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Wood Pallets for Plant Display and Support

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Using wood pallets for plant display and support can be a low-cost option for creating a vertical garden. Wood pallets can also be re-constructed into garden benches. You already knew that, right?

I knew that, too, before visiting Italy, but I hadn’t seen so much repurposing of wood pallets for use with plants in public spaces. This blog post shows some ways wood pallets have been put into productive use in small towns in Tuscany.

wood pallet creates vertical plant display at restaurant entrance
Wood pallets create vertical plant display at restaurant entrance. PHOTO/Amygwh

Wood pallets as vertical gardens for small spaces

Small businesses use wood pallets to make their storefronts more attractive. The pallets don’t need much construction work to re-fit them as vertical gardens. When placed by a shop’s entrance, the pallet-gardens of living plants, and especially flowers (which are mood enhancers), give a signal to shoppers that the store is a good place to visit.

The vertical gardens created with wood pallets are usually stained or painted to match or complement other parts of the storefront, and they always look good.

They also look pretty easy to set up. A homeowner, or apartment renter, or condo-dweller, who has a narrow planting space could use wood pallets in a similar way to create a vertical garden for food plants.

In these vertical gardens, the planting spaces are not packed solid with potting mix (I checked). Instead, plants are in individual pots. This would make replacing mature/finished plants an easy task. Just replace a pot containing an old plant with a pot containing a younger, less mature plant!

Small crops that could grow in the small spaces in this plant-support system include salad greens, small herbs, strawberries, and edible flowers.

Wood pallet for plant display and support by a storefront.
Another wood pallet for plant display and support by a storefront in Tuscany. PHOTO/Amygwh

One of our local, posh restaurants has its sign mounted on stacked wood pallets. The wood has been sanded, then either stained or painted with chalk-paint (I can’t decide which), then distressed by sanding again.

The stacked pallets include a couple of wood planting boxes, complete with the living plants that we find so appealing, wedged between slats. It looks much more elegant than it sounds. See the image in this post for La Briciola Ristorante.

The particular version pictured below doesn’t allow for as many plants as the ones above, but gardeners are creative. There is probably a way to increase the number of planting boxes supported by the pallets.

Wood pallet benches as plant supports

The red bench made from wood pallets in the “inset image” at the top of this blog post is one of many brightly painted benches in the town of Chianciano. We first saw them last summer, and they still are all over town this summer.

Wood pallet re-used as plant display and restaurant sign.
Wood pallets re-used as plant display, restaurant sign, and leaning post for my Joe. PHOTO/Amygwh

The benches create cheerful spots of color in the mostly-stone town, and each one supports a container-plant display.

The overall impression created is one of welcome. I suspect that was the the goal.

Another wood pallet bench in the same town isn’t brightly painted, but it supports container plants in a completely different way. The plants are in a “holder” along the top of the back, leaving more room for people to sit on the bench!

Wood pallet bench includes built-in space for container plants.

The back of the bench is supported by a post, so any sitters who want to rest against the back can do so without tipping over. It’s a pretty clever design, and space for plants is a great addition.

The bench also provides advertising space for the store it sits across the sidewalk from. The name of the shop is stenciled across the upper piece of wood on the bench’s back. It is possible, though, to create your own garden logo to stencil across that upper piece of wood. You can advertise your personal garden philosophy instead of a store.

Are you short on garden space? One or more of these wood pallet creations may spark an idea of a way to create more space for garden crops in your own yard. If repurposed wood pallets work for these towns in Tuscany, for shops and for restaurants that serve Amazing Food, then they might be ok for suburban Atlanta, or Birmingham, or Laffayette.

Best wishes for great — and creative — gardening!

 

-Amy

Why Do Some Tomatoes Have Thicker Skins?

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Have you noticed that some tomatoes have thicker skins than others? There is more than one possible reason for the differences in skin thickness.

Why some tomatoes have thicker skins

  1. This trait is bred into commercial varieties for supermarket-reasons. Thick-skinned tomatoes survive long-distance transportation better than thin-skinned tomatoes.  More tomatoes arrive at the store looking good. Then, more people buy them.
  2. This trait is bred into some tomatoes to improve appearance. Thick-skinned-tomatoes resist “cracking” (info from HortScience reasearch article). More thick-skinned tomatoes picked at the farm look good. This is  another supermarket-driven reason.
  3. Paste-type tomatoes, like ‘Roma’, that have drier innards also tend to have thick skins.

I heard another possible reason for thicker-skinned tomatoes in a presentation by UGA plant pathologist Elizabeth Little. She said tomatoes that are resistant to root-knot nematodes seem to have thicker skins. The two traits may be linked somehow, so that when nematode resistance is “on”, so are thicker skins.

Paste-type 'Wuhib' tomato is thick-skinned.
Paste-type ‘Wuhib’ tomato is thick-skinned. PHOTO/Amygwh

When I moved to Georgia (1990), I found that many Southerners peel their fresh tomatoes before serving them. It didn’t matter whether the pieces were going in a salad, on a sandwich, or in a soup, the tomato got peeled before being sliced/chopped and served.

Most of our Southern gardens are troubled by root-knot nematodes; maybe the thicker skins on our local tomatoes — plants that resist root-knot-nematodes — explain that practice.

If your home-grown tomatoes are in the thick-skinned group, then one or more of the above reasons could explain why.

If you want home-garden tomatoes with thinner skins

Varieties that are bred for commercial use often have thicker skins. These varieties for commercial use are also sold to gardeners, to grow at home.

Some commercial varieties are hybrids, and the word “Hybrid” — if the variety is one — will be somewhere on the seed packet or plant label. This is a clue that the variety may be for commercial use. See points 1 and 2 in the list above, in the section “why do some tomatoes have thicker skins”.

To avoid the thick-skinned tomatoes, experiment with growing one or two heirloom varieties. Many of these will have thinner skins, because they were bred for home-use. They were not developed with the idea of shipping them across the country, or the world, in mind.

Of course, if your garden is infested with root-knot nematodes, you will get more tomatoes from nematode-resistant plants. In that situation, you may be stuck with thicker skins.

How to remove tomato skins

Some eaters are not especially sensitive to the difference in texture caused by thicker skins. We eat most tomatoes without peeling them. However, tomato skins have a bitter flavor for some people. If the skins bother you, either in texture or flavor, you can easily remove the tomato skins. Below are four methods that work.

Method 1:

Cut out the stem and then cut a small “x” in the bottom end of the tomato with a sharp knife; lower the tomato into a pot of boiling water (a large, slotted spoon is a good tool for this). Leave for about 30-60 seconds, or until the cut edges of tomato skin start to curl. Remove the tomato from the boiling water and set it in a bowl of ice water. After the tomato has cooled, the skin will slip off easily. Several tomatoes can go into the boiling water pot at the same time.

Method 2:

Wash your tomatoes, then freeze them. When freezing them, place the tomatoes in a single-layer in the freezer bag, to help them freeze quickly. If they are bunched together in the bag, in a tomato-huddle, they might take longer to freeze all the way through. Faster freezing usually gives better quality in the final product, so speed here is important.

To peel, submerge a frozen tomato in warm water. The skin will peel off easily.

Method 3:

The old-fashioned way is to use a paring knife, slicing just under the skin and pulling it away in strips.

Method 4:

If you are planning to use your tomatoes in the mashed/sauced state, use a food mill to remove skin and seeds (see article in Bon Appetit). The author of the Bon Appetit article (Marco Canora, as told to Julia Bainbridge) says “When you use a food mill, those tomatoes stay dense and rich and unctuous.”

Hoping that you are all enjoying good food from your gardens!

-Amy

Side-Dress Your Vegetable Garden if Needed

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If plant growth in your garden has slowed, or your plants are looking puny, it might be time to side-dress your vegetable garden with fertilizer. What does that mean? Side dressing is applying additional fertilizer near your crop plants, either spread on the ground around them or in a little furrow a few inches away.

Side-dressing helps some crops more than others

Some crops will not need additional fertilizer in mid-summer to make a full harvest. These, mostly, are the beans and peas — Southern peas especially, like purple hull peas and zipper creams. Most of the other fruiting crops in a summer garden, like tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, corn, eggplants, and squashes, may benefit from additional fertilizer. These crops are often referred to as medium feeders or heavy feeders. They have a higher need for some nutrients.

Side dress your vegetable garden tomatoes in mid-summer, if needed.
Side dress your vegetable garden tomatoes in mid-summer, if needed. PHOTO/Amygwh

For plants that benefit from additional fertilizer in mid-summer, it usually is applied either when plants have begun to set their fruit (squash and cucumbers count as fruit, since they have seeds), or, for corn, when it is “knee high.” If your crops are further along than this, it is not too late to side-dress, if plant growth or productivity seems slow.

How to know if you need to side-dress your vegetable garden

These gardens are most likely to benefit from mid-summer side-dressing with fertilizer:

  1. Gardens with sandy or fast-draining soil
  2. Gardens that have received more than the usual amount of rain
  3. Gardens fertilized with water-soluble, conventional, chemical fertilizers
  4. Gardens that support a lot of medium and heavy feeders

In the first three examples, some of the nutrients added in spring may have washed away, out of reach of the plant roots. When nutrients are out of reach, plant growth will slow down, some plants may start to look a little pale, and harvests will not be as large as they should.

If the only plants in your garden that look pale/puny by mid-summer are the tomatoes, peppers, and/or eggplants, and all other crops are growing well, these crops might need a little extra magnesium. In my county, soils are low on magnesium. The tomato-family plants all have a slightly higher need for magnesium than other crops. This combination can result in plants that are pale and less productive.

To boost the available magnesium for these plants, use epsom salts. Dissolve a couple of tablespoons of epsom salts in two gallons of water, and pour it on the ground around your plants. Two tablespoons-full dissolved in two gallons of water should be enough for four plants. If the plants start to look darker green in about a week, then they needed the magnesium.

You also, of course, could get your soil tested through your local County Extension office. A soil lab report will tell you whether any nutrients are in short supply and offer a fertilizer recommendation. Extension fertilizer recommendations are, at this point, still all for conventional, chemical fertilizers, but even this can be helpful in pointing out the needs of your garden’s soil.

Some gardens may not need side-dressing

  1. Gardens with soil that is, essentially, all compost
  2. Gardens that are 100% beans and Southern peas that have been inoculated with bacteria that help fix nitrogen

If your garden soil is all-compost in a raised bed, and the compost was all new this spring, then the odds are good that your plants will not need side-dressing. Some community gardens in my county fill new beds with a product called “Soil3”, from SuperSod. This is an all-compost product. Soil3 and similar composts available in other areas can provide all the nutrients the garden plants will need for the first summer. Organic fertilizers may be needed in increasing amounts in later years.

Which organic fertilizer is good for side-dressing?

  1. The vegetable garden fertilizer you already have
  2. Fish emulsion or a seed-meal-based fertilizer
  3. Worm compost, yard compost, compost tea

If you have a complete garden fertilizer already, one that you used in spring, use that again in mid-summer, following directions on the container.

However, the nutrient that is most often in short-supply by mid-summer is nitrogen. It can leave your soil by going into the air in addition to being washed away. If you can locate a higher nitrogen fertilizer product like the Alaska fish emulsion fertilizer or the seed-meal-based Nature’s Source Garden Plant Food, those can be good choices.

Composts are also good choices. To side-dress with these, be sure to rake them in — shallowly to avoid damaging roots — around the plants, covering it all with soil. Then water the compost in well to give the soil bacteria, fungi, and other small life-forms better access, to start breaking it down for use by plants. Use a big shovelful of yard compost, or a cup or two of worm compost, per plant. Worm compost is usually a more concentrated source of nutrients than yard compost.

If you make compost tea from your compost, to pour around your plants, root-damage becomes a non-problem. The tea may need to be poured around the plants more often than just once in mid-summer, for best effect. Compost tea applied to leaves can also slow down the growth of fungal leaf diseases. (Compost tea recipe is in the “treating mildews” section of the Summer Squash blog post.)

For gardens prone to leaf disease problems (pretty much every garden I have ever seen), regular use of compost tea can be helpful in extending harvests of some sensitive crops, like cucumbers and tomatoes, further into the summer.

Any gardener who has a small garden, but no compost pile or worm bin at home, might be interested in trying the compost tea bags. Sustane Compost Tea Bags are convenient, and no straining is required. I have used these to make tea for my own garden, and they seem helpful. When pressed for time, it is nice to not have to strain the compost bits out of the tea before filling a spray bottle.

 

Small Garden Ideas from Tuscany to Use Anywhere

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In hilltop towns in Tuscany (where I still am, for my husband’s job), bare ground is a rare thing. People here have had centuries to figure out where and how to grow herbs, flowers, and small vegetable plants in these mostly-stone towns. This makes Tuscany a good source of small garden ideas.
Examples of small garden ideas from Tuscany, for both in-ground and container gardens.

Small Garden Ideas for In-ground Gardens

For in-ground gardening, a small area can be blocked out with stones, one way or another, and one or more plants wedged into the dirt. The surface of the planting space might be just one square foot. Plants grown this way are usually tall, like rosebushes and grape vines.

Before seeing these tiny plantings, I would not have thought that one or two square feet of space was enough. Now, I can easily imagine planting a tiny garden that nourishes one or two beloved plants.

I am not sure how the small-space plants  grow so well with the limited surface area, for water to soak through to the roots. If I hadn’t seen so many plants grown this way, I would not believe that it could work!

Small garden ideas from Tuscany include the use of poles to support plants.
Poles set teepee style are ready for plants to grow. PHOTO/Amygwh

Slightly larger “yards”, that have more bare ground, make use of vertical space, too. Trellises or poles set teepee-style support lanky plants. Pole beans, cucumbers, and tomatoes are in this group.

Small Garden Ideas for Containers

Not too surprisingly, the most abundant form of small gardens I’ve seen in Tuscany are container gardens. In densely populated parts of towns, I see more herbs and flowers in pots than vegetables.

One herb plant can produce a lot of flavorful leaves for use in the kitchen. This makes herbs a good crop-choice for a gardener whose space is limited.

Outside the historic centers, outside the city walls, people have slightly more space for gardening. This is where I have seen more vegetables and fruits (strawberries, lemons, pomegranates) growing in containers.

These container gardens usually hold just one kind of crop in each container. However, there may be several pots with flowers in them set nearby. The grouped-containers give the planting a sense of abundance.

Lemon tree in container in Tuscany
Lemon tree in container in Tuscany.

In the U.S., I have seen more diverse single-pot plantings that provide a different visual effect, if that is important for your yard.

My time in Tuscany has helped me see container plants and their potential in a whole new way. Hopefully, the pictures here will provide other small-space gardeners with some useful ideas, too!

Home Vegetable Gardens in Italy

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I will be in Italy until my husband’s work here is done for the summer. I miss growing my own summer veggies, but I do get to see how vegetable gardens in Italy are set up. Here is one garden that I saw on the shore of Lake Trasimeno:

The lake is beautiful. I made the little video in a town called San Feliciano. We also stopped at Castiglione del Lago, where we could see more of the lake from the top of the old fort.

View of Lake Trasimeno from the fort at Castiglione del Lago.
View of Lake Trasimeno from the fort at Castiglione del Lago. PHOTO/Amygwh

Visiting the fort reminded me of when we took the kids (24 years ago?) to Fort Pulaski, near Savannah. We all had fun walking around the fort and seeing the cannons! The fort at Castiglione del Lago is about 600 years older, and its walls are higher, but the whole fort-experience didn’t seem very different.

Home vegetable gardens in Italy that I’ve seen so far give me that same feeling — that they are the same and yet a little different.

They do produce a lot of good food. The cool season vegetables like onions and lettuce look mature and ready to pull from the garden. Summer vegetables are in various states of development. Some gardens have a few older tomato plants, with large green tomatoes on them, abut also a few younger tomato plants, just beginning to flower. I plant my tomatoes this way — a few early and a few late, to stretch out the harvest.

One less-familiar feature of the food gardens I’ve seen is that supports for plants like tomatoes are almost always made from bamboo or from long sticks/branches. I have not seen the durable cages or supports made from metal like we tend to use in the U.S.

Another is that larger vegetable gardens in Italy are still planted in rows, like little farms. This planting pattern can make sense even in the U.S., where gardeners with lots of space often have power-equipment that works best when it has plenty of room for maneuvering.

Large home vegetable gardens in Italy are still planted in rows.
Large home vegetable gardens in Italy are still planted in rows. PHOTO/Amygwh

Just like at home, though, people who have less space to work with plant their gardens differently.

It is great to see the creative use of the tiny spaces that many gardeners here have to work in! These gardens often combine plants in a way that is similar to the intensive planting model I am used to seeing at home.

They still, though, leave plenty of room between plants, because this is an arid region. It gets much less rain than we get in the Southeastern U.S. Wider plant-spacing gives each root system a little more soil to scavenge water from.

Gardeners with even smaller patches of ground available, or none, grow their crops in containers. In parts of cities where many people walk past each day, I have seen more herbs than vegetables. Outside the crowded parts of town, though, on less-traveled streets, more containers include vegetables and fruits like strawberries.

Peppers and green beans growing in containers.
Peppers and green beans growing in containers. PHOTO/Amygwh

The choice of crops for each garden, like at home, is also very personal. One of my favorites so far is the all-artichoke garden, in a picture below.

At home, I know plenty of gardeners who grow ONLY tomatoes, because that is the crop most important to them.

They know that tomatoes taste best when they are grown and harvested right at home, so that is the crop they grow. They don’t waste their effort, space, money, or time on crops that are less important to them.

Maybe the all-artichoke gardener feels the same way about his/her chosen crop.

An all-artichoke vegetable garden in Italy.
An all-artichoke vegetable garden in Italy, outside Montepulciano. PHOTO/Amygwh

Summer Squash in the Southern Garden

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One of my most-favorite lines ever in a UGA Extension publication is about summer squashes. The line is in a table that lists recommended varieties for each type of crop. It says, for which varieties of summer squashes (including zucchini) to plant in the garden, “all are good and easy to grow.”

This line still makes me laugh. In a way, it matches my experience. In early summer the plants look great and produce plenty of flowers and small squashes. Unfortunately, it could also read “all are finicky and frustrating to grow”, since many summer-squash plants seem to drop into wilted piles of yellowing leaves in mid-summer, long before we have eaten too much squash. When I first started gardening in Georgia, I was lucky to get five or six good-sized squashes from a plant before it keeled over.

Southern Vs. Northern Experiences with Summer Squash

I am not the only Southern gardener to be troubled by a too-small squash harvest or plants that die too soon. However, Northern gardeners do not seem to have this problem. The complaint I hear from Northern gardeners is quite the opposite – they have mountainous harvests of zucchini and yellow squashes that keep coming all summer long.

Really, the complaint is one that doubles as a brag – their squashes are so very productive that, when the harvests begin, it is risky to leave your car windows open. The risk is that gardeners who have a superabundance of squash are likely to drop a large bag of squashes into the car as “a gift”.

Legend has it that over-squashed gardeners also will fill a bag with squashes, hang the bag on the  doorknob of an unsuspecting neighbor’s home, ring the doorbell, and run. By the end of August, people are totally tired of squashes, especially zucchini.

I have never had so much summer squash and zucchini that I was not happy to find another one in the garden. Happily, as I have gained experience and understanding of what is going on in the garden, my plants survive longer and the harvests are larger. I have found that it is possible to have plenty of summer squash in the Southern garden, with a little planning.

Problems with Summer Squash in the Southern Garden

Squash Vine Borers

These are the cause of much anguish in the squash patch. The borers are larvae (caterpillars) of a day-flying moth that lays its eggs on stems of our squash plants. When the eggs hatch, the babies bore into stem, where they eat the soft part of the inside of the stem. The borers seem to not eat the toughest fibers, because one sign that borers have caused your squash plants to wilt is that the stem looks frayed. You may also see some frass (caterpillar poo), a golden-orange-brown, granular-looking mush, around or in the damaged section of stem.

What to do? If the plant is already a wilted mass of yellowing leaves, it may be too late to save the plant. If, though, you look at the lower part of a squash stem, see little holes in the stem and maybe a little frass nearby, but the plant looks otherwise healthy, it is not too late!

Sequence of pictures zooming in on damaged stem of squash plant to find the squash vine borers.

Step 1:

Locate the sharpest blade on your pocket knife and use it to make a long slit in one side of the squash stem. The slit should run lengthwise on the stem; it should start below where the damage seems to be and extend above the damaged area. Use the tip of the knife blade to pry the slit open, so you can look inside and find the squash vine borers. Use the knife tip to remove (or kill, depending on your philosophical stance on garden pests) the borers from the stem. You might find just one, but you might find a half dozen or more.

Step 2:

Saturate the inside of the stem with a product that contains Bt for caterpillars (Thuricide is the brand I have been using – bought a few years ago and still works), and spray up the length of the stem on the outside, too. If any borers are still alive inside the stem, the Bt for caterpillars (organic approved) should reverse that status fairly soon. If your Bt is powder form instead of liquid, do your best to fill the stem with the powder, and then liberally apply it along the outside of the stem.

Any Bt applied on the outside of the stem will wash away in the next rain or watering-event, so you might want to re-apply it a few times.

Step 3:

Mound up garden soil over the damaged section of stem. If you are feeling very industrious, you can try wrapping the damaged section with aluminum foil, but I find that just piling up some good soil over the damaged stem protects it from invasion by other pests. Also, squashes sometimes will send out new roots along buried sections of stem.

Step 4:

Consider the health-status of your plant. Summer squash in the Southern garden should be lush, with huge, dark green leaves. In my garden, the largest, fastest-growing squash plants survive squash vine borer damage much better than less-lush plants. If your plants are on the puny-side, side-dress with some organic fertilizer or a shovel-full of compost or composted manure.

Squash Bugs

Squash bugs look a lot like stink bugs as adults. As youngsters, they are called nymphs, and they move around in groups. The nymphs do not look at all like the adults, but if you see groups of insects scuttling around on your squash plants, they probably are squash bug nymphs.

Squash bug eggs on a leaf of summer squash in the Southern garden
Squash bug eggs on a leaf. PHOTO/Amygwh

These feed on the squash plants – leaves and fruits – and they can cause a lot of damage. An even bigger problem is that they can carry a squash disease called Cucurbit Yellow Vine, which can definitely kill your plants.

The adults and nymphs can be removed by knocking them into a tub of soapy water. It is a good idea, though, to check your plants for squash bug eggs.

You can use a piece of clear packing tape or a piece of duct tape to remove the eggs from your plants. Just press the sticky side of the tape to the collection of shiny eggs, remove the tape, fold it over, and smash the eggs inside the tape. Simple!

Removing all the eggs will help keep the population of adults and nymphs to a much lower level, which will limit the amount of damage they can do to your plants and reduce the risk of Cucurbit Yellow Vine.

Mildews

Summer squash in the Southern garden also is attacked by mildew diseases, both downy mildew and powdery mildew. If your plants die earlier in the summer, then these will not be a problem, because the mildews usually appear after mid-summer.

Downy mildew arrives at a slightly different time each summer in upper parts of the South. It can’t survive our winters, but it comes up from Florida where it survives just fine. If the petioles (leaf stems) are still standing up on your plants, but the leaves look brown and droopy, then downy mildew is a likely cause. There is no effective spray or treatment for downy mildew, but preventive care can help.

Leaf diseases like downy mildew (and powdery mildew) need leaf wetness to infect the leaves and grow. Keeping the leaves dry as much as possible, by careful watering, can delay infection. Increasing air-flow around the leaves, so they dry faster after a rain, also helps. Remove weeds as much as possible, and allow plenty of space between plants.

Also, healthy, well-grown plants get less disease than puny plants. Just like for squash vine borers, consider whether you might need to side-dress your plants with fertilizer or compost to improve their condition.

Powdery mildew becomes a big problem in warm, humid conditions. Since that pretty much describes several months of weather across the entire Southeast, it is a safe bet that powdery mildew will find your plants eventually.

Treating Mildews in Organic Gardens

For both downy and powdery mildews, the bacterial product Serenade, which is organic-approved, can slow down the rate of infection.  It should be applied to plants every 7-10 days, before any sign of infection is seen. If you see signs of disease on your plants (mottled or brown spots on leaves, for example), it is too late to get much benefit from using the product.

In a couple of Cobb County community gardens, the use of Serenade has helped extend the “squash season” for local gardeners. If your squash patch has suffered from mildew attack in past years, you might consider trying the spray, but do not wait much longer to start. By July, infection may already have begun.

Another option is to spray with homemade products of either compost tea (one gallon of well-aged compost in a five gallon bucket filled with water, soaked for three days, then strained to use in a spray bottle) or a baking-soda spray, both of which can slow down an infection. Neither of these has been shown to work as well as Serenade (which works less well than chemical fungicides), but some gardeners like to try the DIY route first.

If you are a DIY gardener, this is the recipe for baking-soda spray recipe from one of my Rodale gardening books:

Dissolve 1 teaspoon of baking soda in a quart of warm water, with up to a teaspoon of dish soap or insecticidal soap added. Spray the leaves, including the undersides. 

For both compost tea and the baking soda solution, apply to plants much more frequently than the Serenade.

Hoping for Plenty of Summer Squash from the Southern Garden

Summer squashes seem to be an essential vegetable in the South. They are the base of many favorite “church casseroles” – dishes that fill the tables at summertime potluck suppers and appear at your door in hard times. I don’t remember seeing squash-casseroles when I was growing up in Oklahoma, but I certainly have seen (and enjoyed) many since moving to Georgia. In the South, the squash harvest is important.

The garden/farm where Joe and I used to volunteer got around squash-plant losses by planting MANY squash plants over several weeks. Even when some plants died, more remained and produced squash. If the squash harvest didn’t look abundant enough, we just planted more.

In home gardens, this approach is not really feasible. Hence, the long blog post about upcoming problems with summer squash in the Southern garden.

Best wishes for a squash-filled summer!

-Amy

 

Flowers Make Us Smile

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Many gardeners find that flowers make them happy. We vegetable gardeners include flowers in our plantings, too. Some are to support our pollinating insect friends, but some of the flowers are just for us. We plant them because we love them. As we strive to find balance in our yards, between edibles and ornamental plants, it may help to know that flowers are  “a positive emotion inducer” . Flowers make us smile. This is a good reason to plant a few more.

Edith's Darling rose, in April. The flowers made me smile.Our reaction to roses, in particular, has been studied, and researchers found that office workers were more relaxed in the presence of roses.

Of course, if you are like me, living in the Southeastern US and having lost numerous rose bushes to fungal diseases over the years, the idea that roses can lift our spirits may seem wrong. Growing them can be a frustrating experience!

‘Bonica’ (a shrub rose) did well in our yard for several years, but none of the next five or six roses I tried survived for long. Thrips seemed especially attracted to flowers on the white rose. Their feeding turned the petals a mottled brown, so it was a big relief when that plant died. It never looked good.

Of course, if I had been willing to use an assortment of pesticides on the plants, they might still be alive, but that chemical-use was never going to happen.

‘Madame Isaac Pereire’ survived longest of all my past rose bushes, and the fragrance of the flowers was amazing! I loved that plant. Eventually, though, we had a long stretch of wet years that really boosted fungal growth.

I do have one rose bush currently alive, an Edith’s Darling shrub rose. It is in a large container, and right now it is in a friend’s yard (thank you, Cheryl!) where it will get watered while I am away. When I delivered it to my friend for safe-keeping, the little shrub already had black spot fungus on its leaves. This is not a good sign for its continued liveliness.

If I were home, I would be using a baking-soda spray on the leaves to slow down the black spot, but that will have to wait.

In spite of the leaf disease, the little shrub also had many flowers in various stages of bloom. Some flowers were still tightly closed buds, some were partly-opened buds, some were more open, and some were in fully-opened, opulent splendor.  Earlier in spring, the unfolding flowers and sweet fragrance made me smile every time I went near the plant.

Some roses that are in Rome's Roseto Comunale.

I will not see that shrub again for a while, but there are other flowers where I am now. We are stationed in a small hilltop town in Tuscany, the same town we were in last summer. There is a lot of stone everywhere, with very little unpaved or bare ground; “lawns” are scarce and tiny.

However, colorful geraniums and petunias in window-boxes brighten the spaces, and rosebushes are scattered around town, too.

When we were in Rome earlier this week, the group went to the Coliseum. I have seen enough stone recently, so I deserted the group and walked about a half mile away to the public rose garden, the Roseto Comunale. This garden is open for only a couple of months each year, when the roses are in bloom. I took some pictures.

Flowers make us smile, but I do not know if pictures of flowers have the same effect. A picture-grouping of a small assortment of the incredible selection of roses (more than 1,000 kinds, I think) is included here, just in case the smile-thing works for pictures, too.

 

Small Yards Can Support a Lot of Pollinators

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Many of us would like to do more to support our pollinator insects like bees and butterflies. They are important to all of us who like to eat delicious and varied meals! One  action step often suggested to support our insect friends is that we plant more pollinator gardens.  However, we don’t all have a lot of sunny areas to turn into flower beds for the bees, butterflies, and other helper-insects. The good news is that even small yards can support pollinators – a lot of them.

How is this possible? One very easy way is to include flowers in your lawn.

Clover, dandelions, and other lawn flowers support pollinators

An increasing number of studies show that lawns that contain flowering “weeds” are important resources for pollinators. If we think about it just a little, these results make sense.

Flowers of plants like dandelion, clover, wood sorrel, and violets are sources of nectar and pollen, which are food for the pollinators. When a lawn has all one kind of plant, like fescue or Bermudagrass, there is less food to support many of these insects.

Here are two example studies:

Lerman and Milam’s 2016 study  includes a table (Table 1) that shows a trend: lawns that include more flowers have more bees.

Larson, Kesheimer, and Potter (2014) , in another study, collected about 50 different kinds of bees from Kentucky lawns that included clover and dandelion flowers.

Some neighborhoods have only small patches of lawn. The studies suggest that even these small yards can support pollinators by allowing flowers like clover and dandelion to bloom.

This works for farms, too

Joe and I used to volunteer at a small garden/farm in our county. We mostly worked in “weed management”, with hoes, but we still had fun. The garden included a couple of large fields that were tilled, planted, and fertilized by tractor. It also had some very large raised beds for growing additional vegetables. The garden produced an astonishing abundance of food.

The only flowers that we planted on purpose were sunflowers. The upper field had a row of sunflowers along one edge every year.

A visiting friend asked me once, “where are the pollinator beds?” This was a serious question, and the answer was only obvious if you knew where to look.

Flower-filled lawn of the San Biagio church in Tuscany is a haven for pollinators.

I had been working there for a few years, so I already knew the secret.

Patches of  lawn separated and surrounded all the crop-areas, and flowers of weeds like dandelion and clover sparked the green expanses like stars. Plants that supported pollinators were all around us!

Bees and other pollinators could be seen visiting all of those flowers. In addition, beehives on the property produced enough honey that it was obvious the bees were finding plenty of nectar.

Work less and be a trend setter

You can  support pollinators with less work by allowing volunteer flowers to grow in your lawn. A separate bed of herbs and flowers that support pollinators is nice, too, but it is not the only way to go.

The main difficulty in allowing dandelions to brighten your lawn may be to your sense of social acceptability. In many suburban neighborhoods, these bee-friendly flowers are not allowed! However, the current ideal of an all-turfgrass lawn is just a fashion — like a beehive hairdo or bell-bottom jeans. We can allow it to pass from its current state of desirability to one of “well, that’s what we did in those days”.

My own flower-filled lawn might not be enough to start a new trend, but I have seen some wonderful landscapes that are underlain by mixed-plant lawns.

Examples of flower-filled lawns

This is my second summer to be in Italy for Joe’s work (an interim position, so next year we will not be here). One of my great joys has been seeing clover-filled lawns around historic buildings. The beautiful church, San Biagio, just outside Montepulciano, sits in a flower-filled lawn.

Clover-studded lawn at La Foce estate in Tuscany provides nectar and pollen to support pollinating insects.

It is great to walk up to the church and see bees and bee-mimics (flower-flies) zooming through the clover!

More convincing for others, though, may be the formal La Foce estate gardens in the Val d’Orcha, in Southern Tuscany. The lines of cypress trees, clipped boxwood hedges, fountains, and grand staircases are set on a lawn (clipped very short) that includes clover and other flowers.

It is possible that I am the only person to visit this amazing landscape who turned her camera to photograph the ground. However, I loved seeing the clover and admired the practicality of not-messing-with the lawn. The role of the lawn seemed to be as a backdrop to show off the geometric shapes of the boxwoods, the tall cypress, and what we call “the hardscape.” It worked, too, even with clover.

Associating flowering lawns with beautiful landscapes might help turn the tide in favor of clover, dandelions, and other lawn flowers. Then, owners of even small yards will be proud to support pollinators from edge-to-edge.

 

Clover is an important source of food for bees. Plant some!
Clover is an important source of food for bees. Plant some!

Sequence of Ripening Fruit in My Southern Yard

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We began eating ripe fruit from the yard a few weeks ago, and the future of fruit in the yard looks promising. Several kinds of fruiting plants are in flower, and others are loaded with unripe fruits that will be ready to eat soon. The sequence of ripening fruit in my Southern yard begins with strawberries.

Strawberries ripen first in my Southern yard

We grow a June-bearing type of strawberry, called ‘Chandler’, instead of an ever-bearing type. Even though the “June” part seems wrong (most of them ripen in May in our yard), this type of strawberry produces all its berries within 5-6 weeks in spring. Ever-bearing types produce berries all summer long.

The sequence of ripening fruit in my Southern yard begins with strawberries.
We’ve been eating strawberries from the yard for a few weeks. PHOTO/Amygwh

In general, strawberries are a low-maintenance home-garden fruit for the South.

With our June-bearing ‘Chandler’, we can harvest and eat-or-preserve the whole crop in a short time-frame. After harvesting the last ripe berries, I can take the bird-netting off the strawberry patch, renovate the bed (see UGA’s Home Garden Strawberries for guidance), and then leave the patch mostly on its own for the rest of the summer.

This feels like a win-win to me. We harvest  in early spring when other fruits are not yet ready, and we do most of the work in one big burst after the fruiting is done for the season.

Mulberries are second in our sequence of ripening fruit

A great feature of our mulberry tree is that the birds planted it for us. We didn’t have to dig a hole in the hard red clay or worry about keeping a new tree watered in the first couple of years after planting! If the birds don’t plant mulberry trees in your yard, to come up wild like ours, you can also buy trees to plant. Then, of course, you have to dig the hole and remember to provide water.

Mulberries are second in the sequence of ripening fruit in my yard.
Mulberries will be ripe in another week or two. PHOTO/Amygwh

Even better than a “volunteer” fruit tree is one that needs zero maintenance, as long as it stays in-bounds. Our first little tree came up too close to a pathway, and we prune it every year to keep it out of the way. Otherwise, there is no work involved in keeping this tree.

Eventually, another mulberry tree came up in a much better spot, several feet away. These both bear fruit now, but it took a few years for them to be mature enough. The location is fairly shaded; if the trees had more sunlight they would produce more fruit, but what we get makes me happy.

Not everyone loves mulberries, I know. Dealing with the stems can be tricky. Also, birds can make a huge mess after eating the fruits.

Mulberries, though, are a fruit from my childhood. When I harvest and eat mulberries, I am a kid again. Also, they are very good in pies.

The mulberries here are larger than the ones I picked in Oklahoma, but the flavor is just like I remember.

Plums and blueberries are tied for third in the sequence of ripening fruit

Beginning in mid-to-late June, plums and rabbit-eye blueberries (the earliest varieties) begin to ripen. These are the feast days for fruit lovers! The mixed harvest continues until mid-July.

Blueberries will be ripe beginning in mid-to-late June.
Blueberries will be ripe beginning in mid-to-late June.

Home gardeners usually do not need to spray their blueberry bushes with any kind of pest control products or disease control products, because the plants are hardy in the upper South. They do need acidic soil, though.

The bushes benefit from some pruning as they age, and some fertilizer to keep the berries coming. Caterpillars attack one of my blueberry bushes each year — just that one bush, not any of the others. Every year when I see the caterpillars in late summer, I prune out the branches they are congregated on to remove from the yard. That is not a hard chore, just a weird one.

Clemson University’s fact sheet on planting and maintenance of home garden blueberries contains complete information about choosing, planting, and maintaining blueberries in the South.

Plums in May, not ripe yet.
Plums in May, not ripe yet.

Our plum tree is still a young tree; this is its second year of fruiting. It is the variety AU Rubrum, developed through Auburn University. Right now, its green fruits are nearly full sized, which makes me think they will begin to ripen soon.

The tree would produce more fruit if it were planted in a location that has more direct sunlight, but our yard, like many in North Georgia, contains some very tall trees. So do our neighbors’ yards. In the hot summertime, the shade from all those trees helps keep the neighborhood cool. However, when we are looking for places to plant sun-loving crops, the shade can be a problem.

Blackberries and raspberries are also tied for third place in the sequence

Our sequence of ripening fruits includes ‘Heritage’ red raspberry canes, planted in the shadier backyard,  that tolerate more shade than most fruits. We planted blackberries in a sunny part of the side-yard. Cultivated blackberries do not tolerate shade very well. A few canes of black raspberry are near the blackberries. We also have some wineberries, an invasive species of berry, in the side yard. These can take some shade, so they are behind the blackberries, where the sunlight is more limited. All of these bramble-fruits are delicious!

More fruits will come ripe as the season rolls along, with grapes, paw paws, and persimmons. These are all good. In addition, because we can’t plant as much fruit as we would prefer, we usually supplement what grows in the yard with fruit from our local parks. We rarely see anyone else picking the wild blackberries, muscadines, and persimmons that grow there.

What does your sequence of fruit look like this year?

 

 

 

Flowers in My Yard on Mother’s Day Weekend

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Were other moms as lazy on Mother’s Day as I was? I spent a good chunk of the day wandering around the yard, admiring the “good” parts and gathering the energy to deal with untidy, weedy, and odd parts. Best of all, plenty of plants were making flowers in my yard.

This hardy amaryllis came from the yard of my mother-in-law (aka: ‘Grandma’) in Seabrook, Tx, many years ago. We planted them in several locations around the yard, not knowing which would be best. It turns out that the sunny front flower bed supports the healthiest-looking patch.

Hardy amaryllis blooms every year in my North Georgia garden.
Hardy amaryllis, from South Texas. PHOTO/Amygwh

The daylilies behind and beside the amaryllis will bloom later in the summer.

Purple clematis flowers.
Purple clematis flowers on Mother’s day. PHOTO/Amygwh

I didn’t get to see the clematis flowers last May, because Joe and I left town for his summer work-trip before the buds opened.

Several herbs were flowering, too.

Comfrey, garden sage, and lemon thyme all had flowers on mother's day weekend.

The oldest parsley plants have lots of flower buds, but no open flowers. The newer parsley, planted within the past 7-8 months, won’t bloom until either the coming fall or sometime next spring, depending on the weather.

If I included pictures of EVERYTHING in flower this past weekend, there would also be pictures of dandelions, yellow wood sorrel, hearts-a-busting, foamflower, clover, and more.

One more picture, though, won’t crash anyone’s email or internet access (I don’t think):

Bunching onions have gone-to-flower.
Bunching onions have gone-to-flower.

Seeing the big round flower-shapes makes it easier to understand where “ornamental alliums”, with their giant ball-shaped flower-heads of pink of purple, come from.

Many plants in my yard have unopened flower buds now, and some have fruit (plums, strawberries, blueberries, pawpaws, persimmons, mulberries, etc.) that show where the flowers have been-and-gone.

What flowers are open in your yard this week?