Pocket meadow and views

view through the front door

 I'm grateful today for the wonderful view out the doors in our small mountain house.

pocket meadow- late August 2014

We've certainly created the view out the front door, and the back -- well, the forest overstory was there, but it was my gardening companion's hard work that freed the understory from invasives, and created a semblance of a natural forest.

view from back deck

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Garlic chives, a bountiful evergreen crop

The evergreen garlic chives supplies plenty of fresh greens all year. At the top of the photo on the left, you can see how big the spaghetti squash plants are that I talked about last time and the okra just is going nuts. We are harvesting several each day, which is a good thing...

Harvest with a sharp knife or scissors with a cut near the soil level.

Garlic chives!

A few years back when researching crops for Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida, I bought some garlic chives seeds (Allium tuberosum) and planted them next to my meadow garlic bed. (2 perennial crops together makes sense when everything else in my edible beds is changed up several times a year.) At first I was disappointed that only 3 or 4 seeds sprouted, but now I don't know what I'd do with any more. It's been amazing. We can use it all year long.

We use it in soups, salads, stir fries, dips, pestos, and more.  The other day I needed a pesto, but most of my lime basil* had been harvested, so I made up the difference with 7 or 8 bunches of garlic chives. It turned out very well. My recipe for pesto is in the Organic Methods book, it is more of a pesto sauce that's ready to use than the standard pestos. (*The lime basil seems to last better in our summers than the standard sweet basil and its citrusy flavor works well for our recipes.)

While the common name, garlic chives, is descriptive of the onion/garlic taste, this is on the garlic side of the genus with its flat leaves. Chives is on the onion side and its leaves are hollow. I grow chives as well and we love the subtle flavor, but chives does not take to cooking at all. It's always good to have some choices.

I cut off whole sections to use. There's plenty for us throughout the year.

I planted some of my cool-weather crops the other day after several mornings with temperatures well below 70 degrees. It's probably a little early, but I'm anxious to see how these rainbow carrots do. Very cute packaging, but will the carrots live up to their wrapper?

Predators in the yard!

So I was out back working to clear some encroaching vegetation from the path and caught a movement out of the corner of my eye into this mound of sand at the edge of the lawn area. Of course I had my camera in my pocket, so I hunkered down with my camera ready to shoot whatever emerged from the hole. It was not surprising that it was a huge cicada killer when you look at the size of her sand mound.

There were several nests lined up along the edge of the lawn out back. To host these beneficial insects in your landscape, use no landscape-wide insecticide of any kind and leave some of your property unplanted and unmulched. For more information on cicada killers see this post from IFAS. 

A cicada killer female emerges from her expansive underground nest.

The volume of soil removed for the nest is amazing. See the runway across the top of the mound just above the tips of my fingers. Nests can be up to 4' long with 16 cells—one for each egg/larva.

And while we are talking about wasps...

Paper wasps are also effective predators in the landscape, but their nests are well above the ground. This nest hangs on a dog fennel stem in a vacant lot across the street.

As seen in Clay Today...

My fungus article for Clay Today's Oakleaf Magazine is on page 23.

Sunrise at Jacksonville Beach the other day. I loved the reddish sunlight on the sea oats.

A Florida moon shot...

2 flyers. As I was snapping a shot of this heron, a mullet jumped just at the right time. :-)

I hope you're ready for your cool weather crops and I strongly urge you to try some garlic chives so you can always have something fresh from the garden for your salads, pestos, and stir fries.

Happy Labor Day and I hope that any labor your are doing for the holiday is in the garden.

Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt

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Sunflowers and morning light

I've just started walking along the path near the French Broad River in Biltmore Estate on a regular basis.  It's a magical place, and we've certainly enjoyed visiting the gardens and lagoon paths over the years, with Woody and our previous dogs, too.

But the path that extends from Antler Hill Village to the lagoons is a long, relatively new one, and I'd always thought a bit too far to drive simply for a walk, when there are so many wonderful walkable places nearer to our house.

It's well worth the extra effort.  And I have time now, too. Time to spend on touching base with myself, discovering more fully who I am creatively, and simply being with where I want to go.

This is a perfect walk, too, about an hour, and the historically agricultural fields are ringed by large trees and mountain views, edged by the river.

The current row of sunflowers was perfect in the morning light.

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A cleaned up vegetable bed

I may just be preparing food for woodchucks, but I was so happy this weekend to get my main vegetable garden bed cleaned up. I'd be too embarrassed to show what it looked like at its worst. But this image is evocative.

A last block to be weeded

Now, I've sown beet, spinach, cress, arugula, turnip, and other greens.  And, I put in transplants of lettuces and radicchio, too.

This is a garden that's shady in winter, so it's really just a matter of what might produce in the next couple of months.

Transplants have been planted, seeds have been sown

I also sowed six large flats with mesclun mix, lettuces, various other greens, etc.

The chives and perennial leeks and onions are doing fine, too.

And I'm anxious to see if my squash, beans, and tomatoes have kept to reasonable sizes and ripeness up in the mountains, too.  Ridiculous to juggle two vegetable gardens, but they are productive!  And, it's fun.

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Gardening renovation and clean-up

Happily, a couple of days of spending quite a bit of time in our weedy and overgrown landscape (left alone all summer) is starting to feel like progress is being made.

The main vegetable garden is almost free of its cloak of crabgrass and some sort of amaranth-like weed, my potting bench (which had been almost engulfed by the giant Florida Anise behind it) has been moved forward, with a nicely reordered set of concrete pavers in front.  And the glazed containers have been moved around for sowing some fall greens.

Amazing what progressive improvements can do, encouraging the gardener.  My gardening companion is back, too (hooray!)  Together, we can chug along getting our acre-and-a half looking like a natural landscape again.

Thank goodness that I'm not a plant collector, nor is my gardening companion.

We've created a perfectly wonderful landscape here (from lawn to mixed plantings) from what it was originally, but it's not fussy.  Yes, the shrubs have become giant, but there's largely space for them (and they're better than lawn).  I enjoyed watching tiger swallowtails visiting the Buddleia this afternoon!

Hmm, the front "meadow" is still to come, etc. along with the front woodland and native wildflower plantings, but I'm encouraged.

I actually lamented this summer that I missed the digging and exercise in our mountain landscape.  I'm getting plenty of that now!

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Taking my own advice (re gardening)

I've found doing landscape consultations both fun and rewarding (interesting, too).

What I love to do is help encourage people to consider all of their "needs" in their landscape (they're all SO different), but most importantly, I find, is to encourage them to focus on what kind of gardening they enjoy and what kind of garden welcomes them home.

We don't want to come home to containers or perennials that need watering ASAP, that's for sure, or have the same niggling weedy mess in the corner to look at, or the outdated pot collection.  Decluttering and editing in the garden is a process that rewards dividends.

So, in our Piedmont garden (1.5 acres) converted from lawn to natural landscape, it's now careened into something that I feel is totally overgrown after 20 years, but beautiful still.

I've realized that absent my gardening companion (while writing two books) over the last decade, I simply haven't thought about dealing with all of the shrubs!  Some of them have gotten really big. So, what do I do now?  Especially after a summer away, with another garden to tend, and just another academic year here.

Well, I follow my own advice. 

I don't think about what it "used" to look like, and envision cleaned up spaces.

view from my study

I work through the garden in phases, from the areas near the many large shrubs (which are perfectly attractive, to be sure), tidy up the borders, the main vegetable garden area (aargh), and do the equivalent of bush-hogging the front meadow.

Hmrhph.  I'll take a photo of the "meadow" and post it -- it's common milkweed and river oats now.  Yikes.

I clean up all of the weedy bits, celebrate the nice stuff, and enjoy the views from my study, porch, and front windows.

the front meadow (looking like a meadow)

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An overgrown garden

Hmm, coming home to the Piedmont, I just want to run directly into the house.  The garden, front and back, is overgrown.

The front meadow is overridden with common milkweed and river oats (and needs a good bushwacking), there are weedy edges everywhere, and my "main" vegetable garden is full of weedy summer annuals, happy for a respite from the gardener, I guess.

I hardly want to venture forth.  My gardening companion has mowed.  A good first start.  He removed the champion-sized pokeweed (the biggest I've ever seen) from border I see from from my study window (the oakleaf hydrangea and butterfly bush look fine).  And the giant garden phlox next to my garden shed (viewed from my gardening companion's window) looks beautiful.

So, I'll venture forth and start weeding, I guess.  I've ordered garlic for fall planting and yet another sort of arugula (MyWay) to try!

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