Removing lawn and other adventures

Special Summer Appearance:
My presentation is "Organic Gardening—You can do it!"
Aug. 12th 10am at Fleming Island Library in Clay County.
1895 Town Center Blvd, Orange Park, FL 32003
(about 7.5 miles south of I295 & Rt 17 exit)
This event is open to the public and has been coordinated
by The Garden Club of Fleming Island.

Clearing the rest of this section of lawn.

Digging grass...

After putting it off for some time now, I finally finished removing the lawn in front of the shed. I started removing this part of the lawn last fall when I planted the coreopsis. My post on fall seedlings shows the beginning of this project.

It's not an easy task to rip up well-established turfgrass, but I was side-tracked numerous times. I'll plant some more wildflowers in the area near the coreopsis, but this is a major traffic area for gardening work, so I'll add a thick layer of chips to form a wide access path. I'll probably add more containers as well. More on this project later. But here were some of my distractions:

A quick young scarlet snake slithered out of the grass where I was removing it and quickly slid back in. You can tell that this is a scarlet snake because of red on black "a friend of Jack." The poisonous coral snake is red next to yellow "can kill a fellow." This shy snake is quite common in this area, but is rarely seen because it burrows in the ground looking for reptile eggs to eat. A true snake in the grass!

A green darner dragonfly with a large meal--a moth eaten.

Poison ivy next to the rain barrel platform. It was probably deposited by a bird sitting on the platform with a nice dollop of fertilizer.

You can't see me...

...not me either.

Ooh look, a skipper butterfly... I think I'll walk down to the lake.

I wrote about our slump area repair and I thought I had cleaned out the invasive wild taro, but no... Another item on my ever expanding to-do list. :-) Maybe I'll see something interesting down by the lake when I tackle it.

Planting the walking onion scapes.

Walking onions

Last year, my walking onions were dying out after 5 or 6 years in one location, so I moved what was left of them to my herb garden. I rinsed the bulbs totally clean before planting them and I have not harvested any of their leaves. This spring they produced some scapes with groups of new bulbs. I divided them so I could plant the single bublets. This fall, I'll divide the adult plants to further expand the crop. Then I'll start cutting the leaves again. I will mulch the area with pine needles this week before the weeds come.

I moved the walking onions to herb garden last year--that's our back sidewalk at the bottom of the photo along with a sprinkler head. At the left you can see the Greek oregano, some scarlet sage seedlings that I left, and to the right, and not seen here is a large rosemary bush.

A revisit to a roadside meadow in Putnam County

In May this scene was yellow with tickseed, now it's mostly red with blanket flowers. The farmer's flowers have been made into hay.

On May Day, I stopped by this roadside meadow that was totally yellow with tickseed coreopsis. See my field trip post for photos of what it looked like two months ago. On July 4th, this meadow was still beautiful, but different.

A blanket flower (Gaillardia pulchella) hosts a wasp killer.

Storm's a-comin' at a roadside meadow in Putnam county.

A painted lady butterfly visits the black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia mollis) in that same roadside meadow.

A Jacksonville sunrise

A subtle sunrise over the St Johns River with a pink seashore mallow coordinating with the show.

The moonflowers fade at sunrise, while the mallows are ready to welcome its daytime pollinators.

Closer to home...

The summer sky is fantastic this year. What you can't see in this photo are all the bees and wasps working the cabbage palm flowers. There must have been a hundred or more. This is across the street and a good place to take sky photos without wires.

Our front pond a few years ago. Looking from our end of the pond toward the neighbor's end. I have replaced the turfgrass that grew right down to the edge of the pond with a buffer zone of mostly native plants.

See my latest post over on Native Plants & Wildlife Gardens blog The joys of a Florida Pond for more photos of the pond and its visitors over the years. Next month I'll continue the pond adventures with the actions we had to take to save our pond. I hope you are enjoying the summer as much as I am.

Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt

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Returning to the Pacific Northwest

It's been over 40 years since I spent the summer in a National Forest camp on Mt. Hood, outside of Portland, Oregon. I was part of a an NSF Summer Research for High School Students program (run out of the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.) It was an amazing summer -- tough in some ways, but remarkable in others. It solidified my love of nature and the outdoors, for sure, coming from my home base in the Texas hill country then.

Mt. Hood

What I'm reminded of (aside of the frustrations of doing a blog post on an iPad!) is how soul-satisfying it is to return to a place after four decades to find a beautiful trail through an relatively undisturbed forest to a magical waterfall (admittedly, the ones closer to the highway are more disturbed, in terms of vegetation.) An update: switching to a laptop did wonders, in updating this post!

TS photographing waterfall

My gardening companion was thrilled. He's spent a lot of time recently on waterfll hikes, and to see some of these wonderfully moss- and algae- and vegetation-rich falls in the NW is a treat.Traveling from Portland up the Columbia River toward Mt. Hood today, and hiking along lush Pacific lowland forest trails to wonderful waterfalls and seeing familiar plants (from long ago, and grad school days, too, when my research loop took me up this way, too), reminded me, yet ago, of the green thread that has connected my life since childhood.

A magical day, ending up at Timberline Lodge, an iconic memory from my teen years, which continues to be an historic treasure on the slopes of Mt. Hood.

I couldn't get Blogsy to play nice with the new Picasa nor did it seem to like iPhoto, that's for sure... at least on the iPad.  Here are some (finally posted) photos thanks to my gardening companion's laptop!

Fireweed

Clintonia  relative

Trail through an old-growth forest on the flanks of Mt. Hood

Mt. Jefferson and the Three Sisters (from Timberline Lodge)

Posted with Blogsy

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Fireflies

It's always a joy to see fireflies -- here in the Carolinas, it's June when we see most of them. 

I don't know that much about fireflies -- just that the males flash to attract mates; the periodicity is meaningful; and different species flash at ground level, mid-level, and up in the canopy.

We had a colleague years ago who studied them in the Smokies. He'd head off in June to lie on the forest floor at night and do counts and monitoring. (He had been a city dweller before we knew him, so he seemed an unlikely person to be doing this kind of research!)

Fireflies are definitely seasonal, and hmm, a quick google search brought up this; clearly fireflies are impacted by human disturbance as so many other organisms have been.

But they're still relatively common in the Eastern U.S. and elsewhere in humid areas of the world, apparently.

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Harvest-based tempura and more...

The harvest for some tempura.

The harvest & recipe

I had some okra, but not enough for good-sized batch of fried okra, so I supplemented it with 5 little sweet onions, some zucchini, and not shown here, about half of a garlic bulb.

I don't have a deep fryer, but this method for tempura works pretty well.

Vegetables:
12 okra pods sliced
1/2 zucchini sliced
5 really small sweet onions sliced
1/2 garlic bulb (about 4 cloves sliced).

Batter:
2 large eggs
1/2 cup plain non-fat yogurt
1/3 cup water
1/2 teaspoon of freshly-ground black pepper

Dredge:
Yellow cornmeal
Grated Parmesan cheese
About 3 parts of cornmeal to 1 part cheese in a wide bowl with a flat bottom.

Whip the batter with a fork until fully mixed in a small, steep-sided bowl. Heat a large frying pan with about 1/4" of olive oil covering the bottom on medium high. Drop about 1/4th of the vegetables in the batter, lift  them with a slotted spoon, and then dredge in the dry mixture until coated. Spread the vegetables in the pan and turn after a few minutes. When first batch is light brown, slide it to the side of the pan away from the heat before adding the next batch of vegetables. When the second batch is light brown, turn over the first batch and slide all of them to the cool side of the pan and repeat for each batch.

After all the veggies are done, lift them out with the slotted spoon and drain on a double layer of paper towels on a plate and turn after a couple of minutes. Serve with soy sauce.

Crop-based tempura. It was yummy.

My Swiss chard looked like Swiss cheese!

The Swiss chard had gone by and was being eaten by bugs or slugs.

Chard is a beet and has a good tap root.
I checked them for nematode damage and there was none.

It was time to take action to extend the Swiss chard season. Some of the chard plants were really large with stems that were 2" across, but I chose 7 smaller plants and put them into a pot. This way I can remove them from their hot, sunny location to one with more shade and also remove them from those hungry herbivores.

Chard is a beet that has been bred for foliage and not the root, but that meaty tap root will provide the energy for regrowth for a few more harvests. I harvested the leaves that had not turned brown and rinsed them well before bringing them inside. They are holey, but that won't matter once they are finely chopped for salads or cooked for greens.  Stay tuned and I'll let you know how they grow.

I trimmed away all the leaves and soaked the pot in rain barrel water overnight.

More on my nematode experiment

Someone asked for a better photo of the roots, so here's a closeup of nematode-free broccoli roots.

I posted the results of my experiment that I wrote about last week on The Garden Professors' page on Facebook. People had some great questions and wanted more information on where I had found this information. So here is a summary of my answers:

I found out about using marigolds as a cover crop during a discussion with several UF professors when doing my research for "Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida." There is a whole group working on organic agricultural practices and they were quite generous with their time as we were writing the book. Here is the article on cover crops: Cover Crops for Managing Root-Knot Nematodes, and more specifically, Marigolds (Tagetes spp.) for Nematode Management.

One of the commenters said that it didn't make sense to him that if inter-cropping (planting together) didn't work to reduce nematodes, then how could growing marigolds for two months before planting be effective. What he missed in reading the article was that, by definition, a cover crop is dug under after growing. I learned from the professors is that most of the nematode repellent chemicals are in the leaves, so the marigolds work only when used as a cover crop and dug in before planting the next crop. It was an interesting discussion and several people said that they learned a lot, which makes me feels good.
  

A dark force lurks over the pollinators working the coreopsis.
The large dragonfly is probably a black pond hawk (Erythemis attala).

Pale meadowbeauty lives up to its name.

Summertime in Florida means great cloud formations. They were interesting in every direction on June 24th.

The summer skies in Florida can be amazing. Be sure to look up!

Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt

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Poison ivy, Virginia creeper, and other condundrums

I've been allergic to poison ivy since childhood, so I'm very familiar with how to identify it and avoid contamination.  (I'm crazed about making sure our dogs - over the years - haven't picked up the urushiol from the leaves on hikes, etc. -- and if they have, it's always been bath time!)

So, it's with some humility, and annoyance, that I'm suffering through the worst case of poison ivy that I've had in years.  Most unwelcome, although happily it's not all over my face (that's the worst!)

The saga started about a week ago, with weeding Virginia creeper seedlings in our front woodland border.  There were LOTS of them this year, so I was glad to have the opportunity to pull most of them up, before they covered the woodland wildflowers that we're nurturing!

But, Virginia creeper seedlings can often have 3 leaflets as the first set of true leaves -- this photo from another blog illustrates this nicely, and we've seen seedlings like this in our garden, too.

They're "ringers" for poison ivy.

So, as I was blithely weeding Virginia creeper, I must have also pulled up a poison ivy seedling, or two, as well, thinking it was Virginia creeper.  And, unfortunately, even though I washed my hands after coming back in, I didn't do my usual thorough washing up (immediately) that would follow a potential poison ivy exposure.  We've been so thorough about trying to eradicate poison ivy from our landscapes, I wasn't even thinking about the potential for seedlings.  Hmm, since in a former life I did research in germination ecology, I should have thought about this!

Lots of (native plant and other) seedlings have become established this year, after a very good fruit production year last season.

Here's a comparison of Virginia creeper and poison ivy, from another blog called Identify that Plant.

Virginia creeper on the left, poison ivy on the right

So, I have bad patches on my arms, with secondary patches elsewhere.  Nothing too dreadful, but much worse rashes from the direct contact than I normally would have (from secondary contact).

A cautionary tale, for sure.  With itchy arms to show for it.

For those of you that are interested in the dermatology behind the reaction to the oils, this is an excellent explanation about contact dermatitis.

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Swapping peas for beans

I never imagined that I'd be pulling out sugar snap peas, beet greens, and purple-podded peas just after the first day of summer. But I did that over the weekend, and we enjoyed the harvest.

It took a bit of scrambling to round up the appropriate bean seeds for their trellis replacement, too.  I had some of them at the ready, and thought that I had all of my seeds here, too, but apparently some of the warm season varieties are in a separate container elsewhere.  A quick visit to two local commercial sites took care of that!

I like to grow pole beans: Italian romano, lazy wife greasy beans (an Appalachian heirloom from SowTrue seed), and yard-long beans (which thrive in hot summers). I also sowed a fresh round of cilantro and chard, and planted another Japanese eggplant.  I planted some squash seeds, too, just for fun, and would have planted more, but the woodchuck is definitely too active in the lower beds to make it practical without barriers in place.

Here's my (very) first test audio snippet (too short to be called a podcast) recorded on Garageband and uploaded through Soundcloud.  I've done quite a bit of audio/radio over the years (even video), but with expert support as part of my work. 

This was unedited and not redone, so hardly a smooth piece, but... it's a thrill to see this work.  Magic!
 

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Purples in the garden

fading Aquilegia petals

I've been amazed at the brilliant colors that the fading Aquilegia petals have become.  They're almost neon magenta.  A quite un-natural color, but it's still a true color!

Aquilegia, a fern, and rocks

 The corner plantings look lovely, because of them, and the robust foliage of ferns and celandine poppy.

developing Indigo Rose tomatoes

 The developing Indigo Rose tomatoes clusters look great  -- and hopefully, foretell some delicious anthocyanin-rich tomatoes...

purple-podded "soup" peas

And the purple-podded soup peas ("Blauwschokkers"--I think -- an old German/Dutch variety) has been beautiful, too.)  The fresh peas have been tasty enough, but I'm thinking that they're not worth the space in a small garden!

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