens that I saw -- even when space and water is available.

But most of St. John is national park, too, so "off-limits" to non-park uses -- it's what makes it such a great destination, for sure.  Snorkeling, hiking, peacefulness, and enjoying the views of the ever-changing blues of the ocean waters of the Caribbean.

Leinster Bay

Enjoying Caneel Bay

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Supporting pollinators

With the increase in use of neonicotinoid pesticides in "routine" propagation of garden perennials, there's definitely been a recognition that it CAN be an issue in some plants producing nectar, pollen, and/or leaf tissue harmful to pollinators. 

The Xerces Society has brought this forward -- how comprehensive a problem it might be remains to be seen.

The bottom line is that neonicotinoids have been banned in Europe and really DON'T need to be used routinely in production of garden perennials.

Thanks, Gail, for pointing me on your facebook feed to this nice piece from Prairie Moon Nursery.

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Finally, time to sow!

It's taken forever this winter to finally be time to sow.  It could have been last weekend, but I was busy doing other things, and I knew soil temperatures were still low.

"blank" raised beds --now sown with peas, beets, lettuce, and greens

But a beautiful weekend and signs of spring popping out (from the piedmont to the mountains)  -- it was wonderful to get seeds of sugar snap peas, spinach, lettuce, beets, chard, mustards, kale, arugula, etc. into raised beds and flats.

I put out some spinach transplants in the mountains, and radicchio and kale in the piedmont (woodchuck issues).... we'll see.

flats and pots sown with lettuce mix, arugula, spinach, and kales

kale and radicchio transplants (I KNOW the woodchuck won't like radicchio!)

Lovely to clean out all the dead perennial herbs from pots for a clean slate!

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A trout lily adventure

The beautiful trout lilies put on quite a show,
but only for a few weeks in the spring.

I first heard about Wolf Creek Trout Lily Preserve at the 2010 Florida Native Plant Society Conference in Tallahassee when Dan Miller made a lunchtime presentation. He told about how he a few others had saved a unique, 13-acre population of trout lilies from development. The population is in south Georgia just north of Tallahassee, FL. His photos and story took my breath away.

This year I knew when the the trout lilies had started to bloom because of photos posted on Facebook, so my husband and I made the three-hour trek west out to the preserve on Valentine’s Day. (Yes, no flowers were harmed for my Valentine’s Day treat.)

For more photos of this amazing ecosystem continue reading at Eco-activists: A few people can make a real difference!

There are millions of trout lilies in its southernmost population at Wolf Creek Trout Lily Preserve.

A sunrise hike at Falling Waters State Park

Falling Waters State Park

After Wolf Creek we drove back into Florida and another hour west to visit the state's highest state park. It's elevation is a whopping 324'!

Overnight, a windy, rainy front passed through. The next morning we got up early and hiked to the state's tallest water fall--70'. We don't have much topography in Florida, so this is a big deal and that the waterfall fell into a deep, perfectly circular sinkhole made it quite dramatic. It was a beautiful trail to the waterfall and the sink holes in the karst landscape where the limestone is eaten away by rainfall over the years.

See photos of the sinkholes, waterfall, and more at Falling Waters State Park, a profile over on the Florida Native Plant Society blog.

Instead of hiking back on the same trail we walked on the less-traveled path around the other side of the lake and found this fresh tree fall--a huge pine that filled the air with its sharp resin smell.

This harvest-of-the-day went into a mashed potato dish.

Harvest of the day

This harvest of come-again broccoli (that have sprouted from the plants after the main curd or head has been removed), curly parsley, garlic chives, and wild garlic ended up in one of our favorite comfort food dinners for a chilly, rainy day--Cheesy mashed potatoes.

In addition to the harvest, which was finely chopped with parsley separated, the ingredients are:
1 large onion, diced
1/3 cup chopped celery
3 tbsp of olive oil
1 cup instant potatoes
1 cup of water
1/3 cup plain non-fat yogurt
1/3 cup grated cheddar cheese
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
5 pats of butter
freshly-ground black pepper

Saute the vegetables except for the parsley in olive oil in a covered frying pan (stirring frequently) until the onions caramelize. Turn the heat to low and add the parsley and stir until the parsley wilts. Meanwhile, mix the potatoes, water, yogurt, cheddar cheese, and 3 pats of butter in a bowl. Cover and microwave for 2 minutes. Fold the sauteed ingredients into the potato mixture, add the Parmesan and the pepper. Makes two generous serving. Serve in a shallow soup bowl and top with a pat a butter and grind some more pepper. Garnish with a fresh parsley sprig.

Beautiful Black Creek!

Smooth alder (Alnus serrulata) on the shore of Black Creek.

A close-to-home adventure

Earlier this week, before the weather turned cold and rainy, my husband and I rode our bikes over to the Black Creek Ravines Conservation Area and then hiked 5 or 6 miles along the trails of this 965-acre preserve. We went to a bluff over-looking Black Creek--a feeder into the St. Johns River.

We then went down to the shoreline. I was hoping to find the alders blooming with their yellow catkins, but the pollen was gone--the catkins were still there, but brown. The alder fruits look like little pine cones.

It was a lovely half-day adventure in a beautiful spot. We did not see anyone else out on this beautiful day.

It's all in the family!

Grandson Weber Stibolt, a student at the University of Delaware was on the team that planned and built the University's display at the Philadelphia Flower Show. He's in front of the fish ladder demonstration--fish ladders are located next to dams so fish can migrate past dams to their spawning areas in these rivers.

Weber posted this on Facebook, but you need to be a member to see his Photo album:

The final improvement we were really looking to make from last year's exhibit was to have a more concrete message and one that is easier to understand and digest. This award [Best Achievement in Social Change Messaging ] pretty much sums up everything I could have hoped for! You can read more about the exhibit at the following websites: http://www.udel.edu/udaily/2014/mar/phila-flower-show-030414.html  & http://udreview.com/2014/03/03/professors-and-students-create-exhibit-for-philadelphia-flower-show/

I hope you and your family are out enjoying nature this spring.

Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt

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