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Winter Harvests at Plant a Row for the Hungry

12 November, 2018 by amygwh 4 Comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

For leafy greens, harvest lowest/outer/larger leaves.
Harvest no more than 1/3 of the mass of any leafy greens plant each week.
Wait for warm-enough temperatures (above 32 degrees F, with no frost on the leaves) to harvest any/all of the crops/
For root crops (beets, daikon radishes, etc), pull the entire plant at harvest, including the leaves. Those are good food, too.
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

7 November, 2018 by amygwh Leave a Comment

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.

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

2 November, 2018 by amygwh Leave a Comment

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.

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.

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

23 October, 2018 by amygwh 5 Comments

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

Harvest remaining warm-season crops that are mature enough to either finish ripening indoors or use “as is” in the kitchen.
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.)
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.
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.
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.

Is Gardening Really All About Bugs?

16 October, 2018 by amygwh 2 Comments

Some weeks, it may seem like this blog is more about bugs than about plants. Isn’t gardening all about the plants? Well, it probably should be, but our gardens exist in the natural world, which is crowded with many kinds of life, including insects. Some of the insects are helper-insects, like pollinators and predators (“beneficials”). Other insects are destructive, eating our plants or spreading diseases across our landscapes (“pests”).

Some insects can be helpers as adults and pests in their larval stage. A lot of butterflies and moths are in this category. As adults, they pollinate flowers, helping plants to make fruits and seeds. As caterpillars (larval stage), they eat our plants. This dual life complicates a gardener’s decisions about how to manage caterpillars in the garden.

Which insects are “good” and which are “bad”? How can we know what to do when baby insects, like caterpillars, eat plants in our gardens?

Skipper butterfly on a late-summer zinnia. PHOTO/Amygwh

For me, the decision often comes down to whether the insect specializes on one kind of plant, especially if I am not planning to eat that plant. A lot of the skipper butterfly larvae eat turfgrass. Bermudagrass is not my most favorite plant, so I am not troubled when caterpillars are munching on the lawn.

However, the decision about how to manage pest insects in the garden could one-day disappear. You may remember the report last year of a study in Germany that showed a 75% loss of flying insects within the past few decades.

The authors of the study note:

The widespread insect biomass decline is alarming, ever more so as all traps were placed in protected areas that are meant to preserve ecosystem functions and biodiversity. While the gradual decline of rare insect species has been known for quite some time (e.g. specialized butterflies [9, 66]), our results illustrate an ongoing and rapid decline in total amount of airborne insects active in space and time.
Article appearing in PlosOne, 18 Oct. 2017

A recent article in the Washington Post, “‘Hyperalarming’ study shows massive insect loss,” tells about another long-term study in Puerto Rico that shows the same trend. We are losing insects of all kinds, and in great numbers. Why should we care? The article offers a reason:

Thirty-five percent of the world’s plant crops require pollination by bees, wasps and other animals. And arthropods are more than just pollinators. They’re the planet’s wee custodians, toiling away in unnoticed or avoided corners. They chew up rotting wood and eat carrion.
Washington Post article by Ben Guarino, 15 Oct. 2018

To some gardeners, no longer having to worry about pest insects may sound like a dream come true. Sadly, the good and the bad go together. If we lose our pests, we also lose our helpers. This means we also lose a lot of good food and our “wee custodians”.

Like melons? They are pollinated by insects.

It may be possible for us to live on wind-pollinated crops, like wheat, corn, and beets, and on self-pollinated crops, like most of the beans. I don’t think we’d like that diet, though. In addition, being surrounded by rotting carcasses would make the situation extra-unpleasant.

While I don’t expect total losses of insects any time soon (or even in my lifetime), the thought of such a catastrophic loss of beauty and helpfulness is sobering.

What can we do to change the situation? Well, any action that supports insect life could help slow the decline. Try this:

plant more wildflowers to support native pollinators,
allow more diverse plantings in our yards, to provide more places to live for more kinds of insects, and
refrain (as much as we can) from using pesticide products in ways that kill multiple kinds of insects instead of just the one pest that is “bugging” us.

One step that is both simple and difficult: plant clover in the lawn.

The Passing of a Gardener

9 October, 2018 by amygwh 2 Comments

If you spend enough time in a garden, it will tell you about its gardener. The garden of my Mom and stepdad, Bill, mostly tended by Bill, is no exception. It is full of flowers, vegetables, and herbs,

The flowers are for beauty and for butterflies. Bill loved butterflies. Don’t tell my butterfly-conservation friends, but back when his eyesight was good (decades ago), Bill caught butterflies to use in art, posed with dried plants in box-frames.

Right now, the cosmos are providing nectar for migrating Monarchs, but Bill is not here to enjoy either the flowers or the butterflies, because my stepdad, Reverend Bill Shaw, passed away on Saturday, just a few days ago. When he and my Mom married, back in 1997, he and I became gardening buddies.

Bill’s Oklahoma garden always grew more vegetables than his household could eat. Tomatoes would take over the kitchen and peppers pile up in any bare spaces. The overabundance meant there was plenty to share.

The herbs are mostly for my Mom. They show that he loved her very much.

Bill’s garden reflects his preference for a well-ordered and tidy space. The plants are spaced far enough apart that there is room to work around them. His garden also shows that he could outsmart the groundhogs.

When the groundhogs first invaded, he tried all kinds of traps and baits that didn’t work. The groundhogs ate the plants from below, while underground, which made catching them more difficult. Finally, Bill bought some plastic food-grade barrels, sawed them in half, then sunk the halves into the garden. He planted much of his garden in those half-barrels, which kept out the groundhogs.

Tomato plants, safe from groundhogs in the half-barrel in-ground planters.

This planting strategy shows the creativity of the gardener. No groundhogs were harmed, but the plants were protected.

Back when Bill’s hearing was better, we would talk on the phone about our gardens. He was my main source of information about old-time garden practices. I was his source for information about new varieties and crop diseases.

I will miss Bill and our discussions about his latest plans for the garden.

WWII veteran, U.S. Navy
At his 90th birthday party.

Cucumber Bonanza Nearing its End

2 October, 2018 by amygwh Leave a Comment

My late-planted home garden cucumbers have been coming into the kitchen for three weeks now. The fridge contains a small pile of them, and I harvested more today, but the cucumber bonanza is nearing its end. The older cucumber leaves have spots/lesions that look like downy mildew; the leaves that still are unspotted and beautifully green droop in the afternoon sun. The droop makes me think that the plants have another disease, in addition to the mildew.

Cucumber plants, wilted in the afternoon sun, but they look fine in the morning and evening, if you ignore the spotted/mildewed older leaves.

There is a bacterial wilt disease for cucumbers that is carried by cucumber beetles. I have checked the plants — leaves, stems, and flowers — very closely, and I have not seen these beetles. I have seen several bumblebees, some brown skipper-type butterflies, a few flea beetles, tiny snails, ants, a tiny native bee, a jumping spider, and one squash beetle on the plants, but those critters are not known to carry the bacterial wilt disease.

It is possible that cucumber beetles are very good at hiding. When I finally pull up the plants, I will check the stems for the white stringy goo that is a sign of bacterial wilt (as seen on the Missouri Botanical Garden page on bacterial wilt).

Today’s harvest of cucumbers and peppers.

Meanwhile, I have a small basketful of cucumbers in my kitchen. Some of them will be peeled before we eat them, because something else has scraped the outer part of the skins. If I had found cucumber beetles, I would have suspected that they caused the damage. Since I haven’t seen those beetles, and since squash beetle damage looks different (remember the semicircular troughs?), tiny snails are my current top suspects.

It is hard to say whether the cucumber part of my late-summer-garden-experiment is a bust. The harvest seems short (three+ weeks), but we have a lot of cucumbers. The zucchini part is definitely a bust. There is zero chance of getting zucchini from the sad plants in the half-barrel garden.

Of course, the pepper plants continue to grow and make peppers, unmarred by disease. Some stink bugs have found them and blemished the skins a bit, but the peppers are all still good enough. The late-planted basil will be big enough for pesto soon. Chicory is looking good, too, and so are the carrots and assorted radishes.

I will transplant the rest of my cool-season seedlings into the garden this week. Currently, they are in a flat, where I planted them in late August. The new crops are kale, spinach, beets, cilantro, and lettuce. Those will all provide food for our kitchen in the cooler months ahead.

Trap Crops for the Home Garden

28 September, 2018 by amygwh 2 Comments

Since trap crops take up some space, it never occurred to me that using these was a suitable organic pest control strategy for small home gardens. However, I have unexpectedly gained experience with a trap crop, since that is what my zucchini have turned out to be.

What is a trap crop?

A trap crop is one that is planted as a lure to pest insects, to keep them away from the main crop. Most trap crops are not expected to yield a harvest; instead, they are offered up to pests as an alternative to the main crop of a farm. According to SARE, trap crops are often planted around the edge of the main crop, forming a protective barrier that pests are likely to stay within. Trap crops can also be planted as a block or patch near the main crop.

According to University of Georgia, trap crops to work best when they make flowers before the main crop that they are protecting. When the plants are making flowers and fruits, that is when they are most attractive to most pests.

My zucchini plants function as a trap crop

You may have read the two recent blog posts about pests on my zucchini plants — one about squash beetles and the other about cucumber pickleworms. The squash beetles are really less of a problem, since there are only four or five each day for me to smash and the damage is limited to holes in the leaves. The pickleworms, though, are another story.

They have caused serious damage to the zucchini plants, ruining flowers and boring into main-stems and leaf-stems. The plants are still standing, but all hope of harvesting zucchini from this late-summer crop is gone.

This is the good news: my cucumber patch, planted in early August like the zucchini, has supplied several cucumbers for our meals already. Checking the cucumber plants nearly every day, I have found only a few squash beetles, grand-total, on the plants. It has been easy to find and smash the one-every-few-days beetles as I check on the garden.

In an instance of amazing good luck, my zucchini variety was so fast to mature that the plants made flowers more than a week before the cucumbers did. When the pests first showed up in my garden, the squash beetles and cucumber pickleworm moths flew past the cucumber patch, which didn’t have flowers, and attacked the zucchini plants in the half-barrel planter, where flowers and little squashes were abundant.

Cucumber patch protected by trap crop of zucchini, example of organic pest control. Zucchini are in a half-barrel at left end of garden (not in this image). — My cucumber patch in late September. No leaf mildew diseases, no pickleworm damage. PHOTO/Amygwh

Even better, the cucumbers still do not show any pickleworm damage.

To combat any pickleworms that could be present, I have been treating both sets of plants with Bt for caterpillars (the one I am using is Thuricide), which is an organic pest control product. We have had a lot of rain, though, which washes the Bt away. I am not re-spraying my plants after every rain, so some days the cucumber crop is unprotected other than by the stronger allure of the zucchini plants.

At this point, the three remaining zucchini plants look hopelessly ragged, but they are still alive. I am leaving them in the garden for as long as they continue to work as pest-magnets.

The cucumbers remain pickleworm-free, but they are not perfect specimens. I had forgotten about the uneven pollination in hot weather that results in lumpy cucumbers. These are not headed for a pickle jar, which means the imperfect shapes are not really a problem.

Weird shapes from incomplete pollination, but no cucumber pickleworm damage. PHOTO/Amygwh

Because of pest-concerns, I am harvesting the cucumbers while they are fairly small. This is a bit like harvesting tomatoes before they are fully red. I know that if I leave tomatoes in the garden to fully ripen, some pest (stink bug, chipmunk, mockingbird, etc) will notice the beautiful, ripe fruit and take a bite before I get a chance to enjoy the harvest, myself.

Unlike for tomatoes, there is not a flavor-reason to wait for more mature cucumbers. They taste pretty much the same at smaller sizes, and leaving them out in the pest-filled world seems a little like tempting fate.

So, as I ponder my next year’s garden, it is good to know that zucchini plants can use some unseen come-hither chemistry to draw pests away from the cucumbers.

This is the kind of garden-discovery that any of us can make. I have been growing food in this yard for more than 25 years, and I learn more about gardening every year. And even though there are pests, the garden is producing good food. This is part of the joy of gardening!

At the Pollinator Symposium

24 September, 2018 by amygwh Leave a Comment

At the Pollinator Symposium at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit this past weekend, attendees learned about urban bees, pollinator plantings along roadsides and around retention ponds, and about plant-pollinator interactions. The event was amazing!

Of course, I am on the committee for Monarchs Across Georgia, the group that organized the symposium, so I might be biased.

Dr. Jaret Daniels, the first presenter, is working in Florida with the Florida Dept. of Transportation to find the best mowing schedule for roadside wildflower plantings in that state. Dr. Daniels reported that the state DOT mostly keeps an every-3-weeks schedule for much of the mowing. For the 12-or-so feet nearest the road, the vegetation needs to be kept short for safety reasons.

He has found, though, that for parts of the verge further back from the road, 6-weeks between mowing allows more plants, and more kinds of plants, to flower (all good for pollinators!). In talking with state officials, he found that “protecting monarch butterflies” was a better motivator for trying a longer mowing cycle than “saving money.” Everyone wants to be seen as a friend of the monarch!

Dr. Leavey, telling us about her students’ work with urban bees.

Dr. Jennifer Leavey, working at Georgia Tech to understand how urban environments affect bees, suggested that flowering trees are a great supplement to our small pollinator gardens. Each flowering tree provides many more flowers than a small garden, even though a tree may flower for only a few weeks. The key is to make sure that enough flowers are available to pollinators through the entire growing season to support bees over many months.

She showed us a graph of information, developed by her students with information from Trees Atlanta, that showed most of Atlanta’s flowering trees are blooming in April. Apparently, we need more trees that flower in other months.

This pink Salvia is the kind of flower that is pollinated by critters that have long tongues, like butterflies, moths, and hummingbirds. As pollinators fly under the extended flower parts (anthers with pollen, stigma where the pollen needs to go for pollination) to get to the nectar inside the flower, pollen brushes onto their heads and backs.

Dr. Tim Spira is a (recently retired) plant ecologist whose work has focused on plant-pollinator interactions. His information was less practical, in some ways, since much of what he told us isn’t “things to do”. It was more, “how this works, and why.” However, his talk contained the most fun-facts.

Example: Usually, pollination is a happy accident that occurs when an insect or animal pokes its head inside a flower to plunder the nectar or pollen. Some of the pollen ends up on the insect/animal, and when that individual visits another flower in search of more good food, the pollen from the first flower brushes onto the female parts of the second flower. If the two flowers are for the same kind of plant, voila! Pollination can occur. He told us, though, about one pollinator that moves pollen onto the female parts of a flower on purpose, with pollination as her primary goal. This pollinator is the yucca moth (link to US Forestry Service information).

She gathers pollen from one yucca flower, then flies to another flower where she lays eggs inside the ovary of the new flower. Then, she uses her wad of gathered-up pollen to pollinate the flower where she has laid her eggs. When her eggs hatch, the babies will eat seeds of the yucca fruit that develops from the pollinated flower.

More than just butterflies and bees were visiting the wildflower meadows at the Monastery. Some flower-visitors, like this grasshopper, are not pollinators.

All in all, it was a great day. My little presentation about systemic pesticides seemed to go well, and I had fun visiting with other gardeners and people who love pollinators. Of course, very few people place the flower flies quite so high on their list of favorite insects as I do, but someday that may change.

Uncommon Crops at Area Community Gardens

18 September, 2018 by amygwh 2 Comments

The 2018 Annual Conference of the American Community Gardening Association (ACGA) was in Atlanta this past week. Bus tours of local community gardens were part of the conference. The bus tour option I chose (there were several – all looked good!) was for community gardens in Clarkston, which is a little Southeast of Atlanta.

Our bus tour guide, Bobby, said he’d heard Clarkston called both “the most diverse square mile in the U.S.”, and “Ellis Island South.” One organizer for a garden we visited told us that students from 65 nations attend the local high school.

Our bus stopped at the North Dekalb Mall Community Garden, the Community Garden at Clarkston Community Center, the Clarkston International Garden at 40 Oaks Preserve, the Friends of Refugees Garden at Jolly Avenue, and the Community Garden at Columbia Theological Seminary.

Gardeners at these gardens mostly do not speak English. Many are from countries in Southeast Asia and in Africa.

Uncommon garden crops

Cocoyam

One member of our tour group lives in New York now, but he grew up in Ghana. Luckily, he recognized the cocoyam that we saw in the gardens. Otherwise, I would probably still be trying to identify it! According to the cocoyam description at Plant Village, there are two kinds of cocoyam. The leaves of one type are edible at maturity, in addition to having an edible root. Leaves of the other kind are edible only when young.

Thai basil

Thai basil and lemongrass are not totally unfamiliar (unlike cocoyam), but I don’t normally see them in community gardens. BBC offers many recipes that use Thai basil. In general, the leaves are used in pho (soup) and curries.

Amaranth

We actually saw more than one kind of amaranth. Some, I think, were grown for the leaves (cook them like spinach), and others for the seeds. I have grown a grain amaranth before, but my experience was that separating the seeds from the rest of the plant bits was not easy. Will Bonsall (Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening) wrote about his amaranth experience, saying:

“Looking at my first amaranth crop I was somewhat disappointed to see that, although the yield of biomass was impressive, the grain yield seemed much less than, say, wheat, although they are said to yield comparably. When I hefted the bucket of grain, however, I was far more impressed. It was like lead, and I had to conclude that such a dense grain must really be as nutrient packed as they say.”

He had winnowed his crop on a breezy day, and he grinds the grain (passing the tiny seeds through a hand mill four times) to use in pancakes and waffles.

Tree collards

I have actually read about tree collards before, but it seemed likely that they would be attacked by caterpillars just like other cabbage-family plants, so I never looked into growing them myself. Maybe I should change that! The tree collards growing at the Clarkston Community Center garden looked great.

Roselle

This is another crop that I had read about and then dismissed as one I would not be interested in. The bright red calyxes (flower parts) are used in teas like ‘Red Zinger‘, and I have never liked those teas. They seem slimy to me. However, while at Community Garden at North Dekalb Mall, I was offered a leaf to taste.

The flavor was tart, like sorrel (sheep sorrel in the yard, or French sorrel planted on purpose). Looking it up when I got home, I found that another name for roselle is sour leaf. Apparently, the plants are grown just as much for the leaves as for the calyxes.

According to the chapter on roselle in the book Fruits of Warm Climates, by Julia Morton, roselle did not used to be such an uncommon crop in the U.S.:

“Roselle became and remained a common home garden crop throughout southern and central Florida until after World War II when this area began to develop rapidly and home gardening and preserving declined. Mrs. Edith Trebell of Estero, Florida, was one of the last remaining suppliers of roselle jelly. In February, 1961, I purchased the last 2 jars made from the small crop salvaged following the 1960 hurricane and before frost killed all her plants.”

The book chapter also describes using the red calyxes to make a dish that tastes like cranberry sauce. Since cranberries do not grow well in north Georgia, this could be another reason to grow some roselle.

Hyacinth bean

Plenty of people grow hyacinth bean as an ornamental plant. It is beautiful! however, most of us have not eaten the amazing purple beans. Green Dean at Eat the Weeds offers this caution about hyacinth beans:

“Mature and dry beans have got a high amount of cyanogenic glycosides in them. Not good for you.”

But, he offers this hope:

“Mature or dry beans must not be eaten raw. They have to be cooked. That means boiling soft raw mature beans or roasting as heat drives away the toxin. If they have dried — read they are hard — that means soaking overnight then boiling them a long time in a lot of water. Or, boil unsoaked dry beans in a lot of water twice. “

More hope: he says that young beans, leaves, and flowers can be eaten without all that extra work. Read his linked article find out how to prepare these other plant parts.

Bitter melon

This vegetable seemed to be very popular at the gardens we visited. The vines covered many of the fences used to separate the garden plots. We were told that the fruits truly are bitter, but that the bitterness could be reduced.

Tennessee State University has published information about bitter melon, including its food value, which may explain why anyone would eat such a difficult fruit:

“Bitter melon has twice the beta carotene of broccoli, twice the potassium of bananas, and twice the calcium of spinach. It also contains high amounts of fiber, phosphorous, and Vitamins C, B1, B2, and B3.”

In addition, the fruits are used in herbal medicines in Asia, Africa, and India, for a wide range of complaints, from gout, to cancer, to graying hair (see TSU’s linked publication for fuller list).

Any uncommon crops in your garden?

My most “uncommon crop” is chicory (many kinds). I do snack on garden weeds while in the yard, which might count for something, but I am not an adventurous eater. When I was a child, the foods I was most likely to eat were peanut butter sandwiches, Cheerios, and canned green beans. These many years later, my list of acceptable foods is still not super-long.

The good news about chicory is that, like so many of the uncommon crops I saw last Saturday at the refugee gardens, chicory is unbothered by pests, and it is drought tolerant. Also, if I put chicory on pizza or in bean soup, I can eat it.

Next year, though, I might try roselle.

Hope your gardens are growing well!

Blog

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Fall in the Garden, Continued

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