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From Summer to Fall in the Garden

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

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

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

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

Transition from summer to fall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some minor troubles with cool-season crops

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

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

Something for the pollinators

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

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

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

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Consider Plant Families When Choosing Fruit Trees and Shrubs

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

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

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

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

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

What are plant families, and why are they important?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wait — how do you say that?

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

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

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

Plant families for some popular fruits

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

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

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

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

Ebenaceae – American persimmon and Asian persimmon

Annonaceae – paw paw

Lythraceae – pomegranate

Adoxaceae – elderberry

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

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

Fruit plant families in my yard now

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

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

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

Postcard from the Mississippi Gulf Coast

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

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

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Preserving the Small Garden Harvest

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

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

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

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

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

Freezing

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

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

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

Dehydrating

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

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

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

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

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

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

Canning

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

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

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

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

Fermenting

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

Storing “As Is”

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

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

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

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

For All

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

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State of the Garden, mid-June

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

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

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

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

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

Plastic tub containing harvested tomatoes and arugula from the garden

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

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

Also in the garden right now

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

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

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

And some flowers

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

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

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

In other news

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

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

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

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

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Learning from a Soil Test

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

logo for Mississippi State Extension

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

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

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

What this all means

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

pH

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

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

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

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

Phosphorus

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

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

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

Potassium

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

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

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

Magnesium

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

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

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

Zinc

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

Calcium

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

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

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

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

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

Soluble salts

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

Organic matter and percent nitrogen

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

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

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

Fertilizers for the year, based on the soil test results

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

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

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

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

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The Radish Capital of America

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When we moved to Long Beach, MS, we did not know that it had once been known as the Radish Capital of America. That information appears in the history of the town as posted on the website of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Museum of Photography.

Radishes from our garden.

Had we known, we might have tried to move here sooner. My Joe loves radishes.

I did some hunting in the old newspaper archives (online) of the Library of Congress to see what additional information I could find about the radishes here. This is some of what I found:

From the Mississippi Gulf Coast the Northern market is supplied with the early radish and lettuce, beans and potatoes. Long Beach is called the radish town. The early radish built up this agricultural community, and prosperity smiles upon this well-built-up town, with its thrifty and enterprising citizens from the North and West, who have invested both their money and brawn in the soil.

The Sea Coast Echo, October 2, 1909, in Bay St. Louis, MS

The truckers of Longbeach and other coast points are shipping a great deal of radishes, lettuce and other produce to Northern markets and receiving handsome figures for it. They are in a position to reach markets early and get the highest possible prices. Think of Mississippi shipping vegetables in January, and that, too, raised without the aid of glass or other artificial methods. It is a great old State and the sooner our people fully appreciate that fact the better for all concerned.

The Oxford Eagle, February 1, 1906, in Oxford, MS — note: “truckers” refers to truck farmers

Long Beach, Miss., March 12 – Thirteen cars of vegetables were shipped from this parish last week, radishes, lettuce, shallots, carrots, turnips and cabbage making the variety.

St. Tammany Farmer, March 18, 1911, St. Tammany, LA — note: “cars” refers to train cars, not automobiles

The Long Beach truck farmers are rushing shipments of radishes to the Northern markets for Thanksgiving Day.

The Port Gibson Reveille, November 18, 1909, Port Gibson, MS

And then there was this great little story:

Red radishes, four round types and three long types, in a shallow basket
The long ones are ‘Cincinnati Market’ radishes.

Long Beach, Miss., is the home of the radish king in the Mississippi Valley. His name is Richard Inglis, and five years ago he visited Mississippi on an excursion from Youngstown, O. Having his eyes with him, he perceived such wasted opportunities that he paid $6 an acre for 20 acres of sandy loam which seemed suited for vegetables. Since then he has purchased 200 acres adjoining his original purchase, but he had to pay $35 an acre as the penalty for demonstrating to the natives what the land was really worth. There is more money in radishes than in anything else, because they mature in 20 to 50 days, according to the weather and the amount of fertilizer, and four crops can be raised on the same ground during the same season. Smith and Inglis have raised as high as 100 barrels of radishes to the acre, counting 600 bunches of five each to the barrel.

The Democratic Advocate, April 9, 1909, Westminster, MD

The radish that was grown here back in the early 1900s, that boosted the livelihoods of so many farmers, was not one of the small round radishes that we mostly see in stores today. Instead, it was a longer radish.

In 2018, MS Extension published an article about a search for the radish variety that made Long Beach famous; MS Extension Horticulturist Gary Bachman determined that the ‘Cincinnati Market Radish’ is the likeliest candidate. Not too surprisingly, after I read that article last spring, when I was learning about the history of Long Beach, I ordered a packet of seeds for the Long Beach ‘Cincinnati Market’ radishes.

Other information gleaned from the old newspaper pages indicated that most of the truck farms and market gardens were on the north side of town. The soil there is more suited to farming than is the sand dune where my garden is located. However, my sandy yard has produced an abundance of radishes for us in our first year of gardening here.

I think I will be able to harvest good radishes from the yard at least 8 months out of the year, possibly more. The problem months will be the hot ones, in summer.

  • Radishes from our garden
  • Radishes from our garden, the purple ones are ‘Malaga’
  • Radishes from our garden
  • One of Joe’s salads, featuring ‘Watermelon’ radish, garden arugula, a late tomato that ripened indoors, and sprouts from the kitchen
  • Winter radish, ‘Watermelon’

My copy of the Whole Seed Catalog from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds arrived today. The radish section is full of beautiful radish varieties. I will be re-ordering ‘Malaga’ radish seeds this year, because they are delicious and my current seed packet is almost empty, but I am going to hand the catalog to Joe to let him pick a couple more varieties to try.

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Can I Grow Food Organically on a Sand Dune?

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This past summer, I was told by a farmer at a local farmer’s market that growing food organically is impossible here on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. However, I have found that to be not precisely true.

What is true is that my organically-managed garden is supplying a small but steady flow of veggies to the kitchen. What is also true is that a lot of those veggies have been eggplants and okra. As long as I love eggplants and okra, my summer veggie garden will be a smashing success. Ditto for radishes in the spring and fall.

Gulf coast early fall harvest of okra, peppers, greens, and one winter radish.

Unlike market farmers, home gardeners like me have the benefit of not needing to compete with the produce section of the local supermarket. We don’t expect our gardens to supply all the standard veggies the whole year round. This means we can focus our efforts on crops that don’t need chemical interventions to produce food in our yards.

It can also help if a gardener is a bit flexible in how to measure success in the garden.

Part of the path to success is identifying which exact crops will produce well in our gardens, then growing and appreciating those crops. Another part of the path is to keep in mind the part of the Serenity Prayer that reminds us to not get too fussed about the “things I cannot change” and focusing instead on knowing which things can be changed and which can’t.

My sand-dune-based garden

This Gulf Coast sand dune, 28 feet above sea level in plant hardiness zone 9a, is very different from the location of my previous 30 years of gardening in the red clay of the Georgia Piedmont region in hardiness zone 7b. In the “things that cannot be changed” category, the soil here is, as mentioned already, mostly sand. I can pile compost on top of it, but I cannot change the basic sandiness of the yard. I also cannot add more cold to our winters, which means some plants that need a lot of cold, like Rhubarb and many varieties of apples, will not thrive here. The flip side of that is that now I can grow some sub-tropical fruits.

Radishes pulled from the garden, with leaves still attached. Some radishes are round and red, some round and purple, some long and red.
November radishes, three kinds.

Many crops are more adaptable than Rhubarb and cold-loving fruits, especially the annuals that I usually grow in the garden. In our move from Georgia last spring, I brought seed packets for some of those crops left over from the past couple of years. Some of those crop varieties have worked well, and some haven’t.

I’ve already noted that eggplants, okra, and radishes have been wildly productive here. However, a whole lot of crops have been less happy here on my sand dune.

A sadness of beans

Bean crops, which always totally rocked the garden in north Georgia, have not done well here. The first planting gave us a few handfuls of beans, not the usual superabundance, before they died, and I was puzzled, but planted more. When the next planting died, I had to start thinking harder about what could be wrong. English peas planted in early fall met the same fate as the second sad planting of beans. They just faded away.

I can see a few possible reasons for the problem. One is a lack of some essential nutrient, and another is a high soluble salt content in the soil. Until I can deliver a soil sample to the state testing lab, those are both just guesses.

A third possible reason is the relatively high pH of my sandy soil, which is way above 7. Beans tend to prefer a lower pH. This year, as I prepare the planting beds, I will be digging in some sulfur to start bringing that down (sulfur can take years to have any effect). In addition, I hope to hunt up some gypsum to use for a calcium source, since that can also help alleviate the high pH — and it might help with the soluble salts, too.

There is a good chance that I can change the soil pH a little bit, and I can amend the soil to bring in missing nutrients. I might not be able to do much about soluble salts, since my garden is only five blocks from the beach. Salt is in the air! If salts are the problem, beans may never do well here. It will be interesting to find out.

Every crop turns a bit yellow as it grows

As my summer crops grew this year, I saw that they all became less richly green over time. Back in north Georgia, a little bit of Epsom salts (an affiliate link to the product), a source of soluble magnesium, would fix that when extra nitrogen (like in a fish-based fertilizer — see article at this link) didn’t seem to help.

I discovered that Epsom salts works here, too, but they need to be applied much more frequently. The sandy “soil” lets dissolved nutrients, like the magnesium in Epsom salts, wash away, down out of the root zone, very quickly. Clay soils, like those in north Georgia, hold on to nutrients much more tightly, keeping them up in the root zone longer.

This summer, I ended up needing to apply a weak solution of Epsom salts (two rounded tablespoons dissolved in two gallons of water, then applied as evenly as I could manage over two 3×12 foot beds) every couple of weeks to keep the plants looking healthy. For my fall crops, this schedule stretched out to 3-to-4 weeks.

One item on my “to purchase” list this spring is a big bag of a crushed-rock-magnesium source that will not wash down through the sand so quickly. Big, gravel-sized chunks are my preference, but more finely pulverized products are easier to find. I am considering Sul-Po-Mag and Azomite (two affiliate links) as possible sources.

With some additional research into sources and work in applying what I’ve found to the garden, there is a good chance that I can fix the low-magnesium problem.

Other crops that grew less well than preferred

My corn patch was a bust. We ended up with a few patchy ears of sweet corn, which was a disappointment. I think the cause was a mineral-nutrient deficiency problem. I plan to try again this coming year after amending the soil more intensively (I had added a lot of purchased compost this past spring.)

Zucchini squash was very productive for a very short time, then was killed off by squash vine borers. The winter squash did not do well at all. I had planted a butternut, which can withstand the borers, but the squashes that the plants produced were tiny. Then, the leaves all got mildewed and the plants died. For winter squashes, I will — again — keep working to improve the soil with composts and mineral amendments and also try some different varieties. I know that ‘Seminole’ pumpkin squash should do well here, but I am hoping for something thicker-fleshed, sweeter, and with a shell that won’t require a sledgehammer to break through (I have grown it before…).

Sweet potatoes were not nearly as productive as I would have preferred. The good news is that I did dig up about 20 pounds of sweets from the garden. My experience in north Georgia, though, shows me that a much larger harvest is possible from the number of plants grown. From similar space and number of plants in Georgia, the harvest was typically twice that amount.

Tomatoes from the fall plants, brought inside in late November.

Tomatoes in the spring were not very productive. A couple of plants just plain died (drowned, when the garden flooded) and the rest quit making fruit in mid-summer. Apparently, that is a normal occurrence here, caused by nighttime high temperatures. The late-summer tomatoes that I grew were only just beginning to ripen before our first frost on the last night of November.

These tomato issues can be fixed (I hope) with changes in the timing of my plantings. Luckily, this year I am already here, and the garden beds are dug, so I should be able to get tomato plants into the ground well before April. (Our last frost should be around the end of February.) Last year, I was just starting to prepare the garden beds in April, because we moved here at the end of March.

Beets have been a bust. I planted one set of seeds in the late summer, and they came up, but then the little plants faded away. A second planting produced more little plants, and most of them are still present, but they have not grown much.

Stink bugs! Caterpillars!

In addition to soil problems, there were some pests. This is not really a surprise, since tiny plant-eaters are everywhere. My two largest categories of pests were stink bugs and their relatives, and caterpillars of several species.

Immature leaf-footed bugs, the nymph stage, on Southern peas.

Stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs damaged tomatoes, peppers, and the Southern peas. Most evenings beginning in early summer, I spent a few minutes out in the garden with a large plastic cup of soapy water, hunting for these pests. A whole platoon of immature leaf-footed bugs could be dislodged into “the cup of doom”, where they would drown, with one shake of the bean, leaf, tomato, or pepper on which they were gathered.

Caterpillars plagued the garden until late summer. Every leafy green vegetable that is normally recommended for the summer garden was attacked, in addition to tomatoes and peppers. Weirdly, though, the caterpillars that I expected to see on cabbage-family plants in fall never appeared. My kale, collards, and arugula have been unmolested. I count this as a blessing.

Fire ants

Fire ant mounds were all over the yard when we moved in. It took awhile for me to get around to dealing with them, but I did find that the Texas A&M recipe, noted in my second article on fire ants, that uses Medina Orange Oil (affiliate link) and Blue Dawn dish soap works great here. Smaller mounds were destroyed with one treatment. Larger mounds took two or three tries. As new colonies have moved in, I have continued using the DIY recipe. This recipe is not strictly organic, considering the range of ingredients in the Blue Dawn dish soap. When my giant bottle of Blue Dawn is finally empty, I plan to try using liquid castile soap, which does not include the petrochemical ingredients, as a replacement for the dish soap.

Before I started seriously hunting down and destroying the fire ant colonies, the ants were eating okra in the garden. It was a surprise that the ants on the okra really were fire ants, not like the kind of ants back in Georgia that farmed aphids on the okra. Figuring this out was painful. Welts from fire ant bites/stings take a long time to heal.

Some happier crops

Plenty of crops have done pretty well in my sand dune garden. Here are some happy pictures of examples:

  • Zinnias and butterflies
  • Tobasco peppers, fresh and dried
  • Chicories and carrots
  • Winter radishes, a favorite
  • The arugula patch
  • Sunflower and native bees
Successes!

The plan for now

One great feature of this garden is that digging holes and creating new planting beds is much easier than in the clay in north Georgia. Even better, wet sand never sticks to the shovel in huge messy globs like the red clay can. However, the big drawback is that the sand doesn’t hold onto much of anything. Water and nutrients — like from fertilizers — wash right through.

To improve this situation, I will keep adding composts — my own compost pile is far enough along to reduce the amount I need to buy this year. In addition, I will be buying those crushed rock sources of nutrients, to improve the health and productivity of my crops, as noted above. These additions should make organic gardening in the sand more successful.

In future posts (I promise, they will be more frequent in the coming year), there will be more information about the actual plants in the garden.

I hope that your gardening has provided good food through 2020, and that the coming year brings more garden adventures and successes! Keep well.

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Gardening into Fall

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Even though I know a lot about “how to garden”, it will be awhile before I am an expert on gardening in this new, sub-tropical, Gulf Coast yard. If I were still in North Georgia, I would be getting ready to plant the first of my fall crops.

Back in 2017, in early August, I was already preparing to plant that Georgia garden. By late August in 2013, much of the fall garden was already planted.

The best timing for planting fall crops depends on two factors:

  • estimated date of the first frost
  • estimated time it takes for a crop to reach harvest-size

For that previous garden, I knew that the first frost, on average, occurred around the first of November. Many of my favorite fall crops needed at least 70 days to reach full size, and the cool weather of fall usually slowed them down enough that the “70 days” listed on the back of a seed packet could translate to “80-90-or more days” in my garden. As a result, planting started NOW.

Here on the Gulf Coast, I have an extra month before it is time to plant fall crops. This pushes most of my fall-garden planting to mid-September. Luckily, a I wrote a book that I can use as a guide in sorting out the exact planting schedule for this new gardening situation.

In my garden now

Meanwhile, I am still learning about what grows in the hotter and muggier (than North Georgia) weather that this new garden is in. Local gardens have already been emptied of most summer crops. One nearby vegetable garden has okra still in it, and another has eggplants and peppers. That is all.

My garden has all of those, with okra and eggplants as the strongest producers. Most of my pepper plants had a late start, and they are just beginning to step up their production of peppers.

From experience in Georgia, I know that Southern peas and peanuts can also do well in hot, muggy conditions, so those are in this garden. I’ve also recently planted a new patch of ‘Provider’ green beans, to harvest in (hopefully) early October. It will be interesting to see how that goes.

The sweet potatoes, another crop that produces reliably through a hot summer, planted right at the first of April, are muscling out of the ground. Those will be ready to dig up in early September, leaving that bed open for the first of the fall planting.

Today, I pulled out the rest of the tomato plants. They are making flowers, but not setting fruit. About a week and a half ago, I started seeds for a couple of tomato plants, a paste type called ‘Wuhib’, so we can have tomatoes again in November. Wish me luck with those?

Here is a visual “report” on the current garden:

  • Jalapeno peppers
  • One day’s harvest
  • Southern peas
  • Peanut flower
  • ‘Burgundy’ okra
  • Bell peppers
  • Chinese multicolor spinach
  • ‘Mrihani’ basil
  • Eggplant flower
  • Sweet potato vines

We have been visited by some beautiful insects, in addition to the (sometimes also beautiful) insect pests. Caterpillars, stink bugs, pickleworms, and thrips are on the pests list.

Butterflies, enormous moths, bees, and iridescent flies are on the list of beautiful insects that make me stop and spend extra time smiling in the garden.

  • A quite large bumblebee
  • Walnut sphinx moth

I hope that your gardens are all growing and productive, and that you are keeping safe and well.

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When Things Go Wrong in the Garden

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Our new garden on the Mississippi Gulf Coast already is providing plenty of food and education. So far, besides the early spring radishes, we have harvested ripe cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, jalapeño peppers, about a dozen zucchini, and several small bunches of green beans.

In addition, we have harvested a few gallons of wild dewberries not far from the house, and I have identified several other wild edible plants in our yard and neighborhood.

This all sounds amazing, right? Like we have moved to a land of abundance.

  • Zucchini
  • Early green beans
Swiss chard and Chinese Multicolored Spinach plants growing in the garden. Sticks standing around the plants deter squirrels from digging nearby.

Challenges in our Gulf Coast garden

Let me just list, though, some of the challenges facing the garden (and gardener!) in this yard, starting with zoological forms:

  • Fire ants — many, many colonies — which will take awhile to discourage. I have plans, though, based on my organic fire ant control articles, part 1 and part 2.
  • Moles, which have tunneled through the garden, damaging roots and making it impossible for some plants — the ones with tunnels right underneath — to develop deep root systems.
  • Squirrels, which dig random holes in the garden and uproot smaller plants as they dig.

In addition, other insect pests and the first diseases have already attacked. First, caterpillars destroyed the Swiss chard (Just like in Georgia!). When I finally pulled up the chard to replant that space with another kind of crop, the caterpillars moved to the tomato plants.

It took days and days of spraying the plants with an organic-approved Bt product for caterpillars (Thuricide) and hand-smashing the larger caterpillars to stop the infestation. I think that I finally got them all, but would not be surprised to find a couple more.

  • Powdery mildew on zucchini leaves
  • Evidence of pickleworms, hiding in the cuke

Then, the zucchini leaves got covered up in mildew. The cucumbers have been attacked by pickleworms, and then we had a tropical storm.

Backyard and garden flooded by rains from tropical storm Cristobal.
The vegetable garden completely flooded in Tropical Storm Cristobal

The storm waters have receded, but the ground stayed saturated for several days. Not all plants in the garden will recover from having their roots under water for so long. The okra looks fine, but the tomato plants are still wilted, the green bean plants are turning brown, and the rosemary (not surprisingly) is totally brown.

How does an organic gardener address these many challenges?

It helps if a gardener has a good sense of humor, a lot of patience, and a readiness to observe, experiment, and learn.

To reduce risks of flooding

We had placed the garden in the highest part of the back yard that gets full sun, but that was not high enough. For this particular garden, an obvious place to start addressing our challenges is in building raised beds, to keep the garden from drowning in future storms.

Considering where we live, future heavy-rains are a certainty. Raised beds would allow the garden to drain faster, even if it goes underwater again.

Raised beds might also reduce some of our mole-tunneling issues.

We didn’t start with raised beds, partly because we wanted to get things planted right away, but also because of the fire ants. I had observed in Georgia that fire ants seem to be attracted to raised beds. However, an underwater garden is worse than dealing with ants. Raised beds are definitely in our future.

How to address other garden challenges:

For other critter issues, bugs, and diseases, reaching for “products” is not, usually, my first choice. An exception is when I am caught totally off guard — for example, by unexpected rampaging herds of caterpillars.

Instead, these are strategies that I use:

  • Try different planting dates, to avoid the pest or disease that is causing problems. In Georgia, planting bush beans as early as the weather would allow meant I could harvest more beans before the bean beetles attacked the plants.
  • Try a different variety of the crop. Birds and other wildlife can be confused by varieties of crops that ripen to an unexpected color (when “ripe” is white or green instead of red, for example). Also, some varieties of cucumbers and squashes can stand up to mildew diseases longer than others, before dying. In addition, it is possible to find varieties of most crops that ripen sooner/faster than others, so gardeners can harvest more before an expected disaster strikes.
  • Switch to completely different crops. Some crops might be inappropriate for a particular garden. If the only way to harvest from the crop is to provide constant application of sprays/powders, that could be a clue that it is time to try other crops. Learning to love a different crop that is better suited to your yard is a strategy to try. (Note: I did not used to even LIKE beets, but now they are a favorite.)
  • Expect and be satisfied with a short harvest window for a crop. My zucchini plants produced veggies for about three weeks. Now the plants are done, partly due to mildew and partly to being underwater, and I can use that space for another crop. Even though I would love to have more zucchini from the garden, the ending of the crop is not a disaster. Instead, it is an opportunity to plant another crop. Maybe sunflowers…

Strategies in action for this current garden

We won’t have time to put in raised beds until fall. The house we moved into has had a lot of updates, but it was built in 1948. There are things that need to be done.

Today, for example, we crawled under the house (18 inch clearance) and pulled out the dead animal that has created an awful smell and attracted about a million flies over the past couple of days — it was a possum.

However, we have considered some different options for raised beds, checked prices of supplies at the local hardware/lumber stores, and figured out how much of each supply we will need, when the time comes.

For changing the timing of planting — this is our first season of planting in this garden. I have recorded planting dates and crop notes in my copy of the Garden Planner and Notebook, so that next year I will know which crops — such as zucchini, cucumbers, Swiss chard, and green beans — I should try planting earlier. Because I have kept notes, I will be able to compare results from the different planting times.

For switching out to different crops — I already have switched out the Swiss chard to something completely different. Peanuts are growing in that space, and the plants withstood the flooding like little champs. The seed packet is leftover from 2013 (!!!). I don’t really know why I kept the packet, because it took up a lot of space in my seed box. Glad I did, though. The seeds all came up.

I am still looking for edible greens that can withstand the heat, humidity, caterpillars, and other hazards of a Southeastern US summer. I have tried Malabar spinach in the past, in Georgia, and it does well, but I have been unable to love it.

My parsley is still too small to provide greens for the kitchen, and so is the purslane. I might try Good King Henry next, even though it is related to Swiss chard. Maybe as a “wilder” type of plant, it will not be as attractive to caterpillars.

Ripe red tomatoes, green tomatoes, smaller cherry tomatoes, a cucumber, and small butternut squashes all harvested from the garden, set on a tray indoors.
The good news — harvested from our garden. Green tomatoes are from wilted plants.

To address the challenge of a short harvest window, the best move might be to just plant LOADS of whichever crop is going to have only a few weeks of productivity. Even if the garden is small. Then when the crop comes in, it will be glorious, for just that short time.

This is the strategy I will likely try for Swiss chard next year. In addition to planting it earlier, I will plant more seeds closer together and harvest them smaller. At the first sign of trouble, I will harvest the whole crop to bring into the kitchen. We can luxuriate in the Swiss chard for awhile, then move on to another crop.

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Gardeners Rely on Each Other

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Gardeners learn and improve their gardens not just through personal experience, but also through the shared experiences of other gardeners. Sometimes we learn from these gardeners through their books, sometimes through workshops or formal presentations, sometimes through in-person conversation or over the phone, and sometimes over the internet.

One of my favorite gardeners to discuss gardening with is my Louisiana sister. In the past week, we have confirmed that our favorite bush-type green bean for flavor, reliability, and abundant productivity is ‘Provider’. We also agree that green beans from the supermarket, along with most other commercially-grown veggies, are pretty bland in terms of flavor, even when they are beautiful to behold.

  • ‘Provider’ beans on a plant.
  • ‘Provider’ beans with other veg for size comparison.

Knowing that I am not alone in finding that ‘Provider’ produces an abundance of tasty beans here in the Southeastern US boosts my confidence in recommending the variety to other gardeners in the region.

I have more gardening friends, too, with whom to share successes, failures, and puzzlements. These gardeners share similar kinds of stories with me. We all learn, as a result, about varieties that do well and varieties that don’t. We also share different gardening strategies and methods, opinions on flavor, and tips on preparation in the kitchen.

Without this community of gardeners, my own gardening successes would have piled up more slowly.

Mostly yellow, with bits of red, ‘Amish’ tomato.

Some gardeners, though, I have met by chance, just once or twice, but that can be enough. One gardener that I met by a seed rack at a garden center one spring convinced me to try yellow tomatoes. He claimed that they were the sweetest, best tasting of all tomatoes. He even saved seeds each year for his favorite. Turns out that I agree, after growing some, that yellow tomatoes are extra sweet.

Other gardeners I have met by seed racks are looking for particular herbs or flowers, and their enthusiasm also influences my choices of what to plant in my garden.

This spring, I have been lucky to have many existing gardening friends to talk with — at a distance — about our gardens. I hope that other gardeners have similar good fortune. However, there have been no opportunities, for most of us, to meet more gardeners, from whom we can learn, just randomly at the seed racks in garden centers.

If you are looking for more gardeners to learn from, and are ok with doing that online, I know some you might want to check in on. I am a participant in a “phone group” of garden writers, and one or more of their websites might hold the information or inspiration you need.

Gardening websites to visit

We are a little group, and all are members of Garden Communicators International (used to be called Garden Writers Association). We have had monthly phone meetings for a couple of years.

We don’t talk a whole lot about gardening, since we are focused on the technical parts of having garden-related websites, but the love for plants and gardening shines through each person’s contribution to the group. These are our most-frequent-participants and their websites:

Kathy, our coordinator, writes the Washington Gardener Magazine for the Washington DC area. Her website includes specific details for the DC area, such as local events, but much of the gardening information is also good for a wider area (all the way to metro Atlanta!).

Keri writes the Miss Smarty Plants site. Keri was living and writing in Florida, but recently moved back north to a farm in Iowa where she writes about edibles, landscapes, growing hops, and her chickens.

Duane’s site is The Geriatric Gardener. He writes from experience! His perspective is helpful for younger gardeners, too, since many of us can benefit from simplifying our gardening tasks in the ways he describes.

Gerald is an artist – painter, photographer, gardener. If you are longing for beauty, visit his site. You will be inspired!

Marianne writes the site Small Town Gardener about her mid-Atlantic (near Washington, DC) garden and farm, the ducks and chickens and bees, and she hosts a mini-blog for her dog Mungo. If you want to read some lovely garden writing, visit her site.

Gail co-writes a blog called No Farm Needed with her daughter. Topics of the blog range from pressed flower crafts, to starting seeds indoors, to making “shrubs” (vinegar-based beverage/tonic) and more.

That is the list from my phone group. You can also, of course, visit the linked sites in the sidebar of my own website.

I hope that you all are keeping safe and well and enjoying your gardens!

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