New book, book tour, and more

The Art of Maintaining a Florida Native Landscape

The Art of Maintaining a 

Florida Native Landscape 

Yay! My new book is now available for preorder from Amazon. I've covered a wide array of topics, which I think have not been covered sufficiently in other books and online resources.

List of Chapters

1. Introduction to Natives and Their Ecosystems
2. Planning Native Plant Projects
3. Invasive Exotics
4. Site Preparation and Landscape Editing
5. Selecting, Planting, and Caring for Natives
6. Propagation Techniques
7. Minding Your Edges
8. Managing Freedom Lawns, Lawn Replacements, and Meadows
9. Creating and Maintaining Groves, Hedgerows, and Fencerows
10. Landscaping in Moist Habitats
11. Beyond Your Yard
Appendix I. Suggested Native Plant List
Appendix II. Types of Mulch
Glossary
Resources

Illustrations are by Marjorie Shropshire

Marjorie has done a wonderful job with her illustrations, which make complex topics easy to understand.

This one answers the question, "What to do with a messy lawn tree?"

Book Tour

I'll be a speaker at the Florida Native Plant Society's conference at the end of May, but since the book won't be out until August, my official book tour will be from August 31st until November 15th.  See the Appearances tab for an up-to-date list.  Email me at garden@sky-bolt.com

As tempting as it is to have fresh tomatoes from your garden, summer is NOT the time to plant them even though distributors for big box stores are trying to sell them to us. Wait until late August and you may end up with a moderate harvest before winter sets in. We included a detailed planting calendar by region in Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida 

Have you planted your summer cover crops yet?


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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Gardeners know when to "fold"

Gardeners are gamblers

We plant seeds or seedlings and we bet that we'll end up with a bountiful harvest, but it doesn't always happen that way. So when a crop is in distress, we need to yank it out and move on to something else. Case in point: our fall cucumber crop that I talked about last time. We had a pretty good harvest of 20 or so crispy cukes, but the vines got hit with a blight, so it was time to pull them out even though there were small fruits coming along and frost will not come until late December. The vines would not be able to overcome this fungus, and the longer you leave an ailing plant in the garden, the more likely it is to leave tainted soil behind. So I pulled the vines, gathered all the fallen leaves, and put them out with the yard trash. I never put diseased plants in the compost. We have to know when to fold, just like the old gambler...

"You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em
"Know when to walk away and know when to run..."

Even though there were more cukes coming, I ripped them out.

Fall blight...

Eat your seeds!

Eat the seeds!

We enjoyed a lovely acorn squash for dinner the other night and I also prepared the seeds for eating.
Separate from the squash flesh, cook for 10 minutes in about a half an inch of salted water, and then place the seed/saltwater slurry on a cookie sheet to dry. I turn my oven to 300 degrees for 10 minutes and then turn it off, leaving the seeds in the warm oven for an hour. You can also dry the seeds in the hot afternoon sun. Of course, this is also fun to do with pumpkin seeds, which you may have on hand very soon.

Add a little salt to about 1/2 an inch of water, bring to a boil, and simmer for 10 minutes.

Pour the seeds onto a cookie sheet or pizza pan. Put in a cold oven, turn the heat to 300 degrees for 10 minutes and then turn off. After an hour, delicious seeds to eat.

Snags are so important for bluebirds and other wildlife.

 

Snags, stumps, and logs

Whenever possible leave this deadwood in your landscape to provide food and shelter for bluebirds and other wildlife.

I covered this in my upcoming book, "The Art of Maintaining a Florida Native Landscape." Marjorie Shropshire, my excellent illustrator, created a lovely drawing to illustrate the concept.

I turned in all the drawings and their captions into University Press of Florida this week. This was the last piece of the puzzle; I'd already turned in the final draft, the color photos and captions, the B&W photos and captions, and a collection of possible cover photos, so now the ball is in their court. Yay!

I hope you are enjoying the excellent gardening weather. Just remember, if you are planting trees or shrubs that this is the beginning of our dry season and extra irrigation will be needed for the best success.

Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt

Sunrise this morning. How can you not love Florida sunrises?

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A field trip, a Florida native plant hero, & pasta salad

I traveled over to Gainesville on May Day to meet with my editor at University Press of Florida and Marjorie Shropshire who will be illustrating my third book, "The Art of Maintaining a Native Landscape." It was a productive meeting and good progress is being made on the book--it's currently out for review. We discussed likely photos for the book and looked at Marjorie's drawings so far. (Marjorie also did the illustrations for "Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida.")

Marjorie and I had more work to do on the drawings, so the plan was that she would come back to my house and spend the night before she headed back to south Florida. On the way back to my house we stopped to talk to David Chiappini in Putnam County, but were interrupted by this gorgeous wildflower meadow.

Wow what a great-looking roadside wildflower field.

Barbed wire study...

A Florida native plant hero

We had a great time talking with David Chiappini, a native plant wholesaler. He has done so much to advance the Florida native plant availability. In addition to supplying native plant nurseries with authentic Florida stock, he also co-wrote (with Gil Nelson), and arranged the funding for "Florida's Best Native Landscape Plants: 200 Readily Available Species for Homeowners and Professionals."

This important book includes multiple photos and detailed drawings of each plant and it also provides details on size, where to plant, type of soil, and what to plant with each of the 200 plants. If you are interested in being successful with natives in Florida, this book should be on your bookshelf. David said he is happy to talk to people when they bring his book for reference, especially when it has obviously been well-used with notes, bookmarks, and dog-eared pages.

When I first met David at the Morningside native plant sale last month, he said that he had ideas he'd like to share on what he'd like to see in my book. He was generous with his time and we spent more than an hour talking about native plants and the native plant nursery business. He offered up some great ideas for how it could be of more use from his point of view.

 

A fieldtrip

After a dinner of Mediterranean pasta salad (See below.), Marjorie and I spent the evening going over the illustrations to make sure they were clear and presented the material accurately. The next morning we put on our hiking shoes and headed out to the Ravines Black Creek Conservation Preserve. It was gray and threatened to rain, but we saw some great plants before the rains came. The preserve had been burned since I'd been here 6 weeks ago. Fire maintenance is an important tool to keep the ecosystem healthy.

Looking over Marjorie's shoulder at a pawpaw flower.

Pinewoods milkweed with a notch-tipped flower longhorn beetle (Typocerus sinuatus). I love the pink veins.




A longleaf pine seedling (Pinus palustris) after a fire. You can see how it survives with its terminal bud protected from damage.

A follow up on the mystery of the mossy patch that I wrote about last month in Mother Nature's Mysteries. This post also has more general views of the conservation area.

Marjorie explores the mysterious square patch in the mossy spot. Some of the moss had browned around the edges, but it was still in relatively good shape. I understand how it survives the fires now since it is so moist, but how it got started is indeed still a mystery.

Wow, what beautiful fungi and lichen on this downed log.

Mediterranean pasta salad

I knew that Marjorie would be here for dinner and that we would be arriving at dinner time, so I fixed this hearty salad the day before. We included a detailed recipe for this salad in "Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida."




An eclectic harvest including (clockwise from my thumb) 3 rogue onions, leaf lettuces, come-again broccoli, meadow garlic, garlic chives, small zucchinis, sugar snap peas, Swiss chard, dill, rosemary, & curly parsley. In the bottom out of sight are the last few carrots from the second carrot crop.

The pesto dressing made from the onions, garlic, garlic chives, parsley, dill plus, olive oil, cider vinegar, sunflower seeds, plain yogurt, mayonnaise, rosemary leaves, & freshly ground pepper. 

I mix the pesto into the salad before I add in the pasta.

Here's the salad served on a bed of luttuces. Yummy

The okra swales are planted...

The okra is off and running for the hot summer season. I planted them around 2 swales that I'd enriched with kitchen scraps and then mulched with fresh marigold cuttings to reduce the nematodes. For more details see one of my most popular posts: Okra Swales.

A 10-year retrospective on our front meadow

It started when I posted this photo of my native pinxter azalea on Facebook a couple of weeks ago with the comment that most of the area in the background used to be lawn.

People wanted more information on how the lawn became a wooded area, so I posted From lawn to woods: a retrospective. Someone commented that we had done a lot of work, but in reality, Mother Nature herself did most of the heavy lifting--we just modified her planting scheme.

I hope your landscape is also being transformed into a lower maintenance design that also offers great habitat to birds and butterflies.

Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt

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Spring is in the air!

Some trees and shrubs are already producing their spring growth.

Spring is beginning to show itself with new growth on some of the plants and the extreme busyness of the little birds. It's too early to plant the tender crops because we are still likely to experience more frosty weather, but the rest of our native landscape will be fine with our hot spells in the middle of winter.

People who try to push the envelope on tropical plants in northern Florida make a lot of extra work for themselves. And many of them cover their tender plants and then leave them covered right through hot spells. It's likely that the plants that are being protected from the frost will die from the heat under their protective tarps and blankets. It's been in the 80s here for several days in a row.

If people would plant more natives in their landscapes, they wouldn't have this problem.

Our red maples are in full bloom already, which is why people need to pay attention to provenance. Our Florida maple trees would not do well in Canada and the Canadian stock would do poorly here even though red maples are native in both regions.

The pre-Super Bowl snacks with homemade pesto dip and home-grown carrots.

Super Bowl

Our hope for the Super Bowl was for a good game. I used both orange and turquoise dishes to show our impartiality. We did not get our wish, but we did enjoy the commercials and the pre-game snacks.

Here is the recipe for the pesto dip. Mix together 1/4 cup of pesto*, 1/4 cup mayonnaise, 1/4 cup plain non-fat yogurt, 1 tbs of horse radish, 1/4 cup of equal parts of finely chopped fresh dill, parsley, and meadow garlic, with freshly ground pepper. Yummy.

*I still had some frozen pesto, so it was time to use it. Here's a link to my pesto recipe.

That's me with the braids camping on an island in Long Lake in the Adirondacks.

The making of an advocate

Over the past few weeks I scanned the old family slides into digital files and was struck by how hard my parents worked to get us out into nature. We camped every year, took car trips and we were encouraged to play outside. I wrote about how much their efforts have influenced my life and now I have the time to be a real advocate FOR Mother Nature. See my post A look back to find lessons for the future over on the Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens blog.

The photos below are two of the images that I did not include in my post. On the left, the camping chores were endless.  We'd pack a humongous amount of stuff including a huge canvas tent into a flat-backed canoe on Long Lake in the Adirondacks and camp out on an island with another family. On the right a photo from a trip from Connecticut to New Orleans via Lake Worth FL to visit my grandparents, we stopped to admire the view on the Skyline Drive in Virginia. There were no big highways then, so we traveled through every small town.

The never ending camping chores in the old days. I don't remember the name of the other family, so if you recognize yourself, let me know!

I'm looking at the view with my brother at the Skyline Drive. Wow, look at those old cars, but they were newish then!

I hope you had great outdoor experiences as a kid and if not, it's never too late to get started!

Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt

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Florida's Arbor Day

Hard-working native trees are also beautiful
and add value to your property.

While most of the country celebrates Arbor Day in April, both Florida and Louisiana celebrate on the third Friday in January. It’s a much better time to plant a tree because deciduous trees are dormant and others are less active, so they can withstand the shock of transplanting better. One thing to keep in mind is that January is right in the middle of Florida's 7-month dry season and extra irrigation will be needed at least until the wet season starts in June, and if the tree is large, it will require extra attention for even longer. I've covered the details of planting trees in my article Trees & Shrubs: the Bones of your Landscape.

Marjorie Shropshire drawing to illustrate transpiration for
an article I wrote in Palmetto.

A day with an artist

I spent Arbor Day Friday on the road and then talking to Marjorie Shropshire, illustrator for Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida, about the drawings for my third book "The Art of Maintaining a Native Landscape." I'm quite excited about this project because I think it will help to manage people's expectations when they convert their landscapes to include more natives. Marjorie's drawings will help illustrate the topics I cover. Not only is Marjorie an excellent artist, but she also has an innate understanding of plants and animals. It was a fun and productive meeting.

Lake Worth's Festival of Trees

Lake Worth's Festival of Trees!

On Saturday, I went to the Festival of Trees in Lake Worth Florida. The town had organized a great celebration with educational booths, speakers, native trees to purchase, a kids activity table, and music. Wouldn't it be great if more communities were like Lake Worth, which took the initiative to increase its tree canopy with indigenous trees.

As I explained in my Arbor Day post over on the Florida Native Plant Society blog, trees provide services to communities that translate to actual dollars saved. They purify the air, they soak up water,and the cool the environment. 

"In 1991, Chicago's 51 million trees “removed an estimated 17 tons of carbon monoxide, 93 tons of sulfur dioxide, 98 tons of nitrogen dioxide, 210 tons of ozone, and 234 tons of particulate matter. They [also] sequestered about 155,000 tons of carbon.

"New York City's 592,000 street trees reduced stormwater runoff by nearly 900 million gallons each year, saving the city $35.6 million it would have had to spend to improve its stormwater systems. The average street tree intercepted 1,432 gallons, a service worth $61.

"In Sacramento, California a tree planted to the west of a house saved about three times more energy ($120 versus $39) in a year than the same kind of tree planted to the south.

Ideally, developers should leave a chunk of forest on every
lot, but if it's too late for that, as landscapers, we can begin to
recreate groves of native trees to help the birds & butterflies.

Read the details and see the resources in my post, Plant a Native Tree to Celebrate Florida's Arbor Day.

Celebrate with Trees!

It's not too late to plant a few hard-working native trees in your landscape to celebrate our Arbor Day.  In addtion to all the ecosystem services, mature trees will also increase the value of your home. So what are you waiting for?


Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt

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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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One week only: signed books offer

From November 10th to the 17th, I am taking online orders for my books. See the Gift Book Offer page. Maybe you know an avid gardener who would love one of my books for a Christmas present. If so, let me know and I will hold off mailing it until the middle of December and include a Christmas card saying the book is a present from you.  But this is the only week I'll be taking orders, so don't wait until then.

Organic Methods for Vegetable
Gardening in Florida

Sustainable Gardening
for Florida

Thanks for your support!

Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt

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