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I Joined a Community Garden

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Even though I have a garden in my backyard, I joined a community garden this year. I do not really need the gardening space, but I do need the connection to other gardeners, and to people who share my focus on community food-security (and food-insecurity!).

Joining the nearest community garden is a good way to meet those needs. At the very least, it is a start.

Small "sharing shed" with sign for the 34th street wholistic community garden, and tiered stand holding eight buckets that will each be growing a plant later in the year.

The garden that I joined, the 34th Street Wholistic Garden, is more than six miles away, so it is not super-convenient. However, it is just a couple of miles further than our church, which makes it slightly more convenient. At least one day a week, most weeks, we will be nearer!

I worked with several community gardens in Georgia, helping identify and resolve pest problems and plant diseases, giving classes on various aspects of gardening, doing “walk-throughs” with garden members to help them plan their garden beds, and more.

I didn’t join a community garden then, partly because I loved them all. It would have been too hard to choose one! I had friends at every garden I visited.

Here, I have found only the one community garden, which removes that dilemma. Good thing I already love it, too!

Why join a community garden?

Besides my own reasons for joining a community garden, plenty of other reasons for joining one exist:

  • The gardener has no yard at home to make a garden in (apartment living or other renting), or the yard is not suitable (full of tall trees, for example, or it floods).
  • A gardener who lives alone might join one to be part of the community, to work alongside others. It can be much more fun to garden as part of a group!
  • New gardeners can learn faster as they chat with more experienced gardeners and observe other garden beds.
  • Community gardens can improve the food situation for the larger community, when gardeners grow enough good food to share. The garden that I joined does not have any donation plots, and it does not “give away” food, but I expect to be able to share some food out of my own garden bed.
  • Community gardens can be a less expensive option than starting a garden at home. The garden I joined provides a 4×12 foot bed, edged with sturdy boards, filled (more or less) with planting mix, plus compost, seeds, and water, for the entire year, for $25 and a few hours of volunteer-time. Anyone who has built a raised bed ($!), filled it with planting mix ($!), and bought their own seeds ($!) and compost ($!) will see that joining this particular garden is a bargain.
Book cover of Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening, showing an example garden planted in squares.

The 34th Street Garden mostly follows the Square Foot method

The 34th Street Wholistic Community Garden’s coordinator, Mr. James Franklin, educates the gardeners on the intensive planting method that is described in Mel Bartholomew’s book Square Foot Gardening.

Not every gardener takes to the method, which can be seen by looking at the garden beds, but Mr. Franklin is persistent. He wants the gardeners to all be successful in growing plenty of good food!

He has planted some garden beds as examples, which may help. He planted the example bed in the picture below in the intensive spacing recommended in the Square Foot Gardening book. The bed is marked off with string into square foot sections:

Raised bed, edged with boards, with strings running along and across the bed to divide the space into square foot sections. Each square foot has a plant growing in its center.

It contains mostly plants that can grow successfully when each plant is in a one-foot square, which makes the “square foot” planting arrangement easy for new gardeners to see.

I have a copy of the Square Foot Gardening book (an older edition), but it is not the only book on my shelf that explains how to plant a garden using an intensive spacing method. If you want to increase the productivity of your garden, or find ways to lower costs, look for these next two books at your local library:

Two more good books that explain intensive planting for productive gardens

How to Grow More Vegetables

Green cover of spiral bound book, an older edition of How to Grow More Vegetables, by John Jeavons.

The first book that I read on intensive gardening that seemed most valuable to me was How to Grow More Vegetables, by John Jeavons (my copy is an old edition). I especially appreciate its information on planning to grow all the food crops, including protein and calorie crops, not just salad-type vegetables, and also crops that produce plenty of stem-and-leaf residue to feed the compost pile.

This book presents a lot of information in tables, and there may be more detail than some gardeners want. Also, I have found that adjusting the spacing and planting dates has improved productivity of some of my crops.

However, this book taught me the value of actually writing out my planting plan, by weeks, and of starting little plants in flats, to save growing time during the garden season.

There is no waiting for seeds to come up in the garden if they are all up and waiting in a flat, ready to transplant into a space newly made available after an earlier crop has been removed!

The Joy of Gardening

Cover of book Garden Way's Joy of Gardening, by Dick Raymond, showing Dick Raymond in an abundantly productive vegetable garden.

Another book that contains an unexpectedly large amount of helpful information is The Joy of Gardening, by Dick Raymond. His garden plan does not use raised beds; instead, he uses wide-rows.

In reality, the wide rows are like slightly raised beds that do not have hard sides (no boards or bricks) to hold the dirt. The result is more of an in-the-ground garden, and I have used Raymond-style wide-row beds successfully.

The book has a whole section explaining Raymond’s experiment on growing enough legumes (beans and peas) that he did not need to add nitrogen fertilizers to the garden — for years!

In this time of high fertilizer prices, some gardeners may find that reading this section is a good use of time.

Raymond’s advice on weed-control is also spot-on. This is the book that convinced me to use more cover crops, and taught me how to use my hoe more effectively, and the effort has been worthwhile.

Understanding how intensive planting can help create a more productive garden is only one part of gardening that community gardeners might want to consider.

Since many community gardeners are like me, and are not visiting their garden bed every day, understanding the cycle of plant growth and harvest for different crops is also helpful.

Planning a garden bed that doesn’t need me every day

Gardeners who are able to easily visit their community garden bed nearly every day will have more options for crops than people like me, who plan to visit and tend the garden only 2-3 times each week.

Most crops can grow and produce food without daily attention, but some crops, when they start making food, need to be harvested every day.

Green beans and okra are two crops that spring to mind right away, that need frequent harvesting once they start making food. Green beans and okra pods both become less tender as they mature, and they can grow past their ideal harvest size overnight.

I have made a short list of summer crops that do not need such frequent harvesting, to plant in my community garden bed:

  • Potatoes — I have already planted seed potatoes in my community garden bed (and in the garden at home). These just need “hilling up” for a few weeks as the tops grow; then, they get harvested all at once when the tops die down. This is definitely a low-maintenance crop.
  • Peppers — Peppers can stay on the plant for a long time without rotting. They can be picked in the “green” stage, or left to mature to full ripeness, which can take weeks. These are a great choice for a garden bed that won’t be visited every day in summer.
  • Peanuts — The care for peanuts is similar to the care for potatoes. They need some “hilling up” as they grow; then they are harvested all at once when the plants begin to die back. Peanuts are a hot-weather crop. I plan to plant these after another crop (either potatoes or zucchini) are removed from the garden.
  • Sweet potatoes — The vines need to be trained up a trellis or around other crops, but these grow in the hot summer, to be harvested all at once in fall.

Other crops need harvesting at least a couple of days each week. Two that I am planting this month are zucchini and tomatoes.

Zucchini may be best when each little squash is only 6-7 inches long, but larger squashes are still good, and enormous ones can be grated to make fritters, zucchini bread, or mock-apple pie. This feature, of veggies that can be eaten at many stages of maturity, makes them a good choice for a garden that will not get daily visits.

Tomatoes have the most amazing flavor when picked fully ripe, but they can be picked before then, when just a bit blushed with their mature color; they will still be delicious when compared to grocery-store tomatoes. Some years, gardeners need to harvest tomatoes early anyway, because fully ripe tomatoes get snacked on by birds and small animals.

Some of the plants I've grown from seed, summer crops of tomato, pepper, and eggplant, that will be set out into my garden when the weather is warm enough. These were brought inside for the night, when it is cool, and set back out on the sunny back deck in the warmer daytime.
In the photo: seedlings of tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants that I started last month, waiting to be moved outdoors for the day.

Some of the easiest crops are for cool season growing

  • Many root/bulb crops that are not potatoes — beets, carrots, parsnips, onions, and other root crops also do not have to be harvested daily, but most of these are winter crops for me. Their best growing temperatures are almost gone. Here in the “deeper South”, March is the transition month, when we begin planting warm-season crops (like tomatoes, peppers, and squashes). I have a small area of beets and radishes in my community garden bed right now, but I will plant most of these cool-season root crops in the fall.
  • Most greens — lettuces, kale, collards, escarole and other chicories, for example, are another category of plants that don’t have the need for daily harvest. However, like most of the root crops, most of our commonly planted garden greens do best when grown in cooler weather. On the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the time for growing these is almost past. Their next planting “window” is in the fall.

Planning my plant spacing

The picture below is of the planting “map” for the first planting of my community garden bed. Each little square represents one square foot of space in the bed.

You can see that I make all kinds of notes on the same page as the map. These notes in my Garden Planner and Journal help me plan things like how many plants I will need.

The warm-season crops, the zucchini, peppers, and tomatoes, are not yet planted, but the map reminds me where they are going to go. The potatoes, beets, radishes, lettuce, and endive are all up and growing.

A few herbs are planted at the north end — fennel, borage, and milk thistle.

If you haven’t mapped out your garden beds on paper, this is your reminder that doing so can be very helpful! Knowing that you only need four tomato plants and three pepper plants, for example, can keep you from “over-buying” at the garden center.

I start a lot of my own plants from seeds, and I grow a few more than I think I will need, in case of any post-planting disaster (a late freeze, cutworms, torrential downpour that smashes the little plants…). If all of my plants survive the first couple of weeks outside, any remaining plants will be given to other gardeners.

More to read…

If you are still trying to decide which tomato plants to buy for your garden, consider reading my article Difference between determinate and indeterminate tomatoes to help make good choices for your garden. The article includes short lists of recommended varieties (of each kind) for the Southeastern US.

To learn more about planting the spring garden more generally, consider reading these articles:

Planting dates for summer garden vegetables, Thinking about soil (an article from when I lived in North Georgia with clay soil), and Learning from a soil test.

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In My February Garden

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In my February garden, down here on the Gulf Coast, we have been harvesting plenty of greens and carrots, along with some radishes and cilantro, but I can see that the end of my winter garden is near.

With that change of garden-season in mind, I am getting set for more planting.

Harvesting in February

We have been fortunate in having a mostly-mild winter; our garden has provided good food for our kitchen without interruption.

The greens in the picture below are recently harvested collards, kale, and a sugarloaf chicory:

Carrot crop

Bunch of red and orange carrots harvested from my garden.

The carrot crop has been excellent this year, in both productivity and flavor. In north Georgia, I only managed “excellent carrots” a few times.

I brought in the last of the carrots yesterday, a large mixing-bowl full, even though many were still fairly small.

In our recent warm weather, some of the carrots have started making new, tiny, bright green leaves.

When that new, spring growth happens in fall-planted carrots, the deliciousness gets sucked out of the roots; the sugars get used up in making the new leaves.

Since I prefer delicious carrots, the veggie drawer in our fridge is now overloaded with carrots.

Collard greens crop

We have been eating greens from the garden every week for a few months now, and one green that we grew is collards.

I have never liked collard greens before (Joe has always liked them), but the flavor of this year’s crop is unusually mild. Surprisingly, I have enjoyed eating these collards!

I don’t know if the mild flavor is due to the soil here, or if it is a feature of the variety that I planted: ‘Top Bunch’ Collards.

Next year, I plan to grow this same variety again, plus another, to compare flavor.

One of the other things I like about this year’s collard greens is that the leaves keep a firmer texture than many cooked greens. They don’t end up, after cooking, as a mass of dark green slime.

Kale crop

The kale also has done well. We eat these curly-edged leaves raw (chopped finely for salads) and cooked.

As the weather has warmed, the flavor hasn’t changed, but the texture is more coarse; the leaves are tougher. They are no longer as good in salads.

However, they are still fine for cooking. One way we have found to prepare them, that is especially good, is to chop a big pile into our biggest cast iron skillet with plenty of olive oil and chopped garlic, then, after the kale is the level of “cooked” we want, we mix in cooked pasta.

Proportions of pasta-to-kale vary, depending on what else is for dinner. If this is our main veg, then it is kale-heavy. If this is the “bread” part of the meal, and there is another veg on the plate, then it leans more toward pasta.

Either way, at the end, we add either some grated parmesan cheese before serving, or sprinkle on some big salt (like a coarse sea salt).

Other greens

The fall-winter-early spring garden is packed with many kinds of greens, not just collards and kale.

There is a patch of arugula, and a newer mixed patch of arugula and a small-growing endive. We also have a few kinds of chicories, including sugarloaf chicory and an endive that is still not bitter.


We are growing these other greens for eating raw, in salads. I have tried to grow lettuce here but have not yet had success in that endeavor. Maybe next year…

Getting set for more planting

Here on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, it will be warm enough to plant summer crops in a few weeks. By “warm enough”, I mean that nighttime temperatures will be consistently up in the 50s.

In my February garden, there are “things to do” to get ready for spring. The two main things, for getting ready for spring, are these:

  • first is making room by clearing out winter crops and amending the soil,
  • second is starting some plants in containers, to plant out in the garden when the weather is warm enough.

First: making room in the garden

Space in the garden to plant summer veggies in is already showing up. There were winter radishes (harvested and eaten), other radishes, and the carrots that I pulled. The cilantro is sending up flowering stalks, so that crop will be pulled in a few weeks.

Some of the chicories are heading-types; harvesting the heads of greens creates more open space in the garden.

And when I need the space still taken by collards and kale, there will be a big day of blanching-and-freezing greens, so that we can enjoy eating the last of those greens while we wait for the next crops to come in.

Amending the soil is another step in “making room”. Spreading on more compost and adding other amendments such as organic fertilizers are part of getting the garden space ready for the next crop.

We have already started adding compost to some parts of the garden.

Second: starting seeds in containers

I have started several kinds of seeds, in pots and in a flat, for planting later.

The seedlings below are all cold-sensitive crops, including tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. This tray spent most of its first couple of weeks indoors, under lights, but now, on warm days, I move it outside, in a part-shade spot on the deck. The time spent outside will help toughen up the seedlings as they are exposed to wind and stronger light.

The seedlings in the wooden flat below include flowers and herbs that tolerate cooler weather. This flat has been mostly outdoors, except when there has been rain. I don’t want the little plants smashed by big raindrops!

Yesterday, actually, I gambled by planting seeds outside, in the garden, for bush beans and pole beans. These are “summer crops” that can withstand cooler weather than tomatoes/peppers/eggplants.

If the weather turns cold and the bean plants do not survive, that will be ok. I have plenty more bean seeds to replant the space with, if needed.

I am looking forward to another gardening season, to the change in crops, and to learning more about growing good food in my new yard.

Hoping your gardening is going well!

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Planning to Save Seeds from the Garden

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If you, like me, are planning to save seeds from the garden this year, you might also (like me) be wondering how many plants for each crop it will take, to get good seeds.

I have done some seed-saving before. Most of what I know is from a really great book about seed saving, Seed to Seed, by Suzanne Ashworth, that provides excellent and helpful information. Some of the information it contains, for a wide range of crops, includes

  • how long seeds can be stored
  • some regional growing information
  • how/when to harvest crops for seeds
  • pollination details
  • how far apart different varieties of one crop should be kept, to keep from “crossing”

The book also includes, for some crops but not all, how many plants should be grown to get good seeds. The difficult part here is the “but not all”.

I have done some checking around, in various sources both online and in libraries, to find solid recommendations for how many plants should be grown for the crops I want to save seeds from.

This is what I found:

Different resources recommend different numbers of plants for seed saving for each crop.

As an example, for okra, I have seen that one (1) is the minimum number of plants to grow for seed saving. Another source suggested that 6 is a minimum number, and still another suggested that 10-20 is the recommended number.

That seems like a pretty big range, and for gardeners working with small spaces, the difference in space taken up by one okra plant versus twenty plants can be critical. Which number is right?

How many plants should I grow for seed saving?

Most sources do not explain exactly how the minimum number is chosen, but I found a source that offers options, and a “why” for each option: the book The Seed Garden: The Art and Practice of Seed Saving, edited by Lee Buttala and Shanyn Siegel.

The book offers three categories for how many plants of each crop to grow for seed-saving. These are the categories:

  • Number of plants to grow for viable seeds
  • Number of plants to grow for variety maintenance
  • Number of plants to grow for genetic preservation

For example, cowpeas (AKA Southern peas, such as black-eyed peas) are primarily self-pollinating; each one flower contains everything it needs to make one pod of peas. The planting suggestions for seed-saving are these:

  • For viable seeds: one (1) plant
  • To maintain the variety: 10-25 plants
  • For genetic preservation: 50 plants

This is where I need to tell you that I have not read the whole book. I found this information in a huge excerpt of the text online. This means that I do not have full explanation of the three categories. However, until the book arrives in my mailbox, I am going to hazard a guess, since they seem pretty self-explanatory.

The lowest number “for viable seeds”, which is just one plant in the case of some self-pollinating plants like cowpeas, may be geared toward seed-savers who are mostly focused on saving money through not buying seeds as often. When seeds are saved from just one plant, the odds of losing useful genetic diversity are higher than if seeds are saved from more plants. Eventually, the crop could lose vigor.

Evidence of this loss, such as in less robust plants or lower productivity or less delicious veggies, could take a few years to be seen, or it could take a lot of years.

Eventually, the seed-saver would need to buy another packet of seeds to start again. In the meantime, however, the gardener has not had to buy seeds for this particular crop.

This strategy has the benefit of saving money, but it also gives the seed-saver more room for other crops in a small garden.

Two gardeners, two strategies: growing okra for seed

The planting recommendations in the book, The Seed Garden: The Art and Practice of Seed Saving, for okra are similar to those for cowpeas. Okra is another crop that is mostly self-pollinating.

Dried okra pod, marked by twine tied at the base, left to mature on the plant for seed-saving.
Okra pod marked for seed saving in my garden.

My Louisiana sister, two years ago, grew one okra plant in her small garden; she saved seeds from one pod of that plant. There are enough seeds in one okra pod that she doesn’t need to buy seeds, or save seeds from another pod, for a few years. This is garden-economy in action!

My okra goals are different. For starters, my family eats a lot more okra than one plant will provide. Also, I have a variety that I hope to maintain, which means that I need to grow more plants if I am planning to save seeds from the garden.

The larger number of plants would be a problem if they had to be grown every year; they take up so much space! However, okra seeds can stay “good” for 3-4 years, if stored properly. This means that I do not need to grow the larger number of plants (~25) every year.

The long life of okra seeds means that I can skip growing the larger number of okra plants for at least two years, and, in those years, I can use the space to grow and save seeds from other crops.

Also, since I will have saved a LOT of seeds in that one big year, I will have plenty of okra seeds to share with other gardeners.

How many plants to grow for other crops?

I pulled some of the planting recommendations from the book The Seed Garden, to make the table shown below. The table includes the crop name and three planting recommendations, for how many plants to grow, for a short list of common garden crops, for the three different seed-saving goals.

The book includes information for MANY more crops. If a crop you are interested in saving seeds for isn’t in the table above, you may, like me, need to buy a copy of the book.

How much space will this take in my garden?

Our garden crop plants come in a wide range of sizes, and some will make mature seeds faster than others.

You can see that the recommendation for genetic preservation for arugula is 80 or more plants. That sounds pretty daunting, but arugula plants are small.

I can easily grow 80 or more plants in a 3×3 foot block of garden space. Arugula leaves can be harvested through the winter, to add to salads, then the same plants will produce flowers, then seeds, as the weather warms in spring.

For me, arugula is a crop worth saving seeds for, using the recommendation for “genetic preservation”, and there is enough room in my garden to manage it every year.

For most crops, though, I will only be able to manage growing enough plants for the other two categories, variety maintenance and seed viability.

Are you planning to save seeds from the garden this year? Which planting strategy will you use?

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Gardening to Save Money

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Not all gardeners have the goal of gardening to save money. Some, for example, are gardening for the amazing flavors of freshly-picked, naturally-ripened produce, and some are gardening because they just love plants.

Right now in my life, saving money through growing food is not my biggest reason for gardening, but it does get factored-in as I plan the garden. When the kids were small, and our income was low, saving money was a much more major motivation.

Carrots growing in the garden, intensively spaced to form a patch, instead of rows.

Other people are experiencing a similar motivation to start gardening now, as the pandemic and its associated weirdness result in job losses and tight family finances.

For ideas on reducing the cost of starting a garden, see the article How Much Does it Cost to Start a Garden?

There are no hard-and-fast rules for saving money through gardening, because every one of us is in different circumstances, with differing access to resources, but the ideas that follow may be helpful.

In addition to considering strategies for starting a garden with the smallest cash-outlay possible, by planning ahead (for example, start your compost pile now!) — see that link above for details — our crop choices can also influence the money-saving value of gardening.

How can gardening save us money?

One way my garden continues to save my family money is that it keeps us from making last-minute trips to the grocery store when we are short on recipe ingredients or meal ideas.

Often, there is something in the garden that inspires a meal, when we can’t identify any good options in the pantry or fridge. Of course, it helps if the crops in the garden are the kinds that can form the base of a meal.

Also, fewer trips to the store means fewer “impulse buys”. That is another way a garden helps keep food costs down.

A side benefit has been that, early in the pandemic, when we were all locked-down and limiting our trips out of the house, having a garden meant that we could go two or three weeks between grocery shopping expeditions. Fresh produce was out in the yard.

Several strategies for choosing garden crops exist. The strategies described below are mix-and-match ideas; they can be combined as you consider your own family’s food and money needs.

Crop strategy 1: Filling Plates

My personal experience has been that gardening saves my family the most money when what we harvest can be a major component of our meals. An example of a nearly-all-from-the-garden summertime supper is mashed potatoes, ears of sweet corn, black-eyed peas, and tomato-cucumber salad.

I am not a nutritionist, which you should maybe keep in mind when considering my choices, but for good health, filling meals, and money-saving, I usually grow some of these:

  • Root crops – potatoes, sweet potatoes. These root crops are (almost always) productive, filling and nutritious; also, they taste good. Parsnips belong in this category, too, but I do not yet know if they will grow in my new yard — on a wet sand dune in zone 9a.
  • Legumes – Southern peas, dried-type beans. These can provide the major protein component when a meal is mostly from the garden. Soybeans would probably give the most protein, but they are not my favorite.
  • Nutrient-rich veggies – collard greens, kale, mustard greens, parsley, turnip leaf (and root). Dark green veggies provide loads of vitamins and minerals that keep us healthy. I don’t actually like turnips, but I grow a few each year, thinking that someday I will.

Other people might argue that the above-listed crops are not expensive to buy. For example, when we lived on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, we could buy a 50-pound bag of potatoes for just a few dollars.

That kind of purchase may still be possible in some parts of the country. I never saw that option in Georgia, but I could grow 20 or so pounds of potatoes, in my organic garden, each spring in just eight or nine square feet of garden space.

Sweet potatoes did better, usually producing more than 30 pounds in that same amount of space. The vines tended to take up a lot more room than that, but they could be re-directed when they flowed “out of bounds”.

Kale and other greens can make major contributions to meals. Think, for example, of creamed greens on toast.

Crop strategy 2: High-end Veg

Another point of view might say that a better strategy in gardening to save money would be to grow the priciest crops, the ones that we spend the most money on per serving. These may not be plate-filling, but they can augment meals that are assembled from low-cost ingredients.

Cilantro plants in the garden. We eat a lot of cilantro.

These might include the crops asparagus, artichokes, and radicchio. Culinary herbs might also fit in this category. Little packs of fresh herbs in the grocery store tend to be pricey.

If your family uses a lot of an herb that is easy to grow, adding it to your garden could be helpful. We use a lot of cilantro, so I plant some every fall.

See my related article Some Garden Economics for a look at economic value of garden crops.

Consider how often your family relies on costlier crops and how much space they might take in the garden as you make your choices.

Crop strategy 3: Snacks

Growing some of your own snacks can save money if these replace purchased snacks, like potato chips. These options are probably better for our health, too.

My Joe thinks radishes, sliced thin and salted, are an awesome snack, but other people may not agree.

Popcorn –In our north-Georgia garden, a patch of about 15 plants used to provide enough popcorn for nearly a whole year of “movie nights” when our kids were still at home. Back then, the only source of organically-grown popcorn was our yard. It wasn’t available in grocery stores yet.

Peanuts –Peanuts are fun to grow and good to eat, for those of us who are not allergic to them. They are easy to roast on an iron skillet, and they make a high-protein snack. In addition, growing them can boost the nitrogen level in your garden soil.

Crop strategy 4: Fruits

Gardeners who eat two or three servings of fruit daily can save quite a bit of money by growing some fruit in the yard. Since we moved, the fruit portion of my grocery bill has been higher than I prefer. There is a plan in motion to fix that.

We have planted several fruit trees and a couple of muscadine vines in our new yard. These should produce plenty of fruit, in the coming years, to bring that cost back down. We are already harvesting kumquats from the yard.

Back in north Georgia there was a glorious stretch of about ten years when our blueberry bushes and native plum trees, along with foraged blackberries from a nearby city park, provided most of our fruit (for four people) for most of the summer. In addition, the plants provided a surplus that allowed for making jam and for storing some fruit in the freezer to eat in winter.

If your family eats a lot of fruit, consider planting some of the easier-to-grow fruits. The list will vary, depending on where you live, but most of us can grow some kind of tree-fruit, bush-fruit, or bramble-fruit.

Crop strategy 5: Focus on Productivity

Some crops produce lot more food per plant, and per square foot of garden space, than others. For example, one tomato plant can produce multiple fruits, making many, many pounds of tomatoes.

On the opposite extreme, one onion set will produce one, larger, onion, at harvest time. The up-side for onions is that individual onion sets can be spaced 5-6 inches apart, allowing a gardener to plant 16-20 onions in a space that is just two-square-feet, when a garden uses intensive spacing instead of rows.

Some crops can keep producing for an ongoing harvest. These crops can include green beans, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, collards, and more.

Each family’s needs, and what is available inexpensively at nearby stores, can influence the crop choices each gardener makes.

Choosing organic

I prefer to feed myself and my family food that was grown using organic methods, as much as possible. However, we moved to an area where local stores have extremely limited organic produce selections.

Most weeks, we can find organically grown carrots and salad greens — but not always — and usually there are organically grown fuji or gala apples. About half the time I can find organically grown bananas.

There is more, but the variety is not great, and it is all inconsistent. Organically grown cabbages are especially hard to locate. The nearest source seems to be New Orleans.

Much of the organic produce available nearby is heavily wrapped in plastic; much of it costs considerably more than chemically-grown produce.

So, for me, growing as large a variety of crops as I can manage is a big money-saver, since I grow it using organic methods. In addition, “growing our own” decreases the amount of plastic we bring home from the store. There is no shrink-wrap on our garden veggies!

Why am I thinking about this now?

One part of gardening to save money is keeping expenses down. However, it is that seed-buying time of year. Money will be spent.

Websites of seed companies indicate that they are mostly ready to start taking orders for the 2022 garden year.

Seed catalogs may be later to arrive this year than last year, but it is not too soon to start planning what we need for the upcoming garden seasons.

Saving on seeds, and more

We have a few options to keep our seed-buying expenses down.

Create a seed list or inventory

I completed a “seed inventory” to see what seeds I have left from the last couple of years of gardening. Then, I made a list of seeds-to-buy, based on gaps in my inventory, and cross-checked with the “gardening goals” that I established last spring.

Not-buying seeds I don’t need, by knowing exactly what I still have and what my garden-goals are, is a great way to save money.

I did not make a complete inventory last year, and this resulted in my buying seeds for a couple of crops that I had plenty of seeds for already, leftover from the previous year. Having too many of those seeds may mean that some are wasted, if I do not end up planting them all before they get too old to grow.

I have already sent in a couple of seed orders, and my first order for 2022, to Baker Creek Rare Seeds, has already been delivered in the mail! The mailer that my seeds came in is beautiful.

Split seed purchases with another gardener

Most seed packets contain more than enough seeds for two or more home gardeners to share. If you pool resources and share the seeds with one or more other gardeners, your individual costs will be lower.

In the past, I have done this with a gardening friend, and we both found it helpful in keeping costs down.

Consult your local Cooperative Extension office

Most Cooperative Extension offices — and these are in every state — put together lists of crop varieties that are known to do well for home gardeners in their area. If you are new to gardening, these lists are an essential resource for identifying seed varieties that will grow and make productive plants.

Using crop varieties that actually work will be a big money-saver! New gardeners, especially, may not realize that some varieties produce more reliably in some parts of the country than in others.

The varieties listed by local Extension offices will include some hybrid crops. There will also be old tried-and-true non-hybrid varieties, the ones local farmers have relied on for decades.

For gardeners who want to avoid growing hybrid crops (because some gardeners do), the inclusion of these older varieties is especially helpful.

Local Extension offices can also provide suggested planting dates for your crops, to help you know when to plant your seeds at the right time of year for best success.

Get your soil tested

If I hadn’t sent a sample of my new yard’s soil off to the state testing lab, I would not have known that there was very little potassium in it, and that it is overloaded with phosphorus.

I would have wasted money on the wrong fertilizer, and my garden would have been less productive.

Your local Cooperative Extension office can provide information about sending a soil sample to the state testing lab.

Ready to garden?

I love this garden-planning time of year. It helps that I already have a goals list and seeds list made. In the last week of December, I will start filling out my garden calendar, to help me keep on track. Hopefully, other gardeners are also getting their planning in gear. For those of us in the South, spring planting starts surprisingly soon.

Best wishes for a great gardening year!

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Keeping a Garden Journal or Notebook

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People who want to become better gardeners will find that keeping a garden journal or notebook is helpful in reaching that goal.

Naturalists, biologists, ecologists, and others who work in the world outdoors have traditionally written their observations in field notebooks and lab notebooks, because the effort pays off. Writing down their observations helps these people to focus more purposefully on what they are seeing.

The same idea works for gardeners.

Writing down what you see, what you plant, when you plant it, how plants respond to a particular fertilizer or compost or flood/drought situation, and more, helps us become better gardeners.

Recording our observations in a garden journal or notebook provides some clarity. It helps us truly see which activity or amendment or crop variety might promote more successes.

Our gardens become more productive as we learn from our successes and not-so-successes.

Does it have to be an actual notebook?

A gardener should choose the type of notebook or system that will be easiest to use. If an app or computer program seems easiest, then that may be your best choice.

However, actual writing and drawing on actual paper can be more helpful to learning about your garden than typing into a program, spreadsheet, or app.

Studies have shown that, for putting information into your longterm memory, hand-written notes are more effective than typed notes. (See this pdf document by Mueller and Oppenheimer, as an example.)

The advantage seems to be that, for many people, putting observations into their own words improves the ability to remember and to incorporate those observations into a larger mental framework or image.

The physical act of writing, itself, also adds an element of body-memory that may be missing in typed information.

What kind of journal or notebook is best?

In my earlier gardening years, I kept garden notes somewhat randomly. Some garden notes were in plain spiral notebooks; others were variously on loose graph paper and notebook paper or calendars.

Two copies of the Garden Planner and Notebook, stacked, showing that the copy used in 2021 has the year hand-written on the front.

I still have most of these notes, and they did improve over time, but the inconsistent and scattered nature of the notes makes it harder to locate any exact bit of information that I might be trying to find. In the past several years, I have become more deliberate about keeping my garden journal.

A guided garden journal and notebook

Now, I write my garden notes in the Garden Planner and Notebook that I designed and published with new gardens in mind. The introductory information in each section reminds me to consider things like companion planting, cover crops, crop rotations and more as I work in my new garden.

In my old garden, I did not need these reminders. I knew how my old garden worked, what to plant, when to plant it, and where in the garden it should go. A simple calendar or blank book was all I needed for keeping a garden journal or notebook.

Now, I am happy that I had the foresight to know that I would need all of these reminders as I moved to a new garden, new climate zone, new soil. If such reminders would help you, a journal like the one I designed might be a good choice.

A blank book

Cover of my Gulf Coast Herbal for 2021-22, showing hand-written title and contents information.

Another type of notebook that I like to use is a blank book. This year, one of the garden goals that I had listed in my Garden Planner and Notebook was to learn more about herbs. Specifically, I have a goal to learn more about herbal medicine.

I set up a blank book to be a “Gulf Coast Herbal for 2021-22” with sections for the eight herbs that I planned to focus on first. All eight seemed to be safe for beginners to work with.

Only one of the eight does not show up routinely on edible-plants lists.

Because this garden notebook has a specific additional purpose, beyond garden success, it is arranged a bit differently than my main garden notebook.

I set up each herb section to include traditional uses, HOW to use them, growing information, some additional (modern/recent) research on the mode-of-action for each herb, potential hazards, and any recipes or treatments that I tried, along with results of those treatments. Essentially, I am my own guinea pig for trying these out.

I have learned a lot! This Herbal is just the first volume in what I expect to be, eventually, several booklets of information about the medicinal uses of herbs that I am growing in my Gulf Coast garden.

The blank book that I chose for this garden project is a Moleskine brand booklet that has lined pages. It comes in a 3-pack. The books are a good size, 5″ x 8.25″, and short enough (not too many pages) that they are easy to organize and fill.

Handwritten page from my Gulf Coast Herbal, about Anise Hyssop

Some blank books I have seen are so beautiful and have so many pages that they can be a little bit intimidating. I like the plain booklet style of the saddle-stitched Moleskine. I can write and draw in it without worrying about ruining a beautiful hardcover book.

Also, the blank cover gives me a lot of freedom in setting out the purpose for each booklet.

It would not be difficult to set up a small blank book like this lined Moleskine booklet as a garden journal or notebook for the coming year.

What should I write in a garden journal or notebook?

Any notes you take should be useful to you. The kinds of information that I find useful to write in a garden journal or notebook include these:

  • Planting dates, both for starting seeds in pots and for planting them in the garden
  • Plant variety names (not just Collards, but ‘Georgia’ Collards, for example) for my crops
  • What I noticed about the crop (size, productivity, flavor, pest problems, and more)
  • Basic map or diagram of where things are planted in the garden – this needs to be remade two or three or four times each year as old crops come out and new crops go in, to help work out crop rotations
  • Results of a soil test, if I had the soil tested that year
  • How I used those soil test results in choosing and using fertilizer/nutrient-sources for the garden
  • Pests that show up, which plants they are on, the damage they are causing, and what date I first saw them
  • Methods of dealing with the pests, and notes about what works (and what doesn’t)
  • Notes about the success (or not) of any companion planting that I have tried
  • Notes about pollinators and other beneficial insects that I see
  • Notes about the weather, especially the big events that can cause damage (such as floods and frosts)
  • Notes about major goals for the garden and the progress made (or not) in achieving them
Page from the Garden Planner and Notebook that includes a chart for recording fertilizer information, including soil test results and which fertilizers are used.

However, I have been gardening for a few decades. Also, in the past year and a half I have been working to “speed learn” how my new yard works. This all influences the amount and kinds of information that I write down. Your choices of observations and information to record may be different from mine.

This, though, is a thing I know for sure: As I observe my garden each day, keeping my goals in mind and thinking about the underlying meanings of my observations (what they tell me about the garden) speeds up my learning.

Do garden notes have to be in whole sentences?

Calendar page showing list, in the right-side margin, of seeds planted in a flat on 1 Sept.

One of the best parts of keeping a garden journal or notebook is that it is all yours. If you are a whole-sentence, narrative kind of person, then writing out whole sentences might be your choice. However, it is not the only option.

Lists, like a list of “what I planted today” or “places I ordered seeds from this year” are also great ways to record information.

Drawings and diagrams are also good tools for recording some kinds of information. I draw my garden beds whenever I replant, and record, either in the drawn shape or outside the shape with arrows pointing inside, where each crop is planted.

Sometimes, I include a note about what should be planted in that spot next.

Using the Garden Planner and Notebook

Most of the options in the “what to write” list that is earlier in this article also are given space and explanation in the Garden Planner and Notebook. This makes it easy to use!

Read the sections, then add the information and observations that you want to track in the spaces provided. If you don’t want to fill out every section, then don’t.

Some of the options in the “what to write” list shown earlier, like my goals, I have written in the lined pages that are included as a section called “Notes, ruminations, and inspirations”.

Also on those pages I have written notes about the upcoming fertilizer shortage – so many countries have reduced both fertilizer production and exports! Other notes compare crop varieties; how I managed the 3×3 patches of arugula in spring; and estimates by various researchers of how much space is needed to grow enough food for one person, or (in different research) the entire UK.

Other gardeners might use those lined pages for inspirational quotations, historical information about particular plant varieties, or other bits of garden lore.

I already ordered a new copy of the Garden Planner and Notebook to use next year. One thing I didn’t think about when designing the book was that, at some point, there will be a whole row of these identical Planners on my shelf. Finding which one is for the current year could become a bit complicated.

To help me identify the correct copy, I have written the current gardening year in permanent ink (using a “Sharpie”) on the front cover of each one.

Also, 2021 has a couple of stickers on the front. These are more instantly obvious than the hand-written year.

I have different stickers ready to apply to the 2022 Garden Planner and Notebook when it arrives.

I hope that all your gardens are growing well!

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From Summer to Fall in the Garden

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Fall weather in my garden on the Mississippi Gulf Coast starts about a month later than it did in my old garden Northwest of Atlanta. The first frost here should be closer to December 1 than to November 1, which means that my garden has not been completely changed over to all-fall crops. What is left of my summer crops — the ones that haven’t drowned in this year’s overly abundant rain — is still producing, but not spectacularly.

Pile of red okra pods and red roselle pods on a blue-bordered tray.

Mostly, right now, my harvests are red — red okra and red roselle. These are both in the mallow/hibiscus family of plants, and they both can produce decent harvests in drought and in flood. There have been several occasions this year when the two roselle plants were standing in a few inches of water, for several days in a row, and they kept on growing.

I’ve harvested enough roselle pods to put two cups of chopped up red seed-pod-coverings (aka: calyxes, the part of the pod we eat) into the freezer for use later in a mock-cranberry sauce. More of the red calyxes are drying in a shallow basket, to use in tea this winter.

Transition from summer to fall

Summertime’s pepper plants, eggplants, a couple of tomato plants, and the wild expanse of sweet potato vines are still taking up space in the garden, but most of the space has been refreshed and replanted with cool-season crops.

One of the first spaces that could be replanted was the area that had been in black-eyed peas. We ended up with a full quart of those summer peas from the 3×6 foot space where they had been growing.

  • This year’s black-eyed pea harvest
  • This year’s odd crop was bitter melon
  • Sprawling sweet potato vines
  • The roselle is at one end of the clothesline.

Cool-season crops that I have planted so far include several kinds of chicories (radicchio, escarole, sugar-loaf chicory, and a “wild garden chicory”), lettuce, kale, arugula, collards, beets, many kinds of radishes, carrots, and cilantro.

  • Castelfranco radicchio
  • Winterbor kale
  • One garden bed of greens

I started many of the greens in a wooden flat that my Joe made out of old fence boards. Little rows of each kind of seed were marked with a cut-in-half wide craft stick (aka: popsicle stick). The soil is actually a layer of potting mix under a layer of seed-starting mix.

  • Box of seedlings at about 3 weeks
  • Same box of seedlings after planting some in the garden

I have some other crops to plant after removing/harvesting the last of the okra, sweet potatoes, and other summer crops. There is a new lettuce to transplant into the garden, and we will want more arugula.

The one 3×3 foot patch of arugula already coming up will not be enough. I plan to plant another 3×3 patch of arugula when there is room. Seeds for the patches of arugula get strewn right into the garden, not started in a flat. Also, I will be planting more carrots and, of course, more radishes. Those also get planted straight into the garden as seeds, but not so wildly strewn as the arugula.

Some minor troubles with cool-season crops

Although the fall-and-winter garden is the easiest and most trouble-free, some problems can arise. To start, there are weeds. They are just different weeds than were growing in the summer garden. More annoying, though, are the pests.

  • Slugs and Snails – We have had a tremendous amount of rain this year, more than 90 inches so far, which makes the slug and snail problem totally understandable. I sprinkled out the usual recommended (surprisingly small!) amount of Sluggo, an organic-approved slug and snail bait that is pet-safe and wildlife-safe, which ended the problem.
  • Caterpillars – These have attacked my beets. Last year, caterpillars destroyed my Swiss Chard, which is just a different variety of the exact same species of plant as beets. I was more alert to potential trouble this year, and I have been using my organic-approved caterpillar spray, Thuricide, between rains. Maybe this year I will get some beets and the beet greens that taste a lot like Swiss Chard. The kale has also had a few caterpillars, but not such an enthusiastic abundance as on the beets.
  • Small mammals – I am guessing that the animal munching on the lettuces is a rabbit, but it could be some other small animal. An animal ate last year’s lettuce, too. I will be covering the lettuce patch later today with some row-cover fabric similar to this one at Amazon.com (mine is so old that I do not remember the brand). The cover does make it harder for animals to reach the plants. Some good news is that the lettuce-eater is not munching on any of the other greens, so I do not need to cover the whole garden.

Something for the pollinators

Small flower-fly approaching a cluster of purple-blue ageratum flowers from the left.

I collected a couple of seed-heads from a wild Ageratum last fall, from a plant on the side of the road. I planted a few of the seeds in spring, to make sure that the yard would have some flowers this fall. Right now, the mass of purple-blue flowers is being visited by several kinds of butterflies, including Monarchs, some flower-flies like the one approaching the flower cluster above, from the left, some honey bees, small native bees, and a couple kinds of larger native bumblebees. It is pretty glorious. I am feeling lucky that this plan worked out so well.

I hope that things are working out well in your gardens, too!

(Reminder: This site includes some affiliate ad links to products — through Amazon Affiliates, for example — which, if anyone buys them, could provide a little income to support the continuance of Small Garden News.)

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Consider Plant Families When Choosing Fruit Trees and Shrubs

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Fall is the best time to plant many kinds of fruit trees and shrubs. Choosing which fruit will be best for our yards is mostly an enjoyable process. We often choose our home garden fruits using criteria like these:

  • Which fruits we like the to eat
  • Fruit that a neighbor or friend is growing successfully
  • A new variety that sounds amazing/awesome in catalog descriptions
  • An unusual fruit that no one else you know is growing
  • A fruit that you like but cannot seem to find in stores or markets

Then we move on to the more nit-picky criteria, like these:

  • Compatibility with our growing zone (USDA hardiness zone) and soil type (don’t know your hardiness zone? Check the map at this link.)
  • Size at maturity of the plant (is there enough room for the full-size plant)
  • Sun or shade requirements (does our yard have enough sunlight vs. too much shade)
  • Work required to maintain a healthy plant (extensive pruning, pest control)
  • Whether two varieties are needed for the plant to make fruit (adequate space in the yard)

I have read some garden experts recommend, though, that home gardeners also consider plant families when choosing which fruits to grow, especially if there already are several fruit trees, shrubs, or vines growing in the yard.

What are plant families, and why are they important?

The Science Education Resource Center (SERC) at Carlton College (Northfield, MN) describes plant families this way:

Plants that have similar flowers, reproductive structures, other characteristics, and are evolutionarily related, are grouped into plant families. Species in the same plant family tend to have similar growth characteristics, nutrient needs, and often the same pests (pathogens, herbivores).

InTeGrate, Interdisciplinary Teaching about Earth for a Sustainable Future, Plant Families module

That last bit about similar nutrient needs and shared pests is why most vegetable gardeners rotate crops from different plant families to different spots in their vegetable gardens each year. Moving the crop families around can reduce the risk of pest problems and nutrient deficiencies. (See my related articles Benefits of Crop Rotation and Growing [and Eating] What’s Good for the Garden.)

As an organic gardener, finding ways to reduce pest and disease problems in my food plants, without using even organic-approved treatments, is a major goal. Chemical gardeners will also appreciate spending less time and money treating problems that could potentially be avoided.

Choosing fruit trees, shrubs, and vines from different plant families might, like crop rotation in the food garden, help reduce some of these problems in our yards. One family in particular, that includes many of our favorite fruit plants, is the rose family, Rosaceae. It is easy to overload a yard with rose family plants. However, it is also possible to intersperse fruit plants from different families in a fairly small yard, to head-off potential problems.

Wait — how do you say that?

Official plant family names always end with the three letters “eae”. That combination does not turn up often in our usual, everyday speech or reading, so any confusion over what that might sound like is totally expected. In case you are curious — we say that group of letters out loud like this: “uh ee”.

As an example, the plant family name Rosaceae sounds like “Ro zay suh ee”.

Below is a list of some plant families and their fruits that you might choose among:

Plant families for some popular fruits

Rosaceae – apple, pear, peach, quince, plum, almond, blackberry, raspberry, strawberry, apricot, hawthorn, cherry, loquat, mayhaw, and medlar. Ornamental plants in this family that might also be in your yard include roses, pyracantha, and spirea.

Moraceae – fig, mulberry. An ornamental plant in this family is Osage orange.

Ericaceae – blueberry, huckleberry, cranberry (this last one is not for the South). Ornamental plants in this family that might also be in your yard include azaleas and rhododendrons.

Vitaceae – muscadine, scuppernong, table and wine grape. Ornamental plants in this family include Ampelopsis pepper vine and Virginia creeper.

Ebenaceae – American persimmon and Asian persimmon

Annonaceae – paw paw

Lythraceae – pomegranate

Adoxaceae – elderberry

Rutaceae – lemon, lime, orange, kumquat, mandarin, satsuma, grapefruit — essentially all of what we call citrus fruits. These generally are tropical or subtropical plants, best for hardiness zones 9 and 10, but some species/varieties can tolerate life in hardiness zone 8 and even 7 when protected from the deepest cold.

Musaceae – banana, plantain. Like members of the Rutaceae family, the banana family plants generally require subtropical or tropical climate to thrive and produce fruit. Some species can survive much cooler conditions, but producing and maturing fruit is less likely outside of hardiness zones 9 and 10.

Fruit plant families in my yard now

I have listed in a table, grouped by plant family, all the fruit plants that are growing in my yard. Most of these are new enough, and young, that they are not yet producing fruit. Some may not survive (always a risk), but most of these will start giving us fruit in the next year or two. Here is the table:

Your list, for your own yard, obviously, is going to look very different from mine. The paw paws and pomegranates are still in pots, where I have grown them from seeds, but they will be planted in the yard this fall. At some point, too, I would like to add passion vine. I planted one last spring, but the spot was much more wet than I thought it would be, and the vine did not survive. My new yard in zone 9a still has plenty of surprises for me!

Additional note: the ginger and turmeric are not fruits, but I put them in the list because I expect them to be in the same spots year after year, and the ginger Family is in the same Order as bananas. (Plant Families are grouped into Orders of related Families.)

Postcard from the Mississippi Gulf Coast

My new hometown is a delight. This is where we walk almost every day:

Hope your fall gardens are all planted and trouble-free!

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Preserving the Small Garden Harvest

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Small home gardens, in spite of their size, can produce a surprisingly large amount of food. If your garden is like mine, it is not going to produce enough of any one crop — except maybe dill or other herbs — to last through the whole of the coming year. However, there are often surpluses of one veggie or another as the season progresses.

Any surpluses are likely to be small, but the risk of losing some of that surplus to rots and molds is real, especially if you are gardening for just one or two people. Keeping our small abundances edible for a longer time can require extra work.

The work is in the different preservation options and picking the one that is best for our current crop and situation. Will it be freezing, dehydrating, canning, fermenting, or simply storing a crop “as is”?

For example, this year, the cucumber patch in my garden produced a steady flow of cucumbers, just about right for eating them all fresh, except for one bumper week. That week, the patch produced about twice as many cukes as we could use. To avoid losing the extras to rot, we made a couple of different kinds of pickles.

My choices for extending the usefulness of our harvests may not be the same as yours, but below I have listed the preservation/extension methods we use, and some of the reasoning behind each choice.

Freezing

Many gardeners opt for freezing as a favorite preservation/extension method. Blanched green beans and greens, corn on the cob, fresh tomatoes and peppers, and many more kinds of veggies can, theoretically, be stored in a freezer for at least a few months. Using the freezer is not my first choice, though, because of a bad experience back in 2012.

That year, a tree fell on our house, smashing through the dining room and living room, leaving wires dangling from the attic. The house was without power for more than nine weeks while it was being repaired, and most of what we had in our (thankfully-small) chest freezer “went bad”. This is the kind of thing that can happen randomly, I know, but it made me wary of relying on electricity for our food storage.

We don’t have a chest freezer now. Already, since moving to the coast, we have had one event (last fall — Hurricane Zeta) that knocked out electricity for three and a half days. We use the freezer section of our fridge for short-term storage of some foods, like pesto made from our garden basil and the deer sausage that a sister shared with us. I also keep extra flour and rice in there, safe from bugs. This way, we are less likely to lose much of our home-garden-produce to spoilage in the event of a power failure.

Dehydrating

Drying foods for later use is probably our favorite preservation/extension method. Re-hydrating foods is easy — soak in water or drop straight into a soup pot — and the dried foods take up very little space in the pantry.

This week, we have dried quite a lot of okra for use in winter gumbos. The okra patch is our best-producing section of the garden right now. It all fell over a few weeks ago, in Hurricane Ida, and I had to stand it all back up, cutting some of the tops off to help the plants stay upright. The okra went right on producing; it is amazing.

We dehydrated several trays-worth of tomatoes in mid-summer, and Joe recently made jerky from deer meat (from the same sister who provided the deer sausages). I’ve also dried herbs and flowers for teas and tinctures. Normally, we would also dry a lot of peppers for use in winter, but those plants are not doing nearly as well as the okra in all the rain. We are up to 90 inches for the year, and more is coming.

We also, sometimes, dehydrate sale-produce from the grocery store. This year one of our local stores celebrated “Hawaii Days” with $1.25 pineapples and $0.25 mangoes. We dehydrated some of each.

Our dehydrator has seen more than a decade of use. It is a five-tray Excaliber, which is a bit pricey, but the temperature controls, large surface-area for drying, and fan on the back that blows the heated air evenly across all the trays are great features. The new version (not mine) includes a timer. However, if the dehydrator you have is one of the round ones with just two or three temperature settings, and the fan and heating element are in the base, and you found it at a thrift store, that works, too.

To learn how to use our dehydrated foods, we checked a couple of books out of the library (long ago). If your library doesn’t have a good book about using dehydrated foods, try this one, The Ultimate Dehydrator Cookbook, that is fairly comprehensive.

Canning

We tend toward small-batch canning. This means, for making jams and fruit preserves, we follow instructions from Wild Preserves, a cookbook that I have had for many years. The author, Joe Freitus, knows that we don’t usually find wild fruits in large amounts, so many of the recipes ask for small amounts of fruit — just four cups for many recipes. These recipes work for non-wild versions of similar fruits.

In the past, I have done a lot more traditional pressure-canning, especially for green beans. At this time in my life, though, and with the smaller-and-still-experimental garden, I am sticking with simpler “canning” methods.

For example, when we had an abundance of eggplant earlier this summer, I made a full pint of marinated eggplant, from (I think) seven or so Ichiban-type (long and skinny) eggplants. The recipe indicated that it would keep for only a few weeks in the fridge, but that is a lot longer than any fresh eggplant would stay edible!

For pickles, I use a refrigerator-pickle recipe that can be adjusted to make just one quart of sweet pickles. No water-bath canner or pressure-canner is required. However, I did water-bath-can some of the pineapple purchased during “Hawaii Days”.

Fermenting

Fermenting foods is Joe’s expertise. His three most-frequently fermented foods are sauerkraut, brined pickles, and fermented hot sauce. He keeps the salt-to-produce ratio for brining all of these written on the lid of our pickling salt box. That way, he doesn’t have to hunt it up when he is ready to start a batch of fermented foods.

Storing “As Is”

This is the laziest method, and my favorite, but it only works for some particular crops.

Sweet potatoes can be kept, after harvest and curing in the fall, in a basket, covered with a towel to keep dark, nearly anywhere in the house. They will be good for several months, and no root cellar or special space is required. I usually keep mine in the kitchen.

Some winter squashes will keep for months in a cooler part of the house. Butternut squashes and some pumpkins actually get sweeter as the months go by. The best “keeper” I’ve grown so far is ‘Seminole’ pumpkin squash. I have eaten some that were in the kitchen for more than a year, and they were still good.

Dried beans, like black-eyed peas or kidney beans, can be kept in a jar after they are truly and completely dry. Ditto for popcorn.

For All

If you are new to food preservation, reading a good guide to preserving foods at home is an essential first step. There may be a good book at your local library. Alternatively, you can check the recipe section of the Ball and Kerr Home Preserving website. That site also includes helpful information about all the preservation methods discussed above, at this link (scroll down to see each section).

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State of the Garden, mid-June

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It was a long and interesting spring in my garden, with the usual round of successes and set-backs that included excessive rain, an abundance of slugs, and a fairly steady-but-small harvest of root crops and greens. Currently, we are bringing in tomatoes and cucumbers every day, with an occasional summer squash or eggplant. The summer squashes (both green and yellow zucchini) are a bit of a miracle at this point.

The squash plants have been attacked by squash vine borers and by cucumber pickle-worms. Half the plants have been killed by the borers, but I have done my usual treatment for borers a couple of times now, and the remaining plants are still un-wilted on sunny days and still putting out squashes, some of which do not (the miracle continues…) contain pickle-worms.

Zucchini plants showing the mound of compost heaped over stems that have been treated for borers.

My “usual treatment” for squash vine borers is to slit the stem open lengthwise in the area that looks damaged, saturate the inside of the stem with a liquid version of Bt for caterpillars (I use one called Thuricide), spray the Bt all up the length of the rest of the stem, then heap compost over the slit-open part of the stem, as shown in the picture above.

This treatment usually gives me at least a couple of extra weeks of zucchini. You can read more about squash vine borers, with more detail of the treatment and pictures of the damage, in my article on Summer Squash in the Southern Garden.

Plastic tub containing harvested tomatoes and arugula from the garden

In addition to the summer veggies currently coming into the kitchen, we have some volunteer arugula. I had let my entire 3×3 foot patch of arugula go to seed in the spring, so that I could save seeds for next year, and some of the seedpods shattered in the garden. Sometimes, the plants that come up on their own are the best surprise!

Pretty soon, though, those volunteer plants will start sending up flower stalks. At that point, I will pull them from the garden.

Also in the garden right now

Meanwhile, we have okra seedlings coming up in the space where we recently harvested the sweet corn, many varieties of peppers that will soon be adding to the daily harvest, and eggplants finally putting out an abundance of flowers and very small fruits.

One day's harvest of cucumbers, green and yellow zucchinis, and a red tomato.

Black-eyed pea plants have their first flower-buds, winter squashes are forming on a hilariously long vine, the sweet potato slips are all planted, and even though a mole tunneled under the area where the watermelon seeds are planted, one seedling is growing well. This is all good news.

And some flowers

One of my “special projects” for the garden this year is adding more flowers for pollinators. My garden seems to have plenty of “pest insects”, but we are woefully short on beneficial bees and flower-flies, which are (in general) more efficient pollinators than butterflies and moths.

Anise hyssop and dill are two of the flowers that I planted with pollinators in mind. Back in north Georgia, flowers on these plants would be covered up in bees and flower-flies. Here, there are times when I do not see any insects nearby, even when the flowers are fully open on a beautiful, sunny day.

  • Anise hyssop in the garden
  • Dill flower-head in bud (not fully open)

In other news

We visited a son in Tennessee a couple of weeks ago, and we were able to see the Brood X cicadas. They weren’t too abundant right near my son’s home, but when we hiked in the Forks of the River Wildlife Management area, their collective sound rose and fell in a rhythm almost like breathing. The experience was pretty glorious.

  • One Brood X cicada
  • Cicada husks under a fence rail

I am happy that I did not miss this round of the 17-year cicadas.

Hope that your gardens are all growing well, and that you also are having some pretty-glorious moments!

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Learning from a Soil Test

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I finally sent off a couple of soil samples to the state testing lab. The soil here is new to me (sand, not north Georgia’s red clay), and last summer’s garden was less productive than I had hoped. Getting a baseline set of measurements will boost my understanding of what the soil needs to produce more good food.

logo for Mississippi State Extension

The routine test for home gardens provides quite a bit of useful information, but I also paid for a couple of extra bits, the organic matter content and percent nitrogen. One sample that I sent in (labeled Veg) was a composite of two scoops each from seven garden beds. The other (labeled Fruit) was a composite of several scoops taken down the length of a newly-dug 6×30 foot bed that will be home to some berries and other small fruiting plants.

The results came back, and they contained some surprises. Here is the information in table form:

 ComponentVeg — 7 garden bedsFruit — one garden bed
pH6.4 5.4
Phosphorus (P)353 lbs/acre (very high)104 lbs/acre (high)
Potassium (K)171 lbs/acre (low)39 lbs/acre (very low)
Magnesium334 lbs/acre (very high)79 lbs/acre (high)
Zinc28.6 lbs/acre (very high)22 lbs/acre (very high)
Calcium2331 lbs/acre496 lbs/acre
Soluble Salts0.1 (low)0.1 (low)
% Organic Matter4.23.6
% Nitrogen0.160.11

What this all means

Seeing the numbers for the two areas side-by-side makes the differences stand out, but I will go over the components measured, one by one, to explain how I am using the information.

pH

For both samples, pH was on the acid end of the spectrum. The pH of 6.4 for the Veg sample is excellent for most vegetables, and no additions of limestone were recommended for that set of garden beds. However, the pH for the Fruit sample, at 5.4, was too low, too acidic, for many fruits. Blueberries will be happy at 5.4, but not much else. The Fruit test results came with a recommendation to add limestone: 75 pounds per 1000 square feet, to bring that pH up a bit.

The surprise here is that I had used a simple, home pH test kit last spring on part of the vegetable garden area. The pH as measured with the kit was at least 7 (neutral) or possibly higher. The pH kit relies on color-matching, and it seemed to me that my sample could have been between the colors for seven and eight.

We did find, though, when digging the beds, a couple of the plastic tags that come with tomato plants, that tell which variety they are. This suggests that a previous owner also had a veggie garden in this area, and they probably added lime to bring up the pH. Last spring, the soil sample for measuring the pH was from just a couple of beds, because it took awhile to get them all dug. It is possible that the new sample, a composite from seven beds, includes a mix of high and low pH areas.

I will need to check the pH of each of the seven planting beds to figure out which have a higher pH and which have a lower pH. Some may need a little limestone to improve the pH.

Phosphorus

Just wow. Neither of my planting areas needs any more phosphorus, possibly for years. These came back High (Fruit) and Very High (Veg). It may seem as though having high nutrient levels would be a good thing, but high levels of phosphorus can interfere with a plant’s ability to take up micronutrients, like zinc, that it may also need for good growth and productivity. The Texas A&M article Phosphorus — Too much and plants may suffer indicates that phosphorus levels above 150 ppm may harm plant growth, and levels above 350 ppm can kill some plants. It may be a miracle that my garden has been able to support any crops at all!

The high phosphorus levels mean that I should avoid composts that include manures, especially chicken manure, since those can add extra phosphorus to the soil.

My fertilizers also need to be low on phosphorus. Most fertilizers are labeled with the percentages of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium they contain. These are listed in that order, as N-P-K (nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium). That middle number, for my garden, needs to be as low as possible. The good news here is that one fertilizer that I keep on hand is a fish fertilizer labeled 5-1-1. This product offers plenty of nitrogen with a low amount of phosphorus.

Potassium

Measurements for potassium (K) came back low for both areas.

My 2018 article about potassium sources for organic gardens describes pros and cons of several potassium sources. In addition, my Garden Planner and Notebook contains, on page 12, a list of some commonly available organic fertilizer ingredients and what nutrients each one provides. Looking down the list, I can see that greensand is the one I will want to use.

Wood ashes add potassium but also can raise the soil pH. Since the “soil” here generally seems to have a low pH, that is not a drawback. The issue is more one of finding the wood ashes. Kelp meal would be a possible source to try, except that it can also add phosphorus, which I need to avoid. And, sul-po-mag brings magnesium with it, which the garden also seems to have in abundance.

Magnesium

Measurements for magnesium content for both planting areas came back as high (Fruit) and very high (Veg). No magnesium is needed, apparently, even though epsom salts (a magnesium source) did seem to help last year. I wonder whether the super-high levels of phosphorus made it harder for plants to use the magnesium that was already in the soil

Alternatively, it is possible that the magnesium in the soil was tied up somehow, bonded in a way that made it less available to the plants. Also, if the soil pH is very low, plants are less able to take in nutrients they need, like magnesium, phosphorus, and potassium. So, low pH could have been a factor in some of the Veg beds. (Another reason to check soil pH in each of the seven beds…)

The limestone recommended to bring up the pH in the Fruit area also will add more magnesium to that space, since limestone contains both calcium and magnesium in abundance.

Zinc

Zinc measurements came back high in both planting areas. If all the yards around here are high in zinc, that might explain the success of pecan trees locally. Pecans are big users of zinc. Many yards here have at least one pecan tree, and we saw lots of pecans in the fall. In north Georgia, pecan trees often need supplementation with zinc in order to make good crops, since zinc is less abundant in the soil up there.

Calcium

Calcium level in the Veg sample was a lot higher than the level in the Fruit soil sample, but a value-judgement of whether the levels were low-medium-high-or-very high was not given. A Mississippi State University Extension article includes this bit of information about calcium availability in soils that have low pH, such as in the Fruit sample:

Soils with favorable pH levels are normally not deficient in calcium. Acid soils with calcium contents of 500 pounds per acre or less are deficient for legumes, especially peanuts, alfalfa, clovers, and soybeans. At this level, limited root system crops such as tomatoes, peppers, and cucurbite would also need additional calcium. Soluble calcium is available as the Ca2+ ion and is needed for peanuts at pegging time and for peppers and tomatoes to prevent blossom end rot.

Secondary Plant Nutrients: Calcium, Magnesium and Sulfur ; publication number IS1039, by Larry Oldham, phd, 2019

For my garden areas, this means, again, that checking soil pH for each of the seven beds in the Veg area will be a good thing to do, in case any of these show a super-low pH. Maybe low calcium explains the wimpiness of last year’s green bean plants!

It also provides more support to add the recommended limestone to the Fruit area to improve plant health.

Soluble salts

The low measurements for soluble salts were another big surprise. Here we are, just five blocks from the beach, and the soluble salts are low! I will count this as a blessing. Many garden crops are less productive when soluble salts are high.

Organic matter and percent nitrogen

These measurements are just to provide a little more information about this new (to me) soil. The percentages of organic matter are better than I had expected. At 4.2 and 3.6, I may have to stop calling my yard a sand dune and refer to it instead as a sandy loam.

When working in the garden, it just seems like a lot of sand, but my past 30 years of working in north Georgia’s red clay may be coloring my judgement here. However, in that clay soil, I would want a higher percentage of organic matter, to help break up the clay and improve how it both holds and drains water.

To work on these numbers, to boost them slightly higher, I will need to rely more on cover crops than on composts and manures (because of that phosphorus problem…).

Fertilizers for the year, based on the soil test results

The soil test reports recommended additions of 34-0-0 fertilizer, for the nitrogen, and muriate of potash (0-0-60) for the potassium. These are both conventional fertilizers that are in the form of soluble salts. Muriate of potash is, essentially, potassium chloride. (You may recall from a long-ago science class that table salt is sodium chloride.) These salts dissolve readily in water and are instantly available to plants as soon as they are watered in to the garden.

However, I am an organic gardener. Soluble salts are not part of my game plan. Hence, the decision to use greensand as a potassium source. In addition, I will be adding some Azomite (not listed in the Garden Planner and Notebook), another kind of pulverized rocks, as a source of additional micronutrients and a tiny bit more potassium.

My nitrogen source, selected by looking at page 12 of my Garden Planner and Notebook, could be either feather meal or alfalfa meal. Feather meal smells a lot like dead things, but the odor only lingers for a few days. No local stores carry feather meal, though, which leaves me (thankfully) with the better-smelling alfalfa meal.

I plan to follow Kevin Meehan’s instructions for DIY alfalfa fertilizer, posted on Rodale Institute’s website, which uses alfalfa pellets that can be found at any local feed store. This should be — yet another — interesting adventure, along with the other “special projects” I have listed in my Garden Planner for the year. Wish me luck?

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