Summer Solstice 2012

Sunrise this morning as we greet the longest day of the year--6/20/12.

Here's an informative solstice article over on the National Geographic website.



Last year's onion harvest--Granex Sweet onions were yummy!


Day length is an important consideration for gardeners, because plants are dependent on day length to regulate their life cycles. Here in northern Florida, we grow onions right through the winter, but we must use short-day or day-neutral onion varieties, otherwise they'd never form a bulb. In Maine, just the opposite is true--they grow onions in the spring and into the summer during the long days.

Sometimes plants flower in the wrong season because they've confused the temperature and day length signals. The Asian azaleas so widely grown here in the south almost always have some boom in the fall here. And now there's even a variety developed that's been bred to bloom twice a year called "Encore."

Observations in the Landscape

This morning as my husband and I were trimming back the wax myrtles near the driveway, I noticed this cool white cocoon amongst the trimmings. It's about 1.3 inches long and it's fairly hard. Some of the leaves were incorporated into the cocoon.

I had no idea what this was so I posted it on Facebook and had my answer within a few minutes. It's a Polyphemus Moth (Antheraea polyphemus) a type of silk moth. Here's a post by my friend Loret Setters about her experiences with this moth : Rip Van Moth-y.


And so we now slide backward into shorter days until the next Summer Solstice. Enjoy yours.

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Roan Mountain

I had the pleasure of being on an excellent birding excursion to Roan Mountain today.  The Roan Mountain massif straddles North Carolina and Tennessee in the Southern Appalachian Mountains of the SE US.  

We saw interesting plants and plant communities (grassy balds and spruce-fir forests) and LOTS of new birds (to me) that hang out there, especially in the high-elevation spruce fir forests.  I should have been writing them all down, but I had a checklist, and was busily trying to repeat their calls in my iPod (via the earbuds).  Challenging.

Gray's lily

Rhododendron catawbiense (Catawba rhododendron)

Grassy bald at Roan Mountain

Rhododendrons and spruce-fir forest

A silhouetted bird (I've forgotten which one it was!)  There were a lot of new ones....

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A more practiced fledgling robin

The fledging robin is looking much more practiced searching for earthworms and insects.  

Our mulch must be rich territory -- we had at least 8 robins poking around this afternoon along with this fledgling and mom.

I posted about them before (with equally ho-hum photos). 

They've been great to watch.

a fledgling robin

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What if we grew food instead of turf?

I found this image on Facebook and shared it on both the Lawn Reform Coalition and Sustainable Gardening pages. While lots of people "liked" it, even more shared it on their own pages. I found even more shares on other pages--it's gone viral. So this simple idea seems to have captured people's attention.

In the last chapter of our new book "Organic Methods for Growing Vegetables in Florida," Melissa Contreras and I have included many ideas for how to turn your organic vegetable gardening into a profitable enterprise. We talk about how to participate in local farmers markets, how to start a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) alone or with a small group of other growers, and how to set up a migrant farmer service where you grow vegetables in other people's yards. We also discuss the pros and cons of becoming certified organic.

You can grow a lot of produce in a small area when you use intensive growing arragements with a minimum of space used for access, so why waste any time and money on a lawn? The book will be published in Feb. 2013. I can hardly wait; I think it will fly off the shelves.  The time is now!

What do you think? Is growing edibles instead of lawns the answer to climate change, the health crisis, and the poor ecomony?

Green Gardening Matters,

Ginny Stibolt

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NWF Backyard Wildlife Habitat

Why not display your sign?

I've had my sign for quite awhile, but it graces an edge of my (inside) study in the Piedmont.

I saw this sign, prominently displayed on a mailbox) on a garden tour today (this garden wasn't on the tour).  But, it had me thinking about it.

The National Wildlife Federation's Backyard Wildlife Program (based here in the U.S.) is a long-running program, and it's evolved into quite a nice one -- encouraging native plants to support native wildlife (unlike in the earlier years of their campaign).

It's a bit of a gimmick, certainly; you as the homeowner go down a checklist about your garden, pay something for the sign, and bingo, you're a certified wildlife habitat.  But it's encouraging, too, so I'm supportive of their efforts --  they've tried to go beyond yards to neighborhoods and communities (college campuses, too).  These are all good things!

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Pollinator WeeK: June 18 --24

A tiger swallowtail on goldenrod in a
natural meadow.

The US Senate unanimously approved the motion to designate the last week in June as pollinator week. Who says the Senate can't agree on anything? In the past five years the pollinator week celebration has become an international event. This year it's June 18--24.

Much of the focus of pollinator week is on our food supply.  Every third bite of food we eat depends upon pollinators. But since 2006, the colony collapse disorder of the European honeybees has alarmed the beekeeping experts. Honeybees have been used as pollinators for hire. Beekeepers move their hives into an area where a large crop (often a monoculture) awaits pollinators in order for fruit to be formed. For example, a female squash flower, needs to be visited eight to ten times by bees or wasps that have also visited the male flowers for a fruit to form.

The Pollinator Partnership is the sponsoring agency for the pollinator week. They encourage you to "Invite pollinators to your neighborhood by planting a pollinator friendly habitat in your garden, farm, school, park or just about anywhere!" They provide many resources including posters of pollinators and guidelines and suggested plants to use in your landscape. Note: these are quite broad and most of Florida is included in the Outer Coastal Plain Mixed Forest Province, (an 11 MB pdf file) with a range from the Mid-Atlantic states to eastern Texas. You'll have the most success if you also use more local resources for native plants suggestions such as the FNPS website: www.fnps.org.

A carpenter bee on a native passionvine. The passionvine (Passiflora incarnata) supplies nectar and also larval food for several butterflies. To purchase some for your yard see: FANN website for sources.

Read more of this post over on the Florida Native Plant Society blog...

Green gardening matters,
Ginny Stibolt

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A fledgling robin

A couple of robins near the feeders caught my attention late this afternoon.  They were hopping around in an unusual fashion.

It turned out that they were mom and older fledgling.  She would do a bit of foraging and then return to her offspring, who was complete with the lovely spotted breast of older fledglings.

A mama robin and fledgling

They were fun to watch, although I didn't manage to get a decent photo of the youngster's spotted chest!

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