Garden Plan 2014

Hey Kids, this year is fun, we are redesigning the garden, and it's overdue. It was a large 12x12 garden. Which means that you have to walk through it, which compresses the soil and makes it hard (no oxygen, or water). Last year I wanted to break this big bed up into a couple smaller raised beds and viola we are doing it. I did a lot of research  on designs and found that the ideal width of a bed is 3-4' wide. This will give you plenty of space to reach the middle of the bed from all sides. Here is my board on all of my raised bed designs form Pinterest.

Follow Zachary's board Raised Beds Ideas on Pinterest.

So here is my new design for the garden 2014.

Let me know what you think. I made the bed on the far right only 2 feet because I can only reach it from one side since it rests against the neighbors fence. Otherwise I think it is pretty good looking.

Here is the design from 2010

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Assessing climate impacts

Here in the Southeastern U.S., we've had a very usual year weather-wise.  Way more rain than normal last summer, then bone-chilling cold in the winter.

It's made for some interesting losses and die-backs.

So, it was a reminder about how extreme our variations were over the past year to read this piece in the NY Times about the impact that extreme cold has had on midwest gardens.  It's telling that some gardeners lost plants that had thrived for 30 years.

As gardeners, we always like to push the envelope, even those of us who are trying to be mindful of our regional conditions, but certainly these were exceptional variations, and maybe a portent of more fluctuations to come. 

I gravitated towards being a gardener (and garden educator) as it was hopeful -- restoring landscapes and encouraging people to connect with nature. It's a nurturing and forward-thinking practice (vs. worrying about habitat loss, conservation challenges, etc.) -- this sort of news just makes me realize more that we need to keep planting as restoration gardeners interested in stewardship, too.

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What's New

Okay Kids, So I talked last spring about what is my favorite place to shop at for such a large variety of vegetables and flowers. Again I went to Baker's Acres and got some NEW Varieties. (Click here for last years new veggies).

Juane Flame, Big Zac, Ananas Noire, Abe Lincoln, Tomande, Lipstick

Ive never seen these varieties at my other nurseries so I had to get them. Notice the 'Big Zac' tomatoes! I got three of those! I mean, they named it after me so I really had to. I am still waiting on the beds to be done with the remodel before I can plant them in the ground. Hoping to have that all done by next week. I am deciding to use the EarthBoxes only for peppers. The tomatoes just get too big and unmanageable in them.

I hope all you kids got some new and different varieties... Try something that you never have...I double dog dare you to! Here are some of the different varieties that Baker's Acres had that I liked.

Black Magic Viola: truly a black flower!

Look at these guys, Grafted tomatoes! I don't know if you have heard about these guys yet, but way cool, also Way expensive! A grafted tomato is a combination of two tomato plants. Normally they are one Hybrid and one Heirloom variety. The rootstock is the hybrid and the scion is the heirloom. This makes the heirloom variety more vigorous and immune to soil born diseases. It does not protect it form air born diseases however. Still pretty cool. I know that you can do it yourself too. Maybe I'll try it next year.

Grafted Tomatoes

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Vegan Dandelion Pesto

Okay Kids, what about those dandelions? They are beautiful...okay take a second look and really look at their beauty. Right you see it now! I was weeding the garden and looking at all of the dandelions that I was throwing away. I am sure that I can do something with all of this "waste". What about Pesto, ever heard about arugala pesto? Here is the low down... I was so surprised at how unbitter this pesto was, really it was so delicious that I just had to make it again... and again! So surprised!

Dandelion Pumpkin Seed Pesto

Makes Makes about 2 cups

Ingredients

• ¾ cup unsalted hulled (green) pumpkin seeds
• 4 garlic gloves
• 2 tablespoons nutritional yeast
• 1 bunch dandelion greens (about 6 cups, loosely packed)
• 1 lemon juiced
• ½ cup extra-virgin olive oil
• ⅛ cup water
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• Black pepper, to tasted

Directions

Place pumpkin seeds in a large skillet and roast over medium heat. Stir consistently until golden brown and you can hear they pop a little. Remove from the pan and allow to cool.
Pulse the garlic and pumpkin seeds together in the bowl of a food processor until very finely chopped.
Add nutritional yeast, dandelion greens, and lemon juice and process continuously until combined. Stop the processor every now and again to scrape down the sides of the bowl. The pesto will be very thick and difficult to process after awhile — that's ok.
With the blade running, slowly pour in the olive oil and process. Add the water a little bit at a time until the pesto is smooth. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Here is a tip for you all, when using your Cuisinart, the most difficult thing about the Cuisinart is having to clean that silly lid. So a way I fix that is to wrap the lid is plastic wrap. Then when I am done I just unwrap the lid and viola!

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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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Seeds this Spring - Cucumbers

Hey Kids, last year we had so many cucumbers. They were prolific. More than I knew what to do with them. Pickles were made out of them, relishes, salads. Even though I have never been any good at zucchini, my cucumbers produced more than my zucchini ever did. Unfortunately, with all the wet weather we had last year, the cucumbers got mosaic virus, and mildew. I tried treating them with fungicides like Neem, but it was so wet that I couldn't keep up. We had some really fun varieties last year, check out the list of veggies that I go last year, HERE. This year though I am going to stick with one. It will make it easier for picking, this way they will all look the same and I wont have to guess when they are ripe. 

I picked up Marketmore 76. According Johnny's Seeds, this variety was selected because it is resistant to many diseases such as cucumber mosaic virus, downy mildew and powdery mildew. 

I also wanted to try a process called scarification, which is supposed to reduce germination time by allowing to seed to experience water absorption faster.

It worked too. It only took 2 days for my seeds to germinate.

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Golden ragwort (Packera aurea)

It's hard not to like Golden ragwort (aka Golden Groundsel) = Packera aurea.

It's a native across the Eastern U.S.  It flowers early in spring, supporting some early pollinators, providing a brilliant yellow in woodlands, etc.

It's a exuberant colonizer, and successful self-seeder, so grows prolifically in nice garden beds.

Happily, it's easy to "control" and share with fellow gardeners.

Here's a view of a patch through the front door in our (small) house in the mountains.

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