Weeding

Back home in the Piedmont for a couple of days, I devoted time to tidying the main vegetable garden and satellite garden for fall planting.  "Tidying" is a wimpy word for the weeding involved, but happily, enough recent rain has left the soil pliant enough for easy pulling of even the Italian dandelion volunteers (from an original plant that I had deliberately cultivated years ago).

What was I thinking?  The leaves were just as bitter as 'regular' dandelions... Ick.

But I managed to clear out most of the weeds, so I'm feeling good about it.

There's no sign of woodchucks (hooray), perhaps because of the rainy summer (so good forage beyond the vegetable garden).  So I'll be sowing fall cole crops and lettuce in mid-August, when we're back for fall semester.

Read More

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 of this years.

Today's harvest (yikes!)

Check out the really big tomatoes- they're Brandywine

The yellow pineapple tomatoes are incredibly prolific, as are the cherries and plum tomatoes.  The two giant Brandywine tomatoes I harvested today are probably the only ones that the vine will produce.  Impressive, but not productive.

Read More

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 where a second party app called Blogsy comes in.

They're a top rated app for most of the familiar blogging platforms, and it seems easy to use (at least after reading the How-to's).

With Blogsy, a Picasa Web Albums app (to upload photos that Blogsy will find), and the USB connector from the iPad Camera Connection kit, I'm there.  (Happily, the USB connector with the normal camera cable works with my sturdy (but old) Nikon D100, which uses Compact Flashcards, not SD cards). Hooray.

I did a couple of test runs that seemed successful. Woo-hoo!  If it continues to work, my laptop will stay at home, and I'll be traveling and doing garden posts on my iPad.

Read More

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 the cherries are perhaps the stars -- Sun Gold, Sweet Million, and Black Cherry.  They're all delicious, but the Black Cherry tomato is a keeper -- yum.

This bowl of today's harvest looked photo-worthy!

cherry tomato medley

Read More

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 in building the mound is to put down a good layer of leaves or other water retaining material, because we have sandy soil. I use compost to form the rest of the mound. I also add kitchen scraps three or four inches under the soil in middle of the swale to add all those micronutrients. I mulch everything with pine needles to keep down the weeds.

The swale arrangement does a good job of capturing rainfall or irrigation water, because the water does not leave the mound. Also, there are fewer problems with weeds outside of the swale areas, because it is drier.

Okra growing around two swales--the far swale is receiving a good dose of rain barrel water.

This year I created a double swale shaped like a squared-off figure 8. I planted two seeds in each of the nine planting holes arranged around the swales. I had to replant three of the locations when the original seeds did not germinate. The newer seedlings caught up quickly and now we're gathering okra most every day and save it in the refrigerator until we have enough for a meal. Yum! There's a jambalaya in our future and then maybe some fried okra.

It's easy to water, as shown in the above photo; I just run the hose from our three elevated rain barrels to each swale and let it run for five to seven minutes while I weed or just enjoy the early morning in the garden with the pollinators.

Four pepper plantings around a swale.

I also plant peppers around a swale with the kitchen scrap compost in the center.  The peppers don't need as much water as the okra, but the swale makes it easier to irrigigate when it's really hot.

A green anole keeps the okra bug-free. That's a good lizard!

The okra flowers are just gorgeous. You can probably see its resemblance to various hibiscus flowers and that's not a coincidence--okra belongs to the mallow family (Malvaceae).

In our upcoming book,"Organic Methods for Growing Vegetables in Florida," Melissa and I have arranged the crops by family for easier planning for crop rotation.  The new book will be released in Feb. 2013.

I hope you're having fun with okra this summer.

Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt

Read More

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 to have to worry about having a laptop!

Posted with Blogsy

Read More

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 vegetable dishes at the moment. 

Keeping the young tromboncino and tatume squash separate from the eggplants is fun, and gives us a sense of what each vegetable is like.  Today's bean harvest will wait for tomorrow (there were some big scarlet runner beans that had been hiding!)

My favorite dinner dish at the moment is fresh tomato, basil, and garlic sauce over pasta.  Doing it in a no-cook manner is delightful and easy, and hard to beat with a variety of fresh tomatoes.  Basically, it's chopped-up fresh tomatoes with chopped up basil leaves, and pressed garlic, with a bit of pepper, then the hot cooked pasta thrown in.  Perfect.

Read More