The Gainesville community behind Porter's Garden

I saw a notice on Facebook that Porter's Community Garden in Gainesville was looking for volunteers to plant donated fruit trees on Wednesday Dec. 5th. I was going to be in town for a couple of other meetings on that day, so I stopped by. What a great community project!


Intensively grown cabbage plants have
been mulched with straw.



The community behind the garden

The person who lives next to this plot donated use of the land and a greenhouse, which is still needs to be put together. The plot already had a water source, so it was a matter of clearing the weeds and bringing in some compost. A community fundraising effort raised $12,000 for expenses.

Ten 55-foot long rows are dedicated to raising food for St. Francis a nearby soup kitchen and homeless shelter. The goal is to raise one ton of vegetables annually for St. Francis and other local charities. In addition, six 4x8-foot raised beds have been constructed for families in this disadvantaged neighborhood. More will be constructed as needed to support the community.

The local Chestnut Hill Tree Farm donated $500 worth of fruit and berry trees, which was the reason for this planting session.

Two volunteers adding compost to a newly-planted peach tree. No compost touches the trunk.

 

Straw mulch is added on top of the generous layer of compost.
The large election sign in the background will soon be a sign for the garden.

Several good-sized citrus trees were already growing along the edges of this lot.



 FOG's Travis Mitchell standing in front of the compost bins.



Florida Organic Growers (FOG)  

FOG, a non-profit corporation established in 1987, promotes organic and sustainable agriculture by educating "consumers, farmers, future farmers (children & youth), businesses, policy makers and the general public." Porter's is one of their projects.

Travis Mitchell, a UF alum in organic agriculture and FOG's community project coordinator, was being interviewed and taped for a radio show when I drove up. So I talked to the other volunteers and interns who were working.

After the interview, he explained some of the details of this project to me before getting back to work. If you look at the second peach tree photo, that large election sign will be painted over and posted here, so people will know what's going on.

Gainesville Compost

Also onsite were a couple of guys from Gainesville Compost, a pedal-powered community compost organization, which makes sustainable soil from food scraps collected from local restaurants and distributed to local gardens. They now have a Compost CSA! How cool is that? A CSA (community supported agriculture) is where clients pay up front for a season's share of a farmer's harvest. Here, clients pay for a season's supply of compost.

Chris Cano (on the right in the photo below), the CEO (Compost Experience Officer) of Gainesville Compost, remembered me from my presentation for Gators for a Sustainable Campus three years ago. (See my post on that encounter: Green Gators: There's More to University of Florida Gators than Just Football... )

Chris posted a good summary and history of the Porter's project on his website: Porters Community Farm: Help Fund an Inspiring Urban Farm in Downtown Gainesville. He also promised that he'd write a post as a guest blogger here about bokashi composting, which uses a fermentation process of some kind. I look forward to that.


Gainesville Compost is a company that ditributes food scraps from restaurants to gardens via their pedal-powered trailers. Chris Cano CEO is on the right.  On the left: Steven Kanner, a senior environmental science undergraduate at UF and Chief Engineer & Inventor at Gainesville Compost. Chris met Steven when he was developing his custom bike trailer business called Kanner Karts.

I enjoyed this uplifting side trip to such a green and sustainable community project. I loved running into Chris and that he remembered me from that stormy night at UF when I was sure no one would come. But 40 or 50 students cared enough to show up. As I said at the time, "meeting these enthusiastic students and learning about their initiatives, gives me hope for the future." So now it is the future, and look what I uncovered. How Cool!


Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt

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Gardening and creativity

I've been re-reading a lovely book that I've had for awhile -- Fran Sorin's Digging Deep: Unearthing Your Creative Roots Through Gardening.  She's a tremendously wise gardener, and her book, published in 2004, has obvious 'legs' as it's still in print.

I'm planning on leading a workshop this spring where we'll explore some of the  exercises she describes in her book. And, I'm proposing another workshop and a talk based on this approach in the future, as well.

I think we're missing the creativity in gardening in our popular horticultural press in this country (probably in NA as a whole).  We're all about landscaping language (and tasks), even in fairly sophisticated pieces about gardening in our various magazines, websites, etc.

I've greatly enjoyed Gardens Illustrated (published through the BBC in the UK) for its plant and design-based approach -- they seem to be more about celebrating the creativity of the garden designer and the gardener, instead of thinking about gardens as the equivalent of a room that gets "decorated" every so often, so the articles seem like they have a fresh approach.

Plants grow and change, so are a challenging artistic medium, but they provide an exceptional creative palette, too, for expressing and creating a surrounding space (a garden, if you will) that suits YOU, not anyone else.

Piet and Anja Oudolf's garden, late September 2012

That's what I'm thinking about when I'm considering why I garden and for what purpose, and how I encourage folks in my classes, too, for that matter.

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A anthocyanin-rich fall

It's been a great year for red leaf color here in the Eastern U.S.  Very minimal cool nights followed by a LOT of warm sunny days seem to have resulted in much more intense late reds than usual.

It's been remarkable warm now for weeks, so anthocyanin production must be unusually high. (The red and purple pigments, in fall, are produced using sugars from photosynthesis - in real time - and sequestered in the vacuoles of leaf cells).

Our oakleaf hydrangeas are brilliant right now, as are all the feral Bradford pears around campus and the neighborhood.

And the last blueberry leaves are crimson, along with Clethra alnifolia (Coastal Sweet Pepperbush) -  I've never see it so vivid.

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Recipe for Failure: Long-day Onions in Florida.

I love winter gardening in north Florida. We can grow cool-weather vegetables including, lettuce, onions, garlic, cabbage and the other cole crops right through the winter despite the fact that we get 10 or more killing frosts. The soil never gets particularly cold, though because between those frosts we are likely to get some warm days--even up to the high 70s. I've started many of my cool-weather crops this year, but I hadn't started any onions yet. So it was time to start some.

On December 1, most of the onions for sale in a Home Depot here in North Florida were long-day onions! Any grade-school kid can tell you that the days are getting shorter until Winter Solstice, when they will slowly get longer. So if you plant onions now, you will not have long days any time soon and while those onions may grow, they will not form bulbs before our weather gets too hot for them. Long-day onions are for northern gardeners in places like Maine, who plant onions in the spring and leave them in the ground until the days grow long. So what is Bonnie Plants thinking?

I ranted about Bonnie Plants and their blatant disregard for providing the appropriate plants for their customers over on Garden Rant in March 2011: Unseasonable Offerings from Bonnie Plants

Here are more details on onions in my article: The Skinny on Onions

I harvested my sweet onion crop in May last year when the soil was bone dry.

I tied their leaves together with soft cloth strips and hung them to dry for three weeks in the garage. Then I stored them in a paper bag in a dark cool closet. We ate a lot of onions for more than three months.

So heed my warning: Bonnie Plants has a flawed distribution system. As a sustainable gardener, you need to know what to look for BEFORE you purchase plants. I was able to find some short day onion sets inside near the seed racks, so I will be planting a bunch of onions this week. Yay!

Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt

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An almost full moon

It would have been a great time for a full moon hike this month. The moon has been glorious - luminous and glowing over the last few evenings.

Tomorrow night, it's full. Temperatures are moderate now, but they could have just as easily been overly cool and chilly. And the nocturnal symphony is largely quiet now, too, making evening hikes not quite as rich.

 

Posted with Blogsy

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Final evening sounds

Coming home from the grocery store this evening, I heard some of the final evening songs of fall -- whether they're crickets or tree frogs, I'm not sure. 

We had a good freeze on Saturday night, so I was surprised to hear them, although the warm temperatures before (and after) have buffered the dip in temperature.

The moon is already luminous in the evening, even though not full until Thursday.  It was low in the sky, so visible -- it would have been a great time to schedule a full moon hike, but who knew it would be so mild?

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late November vegetables

November greens have been a high point of an otherwise quiet gardening period, distracted by dog-sitting and coursework.

The Hakurei turnips continue to amaze me. Even unthinned, they've been remarkably productive (and tasty!)

Without a hard frost, the arugula has continued to flourish -- it's remarkably tasty as a cooked green, which tones down the heat-induced bite of the raw leaves, especially the larger ones.

I've been waiting to harvest much of the kale, since it's one of the cold-hardiest greens, and supposedly tastes better, too, after being subjected to cold weather. 

But probably equally important, it's also really attractive next to the parsley, leeks, and chard!

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