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Edible Jewels of Opar is Beautiful, too

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Jewels of Opar is coming up in my yard, just now in late summer. I would be surprised, but purslane is coming up, too. I tend to forget how late the purslane arrives! Jewels of Opar and purslane are in the same plant family, and the food qualities of the two are similar, as well.

The leaves of both are a little slimy inside, and they both have a mild flavor.  I snack on both as I work in my garden in late summer. Jewels of Opar in my yard is missing that slightly tart quality of purslane, but both make good additions to a salad.

They both also are reported to contain some oxalic acid, like spinach does. Anyone who is troubled by oxalic acid in food should probably cook them first. When you pour off the cooking water, most of the soluble oxalic acid will go out with the water.

Edible jewels of opar is beautiful, making it a good choice for a front yard food garden.

However, if you are looking for a “stealth” food crop to grow in a neighborhood that doesn’t allow edible plants in the front yard, Jewels of Opar is one to try.

Southern Exposure Seed Exchange  (SESE) sells seeds for this plant. In my yard, Jewels of Opar acts like an annual, tossing its seeds at the end of summer to come up as plants, in random locations, the following year. The SESE information says that the plant is perennial in zones 8-and-warmer. Other sites suggest that it is perennial beginning in zone 9a.

The traits of self-sowing and being perennial in warm-enough areas might make this plant a useful addition to a permaculture planting.

I transplanted my first Jewels of Opar plant years ago from our Plant A Row for the Hungry garden, where it was a consistent volunteer (just like I was!). Since then, it has popped up around the yard every year.

 

Urban Garden Ideas from Garfield Park Conservatory

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I know, Garfield Park Conservatory is outside the Southeastern US, but the ideas offered in the garden in Chicago transfer to Georgia easily. I visited there this past week and brought back pictures to share.
Urban Demonstration garden in Chicago uses containers and trellises to grow more food in less space.

Crops in containers

Containers for garden crops were enormous, and this is probably for the best. Smaller containers heat up faster on sunny summer days, and roots are in danger of overheating as a result. With larger containers, roots are more protected. The soil may also dry out more slowly in a huge container, since there is so much of it.

Different structures supported plants throughout the garden. In containers, plants like eggplants and peppers need support just to keep from falling out of the pots as their fruits get large and heavy.

For smaller plants, like some of the peppers, supports were slender bamboo canes pushed into the soil around the plants. This can be enough to keep them from falling over.

For tall, heavy plants, like some of the eggplants, four  bamboo poles (sturdy ones) were set firmly into the soil near the edges of the pots. Then heavy twine tied those all together, to hold up the plants.

For tomato plants, which can become very heavy, twine is insufficient to hold up the crop. Tomatoes in containers had four bamboo poles stuck into the pots like for the eggplants, but instead of twine, metal fencing (field knot fencing, I think) with a wide mesh was wrapped around the poles to create a tomato cage.

Trellises for vining crops

One in-ground trellis in the garden was built from wood. The wood pieces were wide enough that squashes could be set on the slats, like shelving. This is a brilliant way to protect developing crops like squash and melons from soil-borne funguses, like Southern blight, that could rot the fruits!

Cucumbers were vining up some of the same metal fencing that supported the tomatoes, but the cucumbers were planted in the ground, not in containers.

Other small garden ideas from the park

'Burgundy' okra is a good choice for small gardens.
‘Burgundy’ okra is a good choice for small gardens. PHOTO/Amygwh

Smaller varieties of some crops were being grown, like ‘Burgundy’ okra, which is both beautiful and shorter. I grow ‘Cajun Jewel’, which is also short, in my small garden, but it doesn’t have the amazing red stems that ‘Burgundy’ has.

The demonstration garden also showed an alteration of one raised bed, with a little ground-level area created at one end. Strawberries were growing in that space. Since they are a shallow-rooted crop, strawberries don’t always need to be in a deep, raised bed. A picture is in the photo-collage above. It looks like a wading pool for toddlers built next to the big-people pool.

Meanwhile, in my own garden

This is my weekend to start some fall crops. For me, the first will be carrots and winter radishes. If you are in the Southeastern US and are not sure what to plant or when to plant it, there is a book (!) available that can help.

If you already know, but have just one or two questions, please feel welcome to use the contact page to send me an email. I would be happy to help.

-Amy

 

Do You Have Your Fall Garden Seeds Yet?

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If you don’t already have the seeds you need to plant a fall veggie garden, and you live near me (one county north of Atlanta), it would be a good idea to go find them soon. I was checking my own planting calendar, and any crop with a days-to-maturity of 70-80 days needs to be planted within the next week or so.

A lot of fall crops will mature in less time, so they don’t need to planted quite so soon. Also, if you are planning to buy plants, you have oodles of time. Fall vegetable plants won’t show up in garden centers for a few more weeks. When they do, that is the time to purchase and set them into the garden, providing a bit of shade to ease the transplants into their new lives in the ground.

Seedlings of 'Astia' zucchini for containers, coming up in my half-barrel planter.
Seedlings of ‘Astia’ zucchini for containers, coming up in my half-barrel planter. PHOTO/Amygwh

There’s still time for a late planting of some summer crops

If you have not yet had enough summer vegetables, bush beans are a crop that matures quickly. Bush bean seeds planted now, in metro-Atlanta, will yield plenty of delicious beans before the first frost.

Last year, I planted bush beans in early August, and I was very glad that I did.

This year when I got back from Italy, I planted a few seeds of a different warm season crop that is supposed to mature quickly. The crop is a kind of zucchini, ‘Astia’ (from Renee’s Garden), bred for growing in containers. The little plants are supposed to produce harvest-sized veggies in about 50 days. Harvest-size for ‘Astia’ is smaller than for most zucchini, but that is ok.

In the past, when I have planted a second crop  of zucchini, they have avoided being attacked by the squash bugs and squash vine borers. Sadly, a mildew-fungus killed the plants before the veggies were big enough to harvest. I have never planted zucchini this late, though, so I am curious how the experiment will turn out. You will be among the first to know!

Presentations and workshops

In other news, I gave a Fall Garden Planning presentation at a local community garden (Hyde Farm) on Saturday, and the gardeners there were awesome! It is great to know more people who value good food and want to grow some of their own.

Garden spider (Argiope) has caught something big for dinner!
Garden spider (Argiope), has caught something big for dinner! PHOTO/Amygwh

On Saturday, August 25th, at 7 (note new time!!!) 3 pm, I will be giving a similar presentation at TruPrep. One great thing about this particular store is that it stocks seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.  Also, unlike many garden centers that are associated with home improvement stores, TruPrep is likely to still have plenty of seeds in the store. If you need seeds and are in the neighborhood, check there.

Other upcoming events for me include a Pollinator Symposium in Conyers, GA, at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit, on September 22. Monarchs Across Georgia, a group I volunteer for, is putting on the Symposium. I am scheduled to talk about pesticides (imidacloprid in particular) in half of an hour-long afternoon session that I am sharing with a person who will talk about growing milkweeds from seed.

Hoping that all your gardens are growing well!

 

-Amy

Large Black Wasp on Flowers

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We finally returned from our summer in Italy, to find the garden full of weeds — no surprise there — and large black wasps on the milkweed flowers. The same flowers also were buzzing with carpenter bees, which looked almost small compared to the wasps. If you are familiar with carpenter bees, then you know that, in the world of bees, they are giants.

Great Black Wasp and Carpenter Bee on milkweed.

To see such large wasps flying among the giant bees was, at first, alarming. When I realized what they were, though, I moved in for a closer look.

The name of the large black wasps is Great Black Wasp.

What do Great Black Wasps eat?

As adults, these wasps are vegetarian, eating nectar and pollen. When they move from flower to flower, the wasps carry pollen on their legs and bodies and pollinate the flowers. This means they are yet another of our beneficial garden insects.

As larvae, they are not vegetarian. They eat grasshoppers, cicadas, and katydids. When a female adult Great Black Wasp finds an insect like a katydid, it paralyzes the insect/prey using its stinger. Then, it carries the insect/prey to a burrow it has dug in the ground, where it lays an egg.

When the wasp egg hatches, the larva that comes from the egg will eat the insect. A hatched wasp larvae can eat more than one insect, so the adult will stuff at least one more insect down the burrow, and as many as five more, for each wasp egg.

Where do Great Black Wasps live?

Great Black Wasps live across much of the United States and into Canada, but they are not commonly seen in the upper part of the Western U.S.

Great Black Wasps are in the group of wasps called Digger Wasps. These are mostly solitary wasps, each female digging its own holes in the ground for its eggs. Digger wasps don’t live together in one place, they are not honeybees in a hive, but they sometimes congregate. In a way, they are kind of like the suburbanites of bees, each with its own space, but grouped in a way that feels less lonely.

Are they really as big as I think they are?

If you are like me, when you see your first Great Black Wasp you will think it is at least two inches long. If you have seen a female, the surprise will trick your mind into believing the fish tale — “it was THIS BIG!” In reality, even though females are larger than the males, the biggest Great Black Wasps are closer to an inch and a half long.

Do Great Black Wasps sting people?

If you do something crazy like chase one around with a camera, it might (or it might not!), but these wasps are busy with their own agendas. If you leave them alone, they will keep doing their work of eating nectar and pollen, digging burrows for their babies, and hunting insects.

The time of greatest activity for these large black wasps is now. By the middle or end of September (depending on where you live), the adults will no longer be flying. Their job of laying eggs and providing food for their larvae will be done. The babies, though, will emerge next summer, and then there will be more Great Black Wasps on my flowers.

Other beneficial wasps you may see at the end of summer include the potter wasp and blue winged digger wasp.

Beneficial Garden Insects: Flower Flies

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While I’ve been walking outside our little town in Italy, missing my vegetable garden, I have paid attention to the local plants. On good days, I see a lot of flowers and pollinator-insects. At first, I thought the pollinators were all bees. Then, I looked closer. Many of them are actually flower flies, a different group of beneficial garden insects.

Flower flies, which are beneficial garden insects, look like bees but without the sting.
Flower flies are beneficial garden insects.

What are flower flies?

Flower flies really are flies, but a lot of them look like bees. It is possible that looking like a bee prevents some predators from eating them. I don’t know if that mimicry really works, though. We used to have a dog that ate carpenter bees when she could catch them. The stinging inside her mouth didn’t seem to stop her from catching and eating more.

Flower flies do not sting or bite, but they do eat nectar and/or pollen as adults. As they visit flowers to gather food, they pollinate the flowers.  Flower fly babies (larvae) eat aphids and other small insects. These are definitely beneficial garden insects!

Organic gardens, in particular, rely on pollinators and predators in the garden to increase harvests and reduce pest problems. We can wait for our helpful predators (like flower flies, wasps and ladybugs) to eat the aphids, no spraying required!

Flower flies are also known as syrphid flies and as hover flies.

How can I tell which is a flower fly and which is a bee?

With only a brief glance, it is not easy to tell bees and flower flies apart. If you have the fortitude (and lack of bee-allergies) that allows you to look a little longer, you might see the difference.

Flower flies are beneficial garden insects that can look like bees.

Check the antennae

Flower flies have short, straight, stubby antennae. The antennae may be so short that they are hard to see. Bees have longer antennae, and their antennae are more likely to bend.

Check the wings

All flies have only two wings (one pair), and you can easily see them. One wing is on each side of the body.

Bees have fours wings (two pairs). The larger front pair of wings is easy to see, but the hind-wings can be hidden below the front pair. You might not be able to see that there are four wings.

Check the eyes

Eyes of flower flies are larger, and more on the front of their heads. Bee eyes are shifted a little to the sides of their heads.

Check the back legs

Flies do not collect pollen in clumps on their back legs. Some kinds of bees, especially our native, solitary bees, also do not collect and carry pollen on their back legs.

However, bumble bees and honeybees often store clumps of pollen on their back legs, to carry back to their colonies. If you see a bee-like insect that has pads of orange, or red, or yellow on its back legs, that is a good sign that the insect is some kind of bumble bee or a honeybee.

How can I attract flower flies to my garden?

University of California has published an easy-to-use table of plants that attract flower flies (see page 16). The table is deep within a document that is not super-easy to read, and not all the plants will grow well in the Southeastern US, but many will.

Here is a short list of plants that are known to attract and/or support flower flies to your organic garden, that I know will grow in the Southeastern US:

buckwheat, coriander/cilantro, thyme, Italian oregano, sweet alyssum, fennel, tansy, white-flowered yarrow

Stale Bread Plus Tomatoes and Basil Equals Great Food

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One new favorite food that I found while in Italy uses stale bread as its base. The dish is called panzanella locally, but in English the name is bread salad. I know — the name “bread salad” isn’t inspiring. The appearance isn’t, either. However, the flavor explains why so many people keep basil plants growing in pots on their windowsills and doorsteps. Bread salad taught me that stale bread plus tomatoes and basil equals great food.

Doorstep gardens in Tuscany, like this one, often include a pot of basil.
Doorstep gardens in Tuscany, like this one, often include a pot of basil. PHOTO/Amygwh

After being served bread salad a few times here, I asked one of my new Italian friends how to make it. This is what I was told:

Traditional panzanella, or bread salad, recipe

Start with stale bread (3-4 days old) that is dry and hard.

Break up the bread, then drop the pieces into water for brief saturation. Then, squeeze out the excess water as much as possible.

Mix onion, white vinegar, and a LOT of chopped basil into the bread in small amounts. Keeping adding and mixing until the flavor is good. Then, add olive oil.

Chop tomatoes, drain them, add salt, and continue to drain them until they are fairly dry.

If cucumbers are available, chop them to add to the salad, but do not use the gel/seed part.

Tips to make the generalized recipe work

The standard, soft, sandwich-style bread that is prevalent in the U.S. might not work well in bread salad. I think that the bread needs to be the kind made of just 4 ingredients – flour, water, yeast, and salt. Whole wheat works, but so does bread made from white flour. Joe and I have made the salad with both kinds, with good results.

We don’t have a basil plant on our windowsill in Italy, but our friend makes herb-infused olive oils. She gave us a bottle of basil-infused olive oil to use instead of fresh basil, and it is glorious!

Notice that there are no guidelines for amounts of anything. Either Joe and I have been very lucky, since this is good every time we make it, or bread salad is nearly foolproof.

Less obvious (maybe) benefits of bread salad

  1. It uses an ingredient — old, hard bread — that might otherwise be wasted.  As a person who prefers to use up leftovers, even hard, stale, leftovers, rather than waste them, finding recipes for good food that use old bread well is a gift. Another way we have noticed that hard, stale bread is used is as a thickener for soups. Tomato soup, bean soup, vegetable soup — all contain bread that has been soaked, broken up, and dispersed throughout the broth.
  2. When tomatoes are in season and piling into the kitchen in large numbers, having an easy recipe (like this one) that uses them well is helpful. Ditto for cucumbers.
  3. If your basil is growing into an enormous plant, you can use that, too.

Let me know if you try making bread salad at home, and if you love it, too!

I hope your gardens are all growing well.

-Amy

Wood Pallet Gardens

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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 many wood pallet gardens 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 always packed solid with potting mix (I checked). Instead, in some, the 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! Tiny wood pallet gardens on bench-backs could be useful for spaces where sunlight might not reach the ground.

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!