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Soil pH and Garden Success

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When a garden hasn’t been doing well, one of the first conditions to check is the soil’s pH, its acid-alkaline balance. The pH scale goes from 0 to 14;  7 is the neutral pH, measurements below 7 are acidic, and measurements above 7 are alkaline.

For reference, distilled salad vinegar has a pH in the range of 2 to 2.5 (acidic), and cold-process soap has a pH in the range of 9 to 10 (alkaline).

Soil pH influences how well plants can take in nutrients from the soil, so getting a garden’s soil into the best pH range for your plants will help them be healthier and more productive.

What is less well-known is that correcting a pH that is either too high or too low takes time. Testing soil pH should be done now, or soon, for gardens that have not done well in the past year.

What pH is good for gardens?

Blueberries will be ripe beginning in mid-to-late June.
Blueberry plants prefer a soil pH near 5.

Most garden veggies need a soil pH of between 6 and 7. Where I live, northwest of Atlanta, the natural soil pH is lower than that range — it is naturally acidic. With that acidity in mind, many people here routinely add lime to their lawns and gardens without checking the soil pH first, and end up with a soil pH that is too high.

When I worked at the local Extension office and managed the soil samples that went to the soil lab at University of Georgia (UGA), it was not unusual to see some samples with soil pH around 5, but others with pH higher than 8. Those higher pH soil samples were from lawns and gardens that had been limed pretty much every year.

Once, a friend who decided to plant blueberries in the space where she had originally kept a vegetable garden sent a soil sample in to the lab at UGA. The lab found that the pH of her soil was 7. This pH level was not a surprise because she had been spreading ashes from her fireplace on the garden. Wood ashes are a good source of potassium, but they raise the soil pH.

For many veggies, a soil pH of 7 is fine, but the blueberries she hoped to plant in that space prefer a pH closer to 5. That soil needed some work before it would make a good home for blueberries. 

How can I find the pH of my garden soil?

Example of easy to use soil pH test kit for home gardeners.
Example of easy to use soil pH test kit for home gardeners.

The most reliable method of finding your garden’s soil pH is to send a soil sample to your state’s soil lab. Call your local county Cooperative Extension office to find out how to take a representative soil sample, how to package it, and the lab fee for this service.

Another option is to purchase a pH test kit at a local garden center. One I have used (pictured nearby) includes a container with color chart for comparison, capsules of pH-indicator-powder to add to the container, and instructions.

The basic instructions for this kit, and others:

  1. put a tiny bit of garden soil into the container
  2. add the indicator powder
  3. add water up to a line near the top
  4. put the lid back on the container, then
  5. mix the parts together by shaking the container until color develops.

You find the pH by comparing the color of your sample to the chart on the front of the container.

Soil sample in pH test kit with water and indicator powder, to read the soil pH.
Sample in pH test kit shows pH of soil in my upper flower bed to be about 6.5.

How to lower a too-high soil pH

The UGA soil lab sent information to my friend about how much aluminum sulfate (the cheapest option) to add in order to bring the pH down to a better level for blueberries. If you know that the pH of your garden soil is too high, but don’t have a lab-recommendation for how to lower it, the amount of elemental sulfur (my preferred option) needed can also be found in a table by Clemson University Extension, in its Changing the pH of your soil publication.

For a soil pH that is only slightly high (about 0.5 higher than the desired level for your plants), one of my county’s former Extension agents used to recommend mixing sphagnum peat into the soil as a quick fix. Iowa State University Extension suggests other amendments that can lower a too-high pH, including “elemental sulfur, aluminum sulfate, iron sulfate, acidifying nitrogen, and organic mulches.”

There is a note, too, that a very high pH (over 8) is hard to bring down. When the local Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden (one of my volunteer groups/projects) was at a location that had a high-pH soil, we added the recommended amount of sulfur several years in a row before the pH started to come down.

How to raise a too-low soil pH

The Iowa State University publication How to change your soil’s pH includes a table showing how much ground limestone will be needed to raise soil pH. If you have hydrated lime handy, and think it might be a “quicker fix” for a too-low pH, please don’t try it. The risk of raising the pH too high with this product, by accident, is large. Lowering the pH after over-liming is difficult and can take a long time. Use ground limestone instead of quick lime or hydrated lime.

It takes more lime to raise pH in a clay soil than in a sandy soil. In general, according to the table in the Iowa State publication, for 100 square feet of clay-soil garden, it takes 5 to 6 pounds of limestone mixed into the top six inches of soil to raise the pH by 0.5.

When is the best time to adjust the soil pH?

For my friend’s blueberries, the UGA lab report recommended that the bushes shouldn’t be planted until 6 months after applying the sulfur. If she added the sulfur in October, that means blueberry-planting should — for best effect —  wait until April. That is pushing the boundary for good planting time for woody plants like blueberries; as spring progresses and the weather warms, newly planted bushes are less likely to do well. They need time in the soil for their root systems to become established before being stressed by the heat of a Georgia summer.

What this means is that soil testing should be done now, if it hasn’t already been done, so adjustments to pH can be made soon enough to benefit plants that will be planted in spring. 

Broccoli, a cool-season crop, does best when soil pH is 6.5 to 7.

What soil pH is best for my plants?

An article by Lewis Hill, published in Robert Rodale’s The Best Gardening Ideas I Know (1983) includes a list of some garden plants and the pH ranges they prefer. I’ve pulled some of the food plants from his list to post here:

  • pH 4 to 5: blueberry
  • pH 5 to 5.75: blackberry, grape, parsnip, plum, potato, pumpkin
  • pH 5.75 to 6.5: bean, citrus fruits, cowpeas, currants, gooseberry, oats, pepper, rutabaga, rye, squash, strawberry, tomato, turnip
  • pH 6.5 to 7: apple, beet, broccoli, buckwheat, butternut, chicory, chives, cucumber, eggplant, endive, kale, leek, muskmelon, onion, pea, peach, radish, raspberry, rhubarb, spinach, watermelon, wheat
  • pH 7 to 7.5: alfalfa, asparagus, barley, cabbage, carrot, cauliflower, celery, lettuce, nasturtium, parsley

This list may help other gardeners in planning what to plant where, but it is comforting to remember that plants will still grow and produce in soil that is slightly outside their preferred pH range.

This is lucky, since most of us grow many of these plants mixed all together in our gardens. However, for peak production, planting in soil that is actually the preferred pH for each crop works best.

Succession planting with preferred pH for each crop in mind

When I plant Irish-type potatoes in the spring, I will have added some sphagnum peat to their soil to bring the pH down a bit, but not all the way down to 5. Knowing the pH preferences of other crops helps me know what to plant after the potatoes in that space. For example, cabbages in that space would likely be a total bust, because their pH preference is so much higher (7 to 7.5!).

After  potatoes are harvested, a better option than cabbages would be to let a nearby vining crop, like melons, sprawl across that space. Another option would be to plant a crop there that prefers a lower pH range, like beans or cowpeas that thrive at pH 5.75-6.5.

 

(If this information seems helpful or interesting, please remember to “like” or “share” it. Thank you!)

Snails in the Garden

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We are in December, with below freezing temperatures at night, but there are still a few snails in the garden. Their continued presence among the greens (chicory, kale, lettuce, rocket) tells about the long season of rain leading up to winter here in north Georgia.

Snail on a chicory leaf, early December in Georgia.

I haven’t seen any serious damage to my plants, so I am not concerned about the snails. To be honest, I am amazed by their persistence in the cold.

If there were very many snails, and a lot of damage to crops, I would set out some organic-approved iron-phosphate bait. The one I have used most recently is called Sluggo, but there are many similar baits, with the same active ingredient, that work.

When I have used the iron-phosphate bait, it was actually for roly-polies, many years ago. For some reason their population had boomed, and roly-polies roiled every square inch of ground in the garden. These critters usually eat decaying organic matter, but there were so many of them that they started eating seedlings in the garden. That was a problem, but the Sluggo iron-phosphate bait for slugs and snails works on roly-polies, too.

It took a couple of years of persistent use of the bait to beat back the roly-polies, but my garden hasn’t been invaded like that again.

The Royal Horticulture Society (RHS), in the UK, where slugs and snails commonly invade gardens and farms and cause a lot of damage, has been studying methods of slug and snail control. Earlier this fall, the BBC reported on an RHS study of home-methods, using things like crushed egg shells, sharp sand, and copper strips to keep the pests away from garden crops.

The study found that none of those things really work, which is sad news for those of us who like to “DIY” as much of our gardening as possible. They had not yet tested beer-traps (beer in shallow saucers, set around the garden, to lure and then drown slugs and snails), so there may be one method left for us to use, other than placing boards in the garden for the pests to hide under, then turning the boards over to pick off the critters by hand to drown or otherwise dispatch.

In another RHS study, effectiveness of iron-phosphate baits and another organic control, nematodes that target slugs and snails, was compared to conventional (chemical) control options. The organic methods did almost as well as the chemicals. Based on my roly-poly experience, I would have guessed this outcome, but it is nice to have that guess confirmed.

Gardens Can Provide Convenient Substitutions for Missing Ingredients

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Food growing in the yard might not count as “convenience food,” but it can be mighty convenient. Sometimes, when I am putting supper together and missing an ingredient, a decent substitute is out in my organic garden.

Most recently, the needed ingredient was cooked spinach. Some years, I have plenty of spinach in the garden, but the local wild bunnies demolished this year’s spinach patch. The good news is that greens are probably the easiest veggie to substitute from the garden.

Chicory as a substitute for spinach in cooking

I have a little patch of kale, which would work as a spinach-substitute if there were more of it. You may remember, though, my patch of chicory, defended from the bunnies by a blockade of sticks. The blockade, after I added a lot more sticks, did work, and the ‘Magdeburg’ chicory, selected for its roots used in making chicory coffee, grew.

Chicory in the garden that has been nibbled by the wild yard bunnies.

Chicory to the left shows the bunny-damaged chicory patch before I beefed-up the stick blockade. 

Because I have not yet dug up any of the roots to make chicory coffee, there are plenty of large leaves on the plants.

I harvested about a third of the leaves from the patch, to use as a spinach substitute, in my recent vegetable lasagna.

'Magdeburg' chicory, nearing the time of harvest.

Picture to the right shows the successfully-defended chicory patch, with taller sticks still visible, poking up around the plants.

Some of the roots are finally large enough that I will dig them up in the next few weeks to make my coffee. This is a benefit of living in the South: the ground will not be frozen anytime soon. Digging up roots is still possible.

'Italiko rosso' chicory has beautiful red leaf veins, making it beautiful in addition to being tasty.

I will say, though, that the leaves of the ‘Magdeburg’ chicory, chosen for its roots, are not as tasty as the leaves of some other chicories I have grown in the past, like the ‘Italiko rosso’ in the picture to the left. 

The problem with the ‘Magdeburg’ chicory leaves is an intensified bitterness. I had to boil and drain the ‘Magdeburg’ leaves a couple of times to get to an acceptably-low level of bitterness. ‘Italiko rosso’ is mildly bitter, but I have never had to do the boil-then-drain  thing with that variety.

Convenient herb tea from the yard

Another convenient plant in the garden right now is oregano. In a few weeks, the oregano patch will lose a lot of its leaves, but — here in early December — it still looks great. The patch is thick with fresh, fragrant leaves.

Oregano can be used to make herbal tea, tasting pretty much like oregano.

We use our fresh herbs pretty frequently in cooking. I hadn’t thought, though, about using oregano to make an herbal tea until I read about it last week.

Since I like to use crops-in-the-yard as fully as possible, oregano tea seemed like a thing to try.

An old (2017) article on Livestrong.com tells about some potential benefits of oregano, especially oregano oil, but is very careful to not make a lot of overblown health claims for the tea. I appreciate the cautious approach!

I made tea using fresh oregano leaves on two separate days last week. The first day, I added honey and lemon, and the tea was good enough that I made another cup the next day. The second time, though, I drank it “straight”, without any additions. Let me just say that the first version, with honey and lemon, was MUCH better than the second. 

If anyone is curious — oregano tea tastes pretty much like oregano. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but finding it out in person made me laugh.

I am having oregano tea again today, with local honey and a squeeze of a lemon-like fruit that was grown by my friend Eddie.

Which “convenient foods” are you using from your garden this month?

Gifts for Gardeners in Winter

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Gardeners will be spending less time in their gardens over the next couple of months. Colder weather means slower-growing weeds and slower-growing crops, so there is less work to do. For many of us, though, our thinking-about-gardens is still on full-speed.

Indoor projects can help use up some of that gardening-energy. If your gardener could use a wintertime project, here are some garden-related gift ideas to consider:

Stepping Stone Kit: I went to a big garden expo in August, and one booth showed kits for garden stepping stones. The projects were super-cute! This is a fun joint project for an adult plus child.

Flower Press and Idea Book: There aren’t many flowers in our gardens now to place in a plant press, but crafty gardeners who love flowers can get ready for flower-season (most of the year, here in the South) by reading an inspirational book (below). Information about the flower press — shown at left — on Amazon.com indicates that it is for kids, but my flower press, that I use as an adult, looks similar (different picture on the front).

My copy of Penny Black’s Book of Cards and Collages , along with my own flower press, has helped me make many beautiful cards over the years, mostly in the slower, wintertime season. This book, or a different one of your choosing, might inspire your favorite gardener, too.

Looking for a more practical gift? Try a very nice food dehydrator, to preserve your gardener’s harvest, paired with a book of recipes for the resulting dehydrated foods, so the preserved harvest is used to its fullest.

My Excaliber dehydrator, which I love, is the smaller, 5-tray version, but I should have bought the 9-tray version (shown to the right of this text).

The Ultimate Healthy Dehydrator Cookbook isn’t a primer on how to dehydrate your garden produce — a booklet with those instructions comes with the Excaliber dehydrator. Instead, this book explains how to use those dehydrated foods in every-day recipes.

Something that might be less practical, but that I thought was very funny and yet also useful when I saw it at that big garden expo, is a set of Outdoor Yard Drinkholder stakes. Setting your cup/thermos in one of these, near where you are working in the garden, would keep it high enough off the ground that dirt and debris is less likely to fly into your beverage.

The stakes would also reduce the risk of spills (how many times have I accidentally knocked over my water/tea/coffee while weeding?). I can imagine placing these strategically around the yard in the morning, so there will always be one near where I am working.

The linked set is multicolored, but the stakes also come in what may be considered a more tasteful color combo of white and black.

Fall Garden Planning book explains how to choose crops, create a schedule, and prepare the garden for fall planting.

Of course, there is also my very own book about planning the fall vegetable garden, Fall Garden Planning, which would be an Excellent gift for any gardener in the Southeastern U.S. (but my view is probably biased…).

If none of these ideas seems right for your gardener, you might check out the gift idea lists of some of my gardening friends:

Ichi Ki Kei Jiro – Asian Persimmon

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I planted our Ichi Ki Kei Jiro persimmon tree back in 2008. In its third year, it produced a few fruits that dropped before ripening. In the fourth year, the tree produced fruits that stayed on the tree and ripened there for us to harvest. The little tree has produced mature fruit every year since then. 

How to Eat Ichi Ki Kei Jiro Fruits

The flavor of Ichi Ki Kei Jiro persimmons is similar in flavor to that of American persimmons, a less-strong version of that flavor, but the fruit is larger. Even better, unlike American persimmons, Ichi Ki Kei Jiro fruits totally lack that persimmon-astringency, even when the fruits are hard. 

After decades of eating American persimmons, sometimes too soon, so that I got that “Sahara Desert” feeling in my mouth, it took a few years to trust that my Asian persimmons would not have that astringency.

The first year we harvested the large, orange fruits from our Ichi Ki Kei Jiro tree, I did eat a few that were still firm, like apples, because everything I had read about this persimmon variety said that I should. The flavor was good, and the fruits were sweet. However, the fruits continued to ripen indoors, and waiting for the fruit to get mushy-soft turned out to be the best plan.

When the fruits are mushy-soft, the flavor is more pronounced, and the sweetness is just right. To eat Ichi Ki Kei Jiro fresh, we wash the soft fruits and then cut them either in half or in quarters and scoop the pulpy innards out with a spoon. This makes an excellent dessert, without any additions or alterations.

How to eat an Ichi Ki Kei Jiro Persimmon
How to eat an Ichi Ki Kei Jiro persimmon

Fruit-preparation is made even easier by the lack of seeds in most fruits from our tree. Every now and then, I will cut into a fruit that contains a few seeds, but that is rare.

In years when we have a super-abundance of these persimmons, I scoop out pulp from some of the fruits into freezer bags, to use in making persimmon bread (and other foods) in later months.

Our tree does seem to alternate bumper-crop years with lower-harvest years. The fruits taste great in both cases, but in lower-harvest years we have less.

Last year we had a huge crop, enough to put several quarts of pulp into the freezer and to share bags of fruit with neighbors and friends. This is a lower harvest year. We’ve shared some fruit with friends, but there might not be much persimmon bread this year.

Ichi Ki Kei Jiro: About the Trees

Ichi Ki Kei Jiro is self-fertile, which means that one tree is enough. It doesn’t need to be planted with a companion-tree to set fruit. For smaller yards, this can be an important feature!

This variety is also one of the smaller Asian persimmon trees; Ichi Ki Kei Jiro is supposed to reach a height of about 8-10 feet. Ours is a little taller. It might be as much as 12 feet tall, but my experience is that plants in the South almost always grow taller than expected. 

Ichi Ki Kei Jiro fruits attached to the tree.
Ichi Ki Kei Jiro fruits on my tree.

Asian persimmons generally are not as cold-hardy as our native, American persimmons. The website for the plant provider Edible Landscaping (where I bought my tree — but this is not a sponsored post!) shows a hardiness range of zones 6-8 for many of the Asian persimmons it offers. My yard is in hardiness zone 7b.

UGA Extension, in its Home Garden Persimmons publication, offers a more conservative guide to cold-hardiness, suggesting that  Asian persimmons might not be reliably hardy anywhere north of Macon. I live a couple-hours drive north of Macon, and my tree has survived for 10 years, but other gardeners this far north may have a different experience.

I have read that the lifespan of this tree is about 10 years, which is its current age in my yard. It will be interesting to see how the tree does in the coming year!

Ichi Ki Kei Jiro: Planting and Care

As for most fruiting trees, the site selected for the tree should have plenty of sun.

Our Ichi Ki Kei Jiro is a grafted tree; the Asian persimmon top is grafted onto the roots of an American persimmon. The American persimmon rootstock increases the hardiness of the Asian persimmon, especially its tolerance for drought and for excess water. Here in the Southeastern U.S., we get both of those conditions. Most importantly, though, the tree should not be planted in a spot that stays wet. 

The best soil for an Ichi Ki Kei Jiro, like for most other plants, is a soil that we don’t have — a “fertile, sandy loam” that is well-drained, a kind of soil that is almost mythological for those of us in the Southeast.

Soil in my yard is pretty much all red clay. It stays wet for a very long time after a stretch of rainy weather, and then changes over to a brick-like hardness in drier weather.

When I planted my tree, my biggest concern was the risk of soggy soil that could encourage root rots and crown rots. I have lost other trees to soggy soils. To minimize the risk, I planted my Ichi Ki Kei Jiro on a little rise that prevents water from gathering/standing near the trunk/crown of the tree. This strategy seems to have worked.

North Carolina State University notes that the soil pH for persimmons should be in the 6-6.5 range. NCSU also offers this planting advice:

Care must be taken when transplanting a persimmon tree because of its fragile root system. In general, trees should be planted at the same depth (or no more than 1 inch below) they grew in the nursery. The root system must never be subjected to freezing or drying conditions. To ensure good root growth after planting, water the trees immediately after setting them out and on a weekly basis thereafter if they receive no rainfall.

North Carolina State University, Growing Oriental Persimmons in North Carolina

If your soil is mostly clay, like mine, planting at the same depth or higher, and on a little rise, would probably be better than planting even a smidge below the depth of the plant in the nursery.

I have read that overdoing the fertilizer can result in fruit drop. With our clay soils, I tend to under-fertilize, because I know that clay soil can hold onto the nutrients in fertilizers (of all kinds — organic and conventional) for a long time.

Pruning an Ichi Ki Kei Jiro Persimmon Tree

The roots of grafted persimmon trees tend to send up “suckers” — little saplings of American persimmons — that need to be pruned away at ground-level. 

Most of my readers are organic gardeners, but not all are, so this is for all those who sometimes do their weeding with chemicals: Do Not Spray these suckers with herbicides to get rid of them. They are still connected to the Asian persimmon through the root system. Herbicides like RoundUp used on the suckers will travel through the connected root system to your cherished Asian persimmon tree. This could kill the tree. Just so you know…

I prune the top part of my little tree in late winter, usually in early March, but the pruning is minimal. This is not like the pruning required to maintain a healthy apple or peach tree.

I remove low branches that get in the way of mowing and branches that are growing back toward the center of the tree. I look for branches that criss-cross each other and rub together (the rubbing could create a wound in the branch), and prune away one of the two branches. I look for places where several branches grow in a cluster from the same node and prune to reduce the number to just 2 or 3, rather than 4 or 5.

The branches I see on my tree now, in late November, are not where the fruit will form next year. Fruits form on new wood that grows in Spring; the little bit of pruning in March can stimulate growth of that new wood.

Harvesting Ichi Ki Kei Jiro Fruits

Ichi Ki Kei Jiro fruits after harvest. You can see a bit of twig is still attached to each one.
Ichi Ki Kei Jiro fruits after harvest. You can see a bit of twig is still attached to each one.

Ichi Ki Kei Jiro trees hold tightly to their fruits. Just pulling to remove the fruit, even fruit that is dark orange and beginning to soften, isn’t always sufficient. To avoid damaging the tree, use pruners to clip right through the twigs or slender branches holding the fruits. 

Those fruiting twigs will not produce fruit next year, but they may be a source of new wood for next year’s fruit. When you cut through a twig to harvest fruit, try to cut just beyond an outward-facing bud, to help guide new growth in Spring.

Report on Other Asian Persimmon Trees Nearby

Unknown variety of Asian persimmon growing about a mile and a half from my yard.
Unknown variety of Asian persimmon growing about a mile and a half from my yard.

Tree 1: One of my friends has a different Asian persimmon tree — I don’t know which variety — that he planted five years ago. His tree still has not produced mature fruit.

Tree 2: When Joe and I walked a different route through the neighborhood yesterday, to get a cup of coffee at a new coffee shop in town (two miles away), we passed a yard that had a very small Asian persimmon tree with fruit. This must be its first year for fruit, because there were just five fruits on the tree, and the tree couldn’t have been more than five or six feet tall. I don’t know which variety of persimmon this tree is, but the fruits are more elongated (cone-shaped) than fruits on my Ichi Ki Kei Jiro.

I hope this information is helpful to gardeners considering which fruits to plant in a Southern yard. If it is, please remember to “like” or “share” the post!

New Page About Wildflowers in Tuscany

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I am working on a page for this website that is a little off-topic. It is about wildflowers in Tuscany. The new page is partly for the couple-of-hundred Cobb County Master Gardeners who love Italy, especially Tuscany, and most-especially Montepulciano, where we have stayed. The page is also partly to provide an easy way for me to help people who are curious about the flowers they see next summer, when we go back to Italy for Joe’s job one more time.

View from the roadside on one of my walks in Tuscany - wildflowers, vineyards, and olive groves.
View from one of my walks in Tuscany.

One of my favorite activities of the past couple of summers has been walking through the countryside around Montepulciano, passing vineyards and olive groves, to see the local plants/flowers and their associated insects. Plants growing within the hilltop towns, which are nearly completely paved and have very little exposed soil, have also been a source of amazement. 

While in Italy, I studied the ways container plants in front of buildings can tell about a building’s purpose. I paid attention to the mix of flowers along roadsides and in meadows, and considered how to recreate similar-looking mixes in the rainy, humid Southeastern U.S. I watched the pollinators, and saw a lack of diversity in the butterflies, but also an abundance of flower-flies and solitary bees. 

Flowers of clematis vine, with a solitary- bee.

The biggest surprise has been how many plants  I can identify on-sight, without even thinking hard, because I have seen them here in the U.S. Dandelion is an easy one, but elderberry grows all over Tuscany, too. It turns out that many common weeds here in the U.S. are not native here. They are classified as being “introduced,” and they came from the Mediterranean region of the world.

An abundantly fruiting elderberry, near Montepulciano, Tuscany.

This is not all bad news for the U.S., since many of these weeds either are edible or they have medicinal properties. They are useful plants.

I saw many dandelions in Tuscany.

You can see some of them now, on the new — but incomplete — Tuscany Wildflowers page of this website. I will continue to update the page over the next few months, so check back occasionally to see the new content.

Winter Harvests at Plant a Row for the Hungry

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The local Plant a Row for the Hungry (PAR) gardeners plan to cut back on their whole-group meetings through much of the winter. That doesn’t mean the gardeners won’t still be providing garden-fresh produce to a local food pantry, but it does mean that they are using the reduced workload of the winter garden to take a break.

Instead of meeting as a whole group every week (the usual schedule), PAR gardeners are signing up in pairs to harvest and deliver greens and root-crops. If the garden seems to need more attention, larger-group workdays can be scheduled, but those will be less frequent. There is no need for watering or continuous weeding, and no more heavy work like spreading mulch, until spring comes back around. 

Fall crops at Plant a Row for the Hungry Garden, well-grown and ready for harvest.
Fall crops at Plant a Row for the Hungry Garden, well-grown and ready for harvest.

Last week’s workday was the last major workday for the season. While some gardeners harvested, weighed, and bagged greens for delivery, others pulled the last of the peppers and eggplants. A freeze was tentatively forecast for the weekend, with a bigger chance of freezing early this week. An early-week freeze looks less likely as the target-dates get closer, but it was good to move those plants out of the garden while there was a small crowd of gardeners to complete the task.

Even better, there was a basket-load of peppers to deliver to the food pantry, in addition to the greens.

Kale and garlic share a bed at the Plant a Row for the Hungry garden. Kale can be harvested all winter. Garlic will be harvested in summer.
Kale and garlic share a bed at the Plant a Row for the Hungry garden. Kale can be harvested all winter. Garlic will be harvested in summer.

In the next week or so, the irrigation system will be turned off.  Turning the system off and draining it for the winter will protect the equipment from freeze damage. This is a more complicated task (than pulling up old crops, for example) to prepare the garden for cold weather, but it is important for the success of next spring’s garden.

Trio of gardeners harvesting lettuces and kale from the first planting bed.
Trio of gardeners harvesting lettuces and kale from the first planting bed.

Gardeners who are new to fall/winter gardening in the South may be unsure about how much to harvest each week from the garden. It may help to know the guidelines the PAR gardeners discussed, to guide their harvest of winter crops:

Closer view of one 'Red Russian' kale plant that has plenty of big leaves ready for harvest.
Closer view of one ‘Red Russian’ kale plant that has plenty of big leaves ready for harvest.
  1. For leafy greens, harvest lowest/outer/larger leaves.
  2. Harvest no more than 1/3 of the mass of any leafy greens plant each week.
  3. Wait for warm-enough temperatures (above 32 degrees F, with no frost on the leaves) to harvest any/all of the crops/
  4. For root crops (beets, daikon radishes, etc), pull the entire plant at harvest, including the leaves. Those are good food, too.
  5. For the broccoli, some leaves can be harvested before the actual head of broccoli is ready to harvest — leaves of broccoli plants taste pretty much like broccoli; harvest sparingly, though, so plants have enough energy to make a good-sized head of broccoli.

Hope that other gardens are doing as well as the PAR garden!

Fall in the Garden, Continued

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When I listed tasks for the fall garden in an earlier blog post, and again in the more recent one on fall tasks for herbs, I totally forgot to mention gathering and saving seeds. For many gardeners, this is such an automatic behavior — like breathing — that it is easy to forget to mention it, but I should have remembered.

A few last seedheads for 'Red Rubin' basil, set aside to dry for collecting the seeds.
A few last seedheads for ‘Red Rubin’ basil, set aside to dry for saving the seeds. 

The last quarterly meeting for the year for Cobb Community Gardens was held near the end of October, and it featured a seed-swap. One person who could not attend sent an enormous bag stuffed full with seedheads from her purple coneflower patch. 

If I hadn’t already saved seeds from my earliest-blooming ‘Red Rubin’ basil, the meeting should have been enough of a reminder. 

If there are still unexploded seedheads in your garden, for plants you’d like to have more of next year (coneflowers, coreopsis, milkweed, basil, horehound, mints, etc.), gathering those seeds now, to dry for several days and then store airtight and in-the-fridge, is a good idea. 

Basil seeds typically don’t shake out easily until the stalks are dry. Removing leaves from the stalks speeds up the drying, and any leaves still in good condition can be used in the kitchen.

If you have tree onions (aka: walking onions, winter onions, top onions) that have dropped bulblets to the ground, these can be separated and replanted, to grow more onions. Mine are from my stepdad, Bill, and he called them winter onions.

These plants make bulblets (or top sets), that look like tiny onions, on a stalk. You can see a cluster of sprouting bulblets in the photo collage below.  Anyone who doesn’t have a free source of these (another gardener) might look into buying a few. They multiplied in my garden pretty quickly, from an original cluster of five bulblets.

One source of bulblets is Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, which is a great resource for gardeners in the Southeast.

Elsewhere in my garden, I still have chicory roots to dig up. The roots have not grown as large as I had hoped, so I plan to harvest only half of the plants this year. This would leave the other half to continue growing next year, to make bigger roots for coffee-roasting. I may have to buy some extra chicory this year to stretch my supply.

Collection of photos showing state of the garden in fall: radishes, green onions, carrots, cilantro, and more.
Collection of photos showing state of the garden in fall: radishes, green onions, carrots, cilantro, and more.

Pictures in the photo-collage above are representative, but do not show all the good things growing in my garden. Kale and lettuces also are growing. There would have been beets and spinach, but critters ate those while they were still small.

The radishes you see up above are ‘French breakfast’ salad-type radishes. The winter radishes (not pictured) are bigger. We will be able to use a few in our family gathering that is coming up later this month.

How is your fall garden?

For the Herb Garden in Fall

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Are there herbs in your garden? When that first freeze arrives, tender annuals like basil, dill, and cardamon will die. Some perennial herbs like mint, comfrey, and anise hyssop will die back above ground, but regrow from their roots in spring. Many of these herbs will have an easier winter with help from the gardener.

How can we help our herbs survive the winter?

According to North Carolina State University, a layer of mulch will protect perennials, like mint and fennel, that die back in winter, from temperatures down around 20 degrees F. The article explains:

A winter mulch helps maintain uniform soil temperatures around the root system and provides protection against heaving cause by frequent freezing and thawing of the soil.

Winterizing the Herb Garden | NC State Extension Publications
Winterizing the Herb Garden

In other words, if your garden experiences freezing and thawing through the winter, a light layer of mulch laid around the herbs can reduce stress on their roots. That reduction in stress from freeze/thaw cycles in winter can result in healthier plants in spring.

The special case of rosemary

One herb in particular is likely to die in a harsh winter, and that is rosemary. In hardiness zone 8, and certainly in zone 9, all varieties of rosemary should survive the winter with no trouble. Where I live, zone 7b, some rosemary varieties don’t make it through the winter.

The variety in my garden is called ‘Arp’. It is the least graceful of all rosemary plants, but it is the most cold-hardy. If I were growing one of the more beautiful but less hardy varieties, I would follow NCSU’s advice: after the first hard freeze, cut the plant to a stub, just a few inches tall, then mound soil and mulch around the stub to keep it safe through winter.

The result would not be beautiful in the garden, but it might save the gardener’s budget from having to replace the rosemary next spring.

There are some happier late-autumn garden tasks than considering whether to completely cut back your rosemary bush. Mostly, these tasks are about harvesting. 

Which herbs do we harvest at the end of autumn?

If there are any annual herbs left in the garden, now is the time to finish harvesting those (basil, dill, fennel, hyssop, for example). This year I grew my big crop of dill in spring, then put it all in our dehydrator (the Excaliber has a setting low enough to be safe for herbs), so we would have dill all winter. Some gardeners may have planted a late crop of dill, or they may have Holy Basil to dry for Tulsi tea. That all needs to be harvested before the weather turns truly cold.

Fading leaves of goldenseal signal that now is the time to harvest its roots.
Fading leaves of goldenseal signal that now is the time to harvest its roots.

Some gardeners, such as those in the Piedmont region, may have goldenseal, ginseng, or bloodroot ready to harvest in their woodland gardens. NCSU’s article “Harvesting and Preserving Herbs for the Home Gardener” tells us that now is the time to dig roots of these herbs — “in the fall after the foliage fades”.

Saffron crocus are up in my yard and ready for harvest, too. The flowers don’t last long, so the saffron patch needs to be checked daily. Harvest the long red thready-parts – also called the stigmas – (use tweezers), then set them on a plate or other dish somewhere safe to dry. For me, the flavor is even better if the strands are lightly toasted before using in recipes.

Saffron flowers are the source of the herb saffron, and they grow well in my yard. Now is the time to harvest the red stigmas that are the part we use in cooking.
Saffron flowers are the source of the herb saffron, and they grow well in my yard. Now is the time to harvest the red stigmas that are the part we use in cooking.

If you don’t have any saffron growing in your garden yet, and you live only as far north as Atlanta, it is not too late to plant a patch (link to bulbs for purchase here) for next year.

Which herbs besides saffron can I plant now?

If you are counting garlic as an herb, then that is one to plant now. You actually have a pretty big window-of-opportunity for planting garlic in the Southeastern U.S., but the longer they have to grow, the bigger your garlics will be at harvest-time. See my earlier blog post about How to Plant Your Home Garden Garlic for more information.

In warmer parts of the South, late fall stretches further into November and December. In those areas, November is still a great month to plant perennial herbs (and shrubs and fruit trees!). In colder areas, plants set into the ground this late might not have a chance to get their roots into the ground before the freeze/thaw cycles begin. The risk is that the plants will get squeezed out of the ground (kind of like toothpaste out of a tube) in one of those cycles, and the roots dry out or become damaged where they are exposed to the cold.

I hope your herb garden provides the flavor and garden experience you are looking for!

(p.s. If this blog post is helpful or at all interesting, please “like” or “share” it so I will know I am on the right track. Thank you!)

Preparing for the First Frost

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The National Weather Service posted a frost advisory for my area (north Georgia) for last Sunday night. One bit of good news is that the frost did not appear. The other bit of good news is that I know how to prepare my garden for the first frost in fall.

Most of that preparation started many weeks ago, but there are always some last minute things to consider. This is what I did to get ready:

I harvested the largest peppers in response to prepare for the first frost..
Pepper harvest before the projected frost.

The evening before the projected frost, I harvested the largest of the remaining peppers. The peppers are the last of my warm-season crops, along with a little basil still standing out there. The cucumbers are already gone from the garden.

That is pretty much all I did, because most plants in my garden are ready for colder weather. The cool-season crops will do just fine in the early freezes of autumn. Some flowers will look terrible after a frost, but that is the way it goes. Some perennials, including a few herbs (thyme, rosemary, for example), will keep green leaves through the winter, and others will die back — turning brown and crunchy — but grow back from their roots in spring. I don’t worry about any of these.

This is a more complete list of some steps I take most years to get ready for the first frost:

Garden checklist to prepare for the first frost

  1. Harvest remaining warm-season crops that are mature enough to either finish ripening indoors or use “as is” in the kitchen.
  2. Check soil moisture. If the soil is dry, water the garden. Roots in moist soil are better-protected from cold than roots in dry soil. (We have had enough rain recently that soil moisture is plentiful.)
  3. If I had frost-tender plants that I wanted to protect (like a still-healthy tomato plant), to keep them growing another few weeks, I would cover them with row-covers or other fabric. Often, the first frost is followed by a stretch of warmer weather that allows warm-season crops to keep producing, if they survived.
  4. If I hadn’t already done this, I would pinch off any flowers  and flower-buds that were on my warm-season crops (tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, etc), to encourage the plants to put their remaining energy into maturing their existing fruits.
  5. Cool-season crops do not usually need protection (like row-covers) for the first frost, so I don’t cover these. An exception would be if the plants were late going into the garden and, as a result, still just seedlings. Another would be when the frost follows a stretch of very warm days (highs in the 70s, for example), which could leave the plants unprepared to withstand a sudden drop into freezing temperatures. In the South, this happens.
Carrots in the garden can withstand the first frost without being covered for protection.
Garden carrots do not need to be covered through the first frost in Autumn.

Where I live, north of Atlanta, the first frost usually shows up around the first of November, which is soon.

When the first freezes finally arrive, it will be time to remove the last of the summer crops. If you are taking a break from gardening this winter (some people who aren’t me do this), be sure to cover the soil with some kind of mulch. Mulch protects the soil, preventing erosion by rain/wind and helping to maintain its fertility.

Ichi Ki Kei Jiro persimmons ripen near the time of the first frost in my yard.
Ichi Ki Kei Jiro persimmons ripen near the time of the first frost in my yard.