Listening to your landscape

To have a more sustainable landscape, you need to listen...

As a long-time gardener with a masters degree in botany, I was certain that I could garden in north Florida when my husband and I moved here in 2004. I've told this story before, but I was shocked and surprised at how wrong I was. Some Florida gardening truths were quickly discovered like how tulips don't grow well here, not even as annuals, because our winters include warm spells so the soil doesn't stay cold enough. Other revelations have taken more time...

Tropical sage in the herb garden by the kitchen window.

Listen to the birds & bees

Tropical sage (Salvia coccinea) has monopolized much of my herb garden. I transplant some of it from this location when I plant basil, dill, or one of the other annual herbs, but mostly I leave this native volunteer in place because it attracts hummingbirds, butterflies, several types of bees.

I started the herb garden years ago by ripping out the tea roses and various non-native shrubs that were not doing well in this WSW-facing wall. At first everything was in its assigned place, but when the sage arrived, everything changed. I listened to the birds and the bees who needed this beautiful native more than I needed a neat garden.

This female hummingbird has been resting on a bare branch of coral honeysuckle to entertain my husband and me while we eat our lunch. Not really, but this perch is just above one of her favorite spots, my herb garden, which is filled with tropical sage.

Carpenter bees are too big to enter the narrow sage flowers, so they bite holes in the tops of the flowers to "rob" the nectar without doing the work of pollinating.

Sine this L-shaped garden was not under general irrigation,
 I turned it into a container garden.

Container conversion project

An early project in our landscape was my conversion of a "messy bed" filled with Mexican petunias, low growing gardenias, weeds, and other volunteers. I wrote about this project as one of my Adventures of a Transplanted Gardener articles, which are now hosted over on Floridata.com, Troublesome spot? Convert to containers.

Well, it's taken a while, but the other day I switched back to what will probably be a somewhat messy bed, but this time it will be filled with native wildflowers and I shall call it a "cottage garden." 

After removing the pots, I was left with weeds and wildflowers.

The other day I removed the pots, which were not all that attractive anymore, carefully lifted the tropical sage plants, scraped out the chipped wood mulch and the nice compost below it, and then ripped out the old weed barrier cloth, which had not been very effective in keeping out the weeds.

I put the saved chips and mulch back in the bed, planted the sage in three groupings, transplanted some other out-of-place wildflowers from other parts of the yard, and then sowed some Florida wildflower seeds in the empty spaces.  The tropical sage and the other plants survived the transplant, but I'll write more about this project as it matures. So far I'm happy with the result and I think, in the end, it will be easier to handle than the containers.

Florida wildflower seeds have been sown and the wildflowers are now replanted in groupings. It's a garden designed by listening to what it said rather than overpowering it with my will.

The edge of the lawn needed some updates.

A close-up of the invading ferns...

A look down this edge now.

The ferns are invading!

Every couple of years I work on the lawn edges. Many times the landscape indicates what it would prefer. I've been writing about edges for some time; see my piece "Cutting edges," for earlier lawn removals. You can also listen to my podcast on the topic: Cutting Edges 1/17/08.

This time around, the ferns, mostly netted chain ferns (Woodwardia areolata) have crept into the grass, which is sparse in this mostly shady edge. So I pulled the grass by hand in a way that was least disruptive to the soil, moss and the ferns. Later I'll come in with some pine needles or wood chips. If it were closer to fall, I'd wait for the leaves, but I don't want to wait that long.

We still want a mowed area down to the lake, but maybe my husband will have one less trip to make. All because I listened to the ferns.

The point-of-view of this photo starts at the cart in the above photo.
The line drawn indicates the proposed new edge of the lawn.

More ferns are invading the grass down here, too.

Other listenings...

Sadly, these suckers will never grow into trees because of the red bay ambrosia beetle and its nasty fungal disease. My husband thought we should trim them back  since they are so ratty looking. I pointed out that the spice bush swallowtail and other related butterflies rely on trees in this family for their larval food. So all those holes in the leaves means that they have found them. Yay!

The Elliot's love grasses make a nice border, but...

I wrote about this new wildflower extension of our front meadow in Adventures in creating a native garden. I emphasized how important a civilized edge is to make a native garden or meadow look like a planned space. I used three bunches of Elliot's love grass (Eragrostis elliottii) to do that job. They looked good for 2 years and then failed to come up the next year. I talked to the grower and wholesale supplier for these plants to ask him what to do. His answer was the classic "listen to your landscape" advice, "Don't plant it there again. Find something else." How logical.

I hope you can hear your landscape when it speaks to you.


Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt

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Remarkable resurrection ferns

Resurrection ferns dried and hydrated.

Resurrection fern (Pleopeltis polypodioides)

While I'd seen spare populations of resurrection ferns when I lived in Maryland, I really became aware of them when I read "Light a Distant Fire," an historic novel about Osceola and the Seminoles by Lucia St. Clair Robson. She wrote about how the scouts could disappear into the ferns on the live oak branches. After we moved to Florida, I came to see how this could be accomplished.

This is a true fern that reproduces via spores, but it is also an epiphyte or air plant. It does not need to be in contact with soil to live. It derives its needs from the air, especially the humidity and dust that it carries.

The common name of resurrection fern is due to its ability to lose 95% of its moisture, stop its photosynthesis, and go into a type of suspended state when it appears to be dead. When it rains or when the humidity becomes high enough, the fronds unfurl and turn green in a matter of hours. Hence the name resurrection fern, because it arises from the dead.

Most other plants will die if they lose 10 to 15% of their water. Scientists have discovered that this fern has a high concentration of a special protein (dehydrin) in or near its cell walls when it is brown. When the fern is green this protein is not present indicating a chemical reaction as the water exits the cells.  In other words as the plant is drying, dehydrin allows the cell walls in the leaf to fold so that the unfolding when water is present can be reversed without damage. For the science of dehydrin see this paper in The American Journal of Botany.

Steve Christman over on Floridata.com states that you can propagate these ferns by laying pieces of the rhizome into the furrows of the bark of the tree where you want to grow it. I may try this one day, because I'd love to have more of them around on our property. On the other hand, I can wait for Mother Nature to plant them in appropriate places without doing any work.

But whatever the science, these small ferns add to the charm of Florida's live oaks. 

In their normal habitat: horizontal branches of a live oak (Quercus verginiana).

This is in South Florida in the wet season, but the ferns are turning brown around the edges.

The fern looks dead, but it's not...

After reading this post, go drink some water, because humans will die when we lose only 15% of our water. Also, full disclosure: Lucia and I are good friends and were neighbors in Maryland where she still lives and where she has written a bunch of fun-to-read and well-researched historicals. She was a librarian and knows how to make her readers feel like full participants in the story. www.luciastclairrobson.com

Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt

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Winter: a good time to remove invasive plants

Wedelia or creeping oxeye daisy (Sphagneticola trilobata): a beautiful invader. 

Less lawn...

When we moved into our house here in North Florida, we let several areas of lawn grow out. I've written about this several times. See From lawn to woods: a retrospective, for what has happened out front.

Here's the other half of the story. Our 1.5 acre lot is long and pie-shaped. Out back is a narrowing strip to the lake. We decided early on that we'd not continue to mow this whole area and just leave a pathway that could be mowed with one trip down and one trip back on the riding mower. The area opens up by the lake, so there is more  mowing to do down there.

So this is what happened...

2007. Vast section of lawn that we let grow out became engulfed by wedelia. Looking back toward the house from the pathway to the lake.

The gardener strikes back...

By 2007, the wedelia, which had been controlled in the lawn by mowing, grew like crazy. So it was time to strike back. I did not want to kill everything in the area, so pulling was the best option. And with some follow-up this has worked pretty well.

Pulling the wedelia by rolling it up like a rug. Yes, leather gloves were necessary here.

Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the path...

2007. A work in progress: pulling the wedelia from the slope next to the shallow ravine between our property and our neighbor's. This photo was taken from approximately the same place as the above photo, but looking toward the lake.

I started the removal project on the other side of the path where the wedelia was covering ferns, small beautyberry bushes and other desirable vegetation. You can see some of the ferns, mostly netted chain ferns (Woodwardia areolata), in the above photo. One good reason for tackling this project in the winter is that the ferns die back in the winter.

It didn't take long for the ferns to totally fill in this ravine and slope, which is what I'd hoped for.

2009. These ferns are lovely for most of the year.
They die back  only for a couple of months here.

The fertile fronds bear a chain of sori that hold the spores. 

Because it's invasive and because there are parts of the plants that did not get pulled, it's necessary to check for new sprouts on a regular basis. The first year after removal, I checked every other month. For a couple of years I checked twice a year. Now I check every other year, because I sure don't want to start all over again. So a few weeks ago, I found a few sprouts at the bottom of the ravine where it's dampest and more near the lake shore.

A sprout found on my latest foray.

While I'm out hunting for wedelia sprouts, I also removed
the other big invasive on our property coral ardisia.

On the upland side of the path, the plant community has changed from a meadow-like area to a wooded ecosystem and is filled with small trees. It has become too shady for the wedelia to take off, but I still found a few sprouts. I also found a fair number of coral ardisia (Ardisia crenata) plants and some wild taro (Colocasia esculenta). So while I was removing invasives, I worked on all of them.

I'll cover the transformation of this area in a post later in the year.

For more information on what is invasive in Florida, see the Florida Exotic Pest Plant Council Invasive website, which has not only the list of the 76 most invasive plants in Category I and the potentially invasive list in Category II, there are links for most of these invasive plants for more information.

I know that my maintenance removal project will continue because so many of my neighbors continue to grow these plants, but at least our property will become less of a problem going forward.

Indian blanketflowr (Gaillardia pulchella) and a Cicada killer (Sphecius speciosus) 

Making room for native plants is so important for the heath of our environment.
I'm working on doing my part. Are you?

Green Gardening Matters,

Ginny Stibolt

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A wish for a greener 2015

I wish you and yours a wonderful and bountiful New Year!!

A frosty reddish leaf lettuce.

Winter vegetables

Here in Florida, even here in North Florida where we receive several killing frosts each winter, we can grow most cool weather crops right through the winter. In most of the country, gardeners spend winter wishing they could garden, while we enjoying our "Salad Days."

One of the main reasons we wrote "Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida" was to alleviate frustration of gardeners new to Florida trying to use their old, general garden books written for Anywhere, U.S.A. They just don't work here.

Growing some of your vegetables is good for you and your family, plus it helps to make Mother Earth a little greener.

Salad days! From the knife clockwise: dill, chard, 3 types of leaf lettuces, garlic chives, meadow garlic, & sugar snap peas. Not shown are Greek oregano and rosemary.

The sugar snap pea, a hybrid  of a snow pea and a shell pea, was introduced in the 1970s. They've become quite popular because they’re easy to grow, have a sweet taste, and are versatile in the kitchen.

Whether you call them beggarticks, Spanish needles, or Bidens alba,
this pioneer species really knows ho to take over any disturbed soil
in your landscape. The bonus is that these seedlings are edible.

Use more sustainable gardening methods to save time and money in 2015

There are many ways to be more efficient in your gardening and maintenance and still have a beautiful landscape. You'll still have issues to deal with like a beggartick attack as shown in this photo, but how you deal with them makes all the difference. 

I boiled all these methods down into just 6 steps for my post over on the Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens blog: 6 easy ways to save time & money in your landscape.

My treatment for the beggartick seedlings is to gently uproot the seedlings by rubbing the surface of the soil with my gloved hand and then cover with mulch, usually leaves or chipped wood. This minimizes the soil disturbance, which would bring out a bunch of other seedlings and discourages others from taking root there. It also uses natural mulches that are free.

Lawn asters 

One of the 6 topics is to urge people to switch over to freedom lawns and only for lawn that they'll actually use. Our lawn has been free of pesticides,fertilizer, and overwatering for 10 years. Most of the time it is just as green as our neighbors' expensive and high maintenance lawns. In some place the St. Augustine grass is doing very well with our regimen, but in other places a variety of different plants has grown in as you can see here in these lawn aster photos.

I just turned in the final edits for my 3rd book "The Art of Maintaining a Florida Native Landscape," which will be published in August. Yay! It continues the theme of sustainable gardening, but this time I cover the reality of living with native or mostly native landscapes. It has been fun and educational to write and I hope you'll like it.

A freedom lawn supports many different species.

Christmas Eve sunrise included a gift of a full arching rainbow.

May you have a wonderful 2015.

Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt

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Yard critters

A green treefrog (Hyla cinerea) jumped out of the beggar ticks (Bidens alba) that I had pulled from the front garden.

A bagworm (Oiketicus abbotii) is overwintering on a beautyberry bush.

Managing exuberance carefully

I allow some beggar ticks (Bidens alba) and snow squarestem (Melanthera nivea) to grow in restricted areas to attract all those pollinators. But in the fall, I harvest those that have escaped to other places in the landscape to reduce the population and weeding the next year, at least to some degree. So last week I started pulling and a cute green treefrog that was using these stems for shelter jumped out of the cart. And the frog is just the wildlife that is evident. There could be hundreds of bugs snuggled inside these stems for the winter. Instead of leaving these stalks out with the yard waste, I add them to various brush piles, so those insects will have a chance to make it through the winter. The songbirds also use the brush piles for shelter, so they may appreciate the seeds, and maybe even some of those hidden bugs. 

Nearby, I spotted this bagworm (probably Oiketicus abbotii) hanging from a beautyberry branch. This moth is different than most, in that it gathers plant parts to stick to itself as a caterpillar to build protection. When its ready to pupate, it glues its portable shelter to a secure location and seals itself inside. When the female reaches the adult phase, she will be flightless and will emit pheromones to attract males. When a male arrives, they mate inside her sack where she lays her eggs and dies. The new larvae feed on her remains and other food that she's stored there. When ready, the new larvae head out on their own, often on a long strings of silk that balloon in the wind so the larvae swing away from each other. Isn't Mother Nature amazing?

Fall goldenrods! 

I planted seaside goldenrod (Solidago sempervirens)  this spring thinking it would be similar to the sweet goldenrod  (S. ordora), which volunteers in my yard, but no. It bloomed later in the season and it attracted a different set of bees. Normally I see carpenter bees with their shiny abdomens, but these are real bumble bees (probably Bombus impatiens).

An insect wove an overwintering shelter within the flattop goldenrod (Euthamia caroliniana) inflorescence, so I'll leave this stalk standing, and if I'm lucky, I'll find out what's inside this cocoon.

The spiny orbweaver!

Spiny orbweaver (Gasteracatha cancriformis): I found this beautiful spider doing her work in a gap on the far side of our driveway. 

We loved seeing this beautiful little spider and the hand lens came in handy to see her up close. It's been a couple of weeks since I took these photos, but she occupies this same gap in the trees in our mostly wild area on the far side of the driveway. We've had some high wind events and a frost, but she's still out there. She has had to reweave her orb at least 4 or 5 times since we've been aware of her, but she may have been there for months before that.

The markings on her back look sorta like a smiley face and those 6 red spines look fierce. Isn't this a cool find? Of course, the reason we have all of the critters is that we have used no landscape-wide pesticides since 2004. If you'd like to improve habitat for birds in your yard, you must invite the bugs. It's time to break that poison cycle. Read my post: A poison is a poison is a poison for details on the whys and hows.

I called my husband out to see her. She's small, so this hand lens is useful.

Suspended above my garden glove, you can see how small she is.

The sun makes the seeds of this bluestem grass (Andropogon sp.)
shimmer. How beautiful.

The Disney Wildlife Preserve

Last Saturday I headed down to Kissimmee to the Nature Conservancy's Disney Wildlife Preserve for a Florida Native Plant Society board meeting. It was great to see old friends and meet new ones. The morning presentation was really interesting, the pot luck lunch was an eclectic collection of yummy stuff, and then in the afternoon I met with Marjorie Shropshire to talk through the plans for the next book. Marjorie illustrated both "Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida" and "The Art of Maintaining a Florida Native Landscape," which will be released in August 2015. Now we are working on the proposal for book #4. Stay tuned for more details.

Our discussion was delayed while we took photos of this wonderful Florida praying mantid. It was near my shoulder, so I felt like Jiminy Cricket was there to give me advice. "Don't poison your landscape," she whispered in my ear.

A Florida praying mantid (Stagmomantis floridensis) behind my shoulder at the Disney Wildlife Preserve.
Marjorie took this photo because I did not want to disturb this magnificent insect.

Seasonal colors

Here in north Florida, we don't get the rich fall colors that you see farther north, but the Virginia creeper (Pathenocissus quinquefolia) lights up the landscape. And its blue berries feed the winter birds.

Even in Florida, there is some color as we move into winter. Virginia creeper provides reliable color and the way it is festooned across the vegetation, it make everything look festive. And speaking of that, I wish you and yours a bountiful Thanksgiving. I hope you'll be able to provide at least some of your family's meal from your edible garden.

Green gardening matters,
Ginny Stibolt

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Cole crops

Don't plant too many cabbages at one time.
While they are easy enough to grow, do you and
your family need 20 of these beauties all at once?

Do you know cabbage?

Cole crops are all the cabbage crops derived from a single species of Brassica oleracea. (Kohl is the German word for cabbage.)

The cultivars are divided into seven or eight major groups (depending upon the authority) that are grouped according to form.
-Acephala group--kale, collard greens and ornamental cabbages.
-Alboglabra group--Chinese broccoli and obscure pot herbs.
-Botrytis group--cauliflower, broccoli and broccoflower
-Capitata group--cabbages: red, green and Savoy
-Gemmifera group--Brussels sprouts
-Gongylodes group--kohlrabi (German for cabbage apple)
-Italica group--Italian broccoli, sprouting broccoli, purple cauliflower. This group includes the looser headed varieties.
-Tronchuda group--tronchuda kale and cabbage, Portuguese kale, braganza.

This is probably more than you wanted to know, but there it is and now you know why a cabbage salad is called cole slaw.

The main curd of broccoli is only the start...

Leave the plant in place for...

come-again broccoli for the rest of the season.

Cabbages can grow back after harvesting or
like this plant grown from a cabbage heart.

While we are waiting for the winter crops, we are enjoying the
fall cucumbers, sugar snap peas and the last of the okra..

Organic Methods for Vegetable
 Gardening in Florida

Now is the time to start your fall/winter crops in Florida.

Cole crops are only one group of plants to start now, you can also start lettuces, beets, chards, carrots, dill, and more. For more details, buy the book.

I'm a tree hugger, for sure!

Tree hugger!

In case it hasn't been obvious, I have been a tree hugger my whole life, so I will be voting "YES" on Florida's Amendment #1 in November. Monies that had been set aside in a trust by Jeb Bush in 1999 to purchase important and environmentally significant lands in Florida have been used for other expenditures by our current governor and legislature. Plus some of the lands that had already been set aside in the Florida Forever program, were put up for sale. Amendment #1 will change things so that politicians will not be able to do this again.Please join me in this vote--it's extremely important for the future of Florida's fragile ecosystems.



Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny

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