A glorious Florida afternoon!



This doesn't have anything to do with gardening, but the clouds in every direction around our house early this afternoon were amazing, so I thought I'd share them with you.

A beautiful cover and progress in the gardens

Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida

Big news! The front cover of my new book.

I think it looks fantastic, don't you? I love the way the designer at University Press of Florida used the purple color from the eggplants in the top photo to edge the tomato-colored title box.

Thanks to Nell Foster for permission to use her photo of that wonderfully chaotic farmers market display. I'm mostly done with proofing the galleys and am now working on the index.

It's due to be released in Feb. 2013. I can hardy wait.

I'll be on America's Home Grown Veggies radio

Kate Copsey, the host of this weekly web radio show, contacted me to see if I'd be interested in appearing on her show. Well, of course--I am always ready to talk about gardening. We had a lovely conversation about what it's like growing edibles in Florida, which will be broadcast on Saturday 9/29/12 at 10am. Later, it will be available in the archives.

Changes...



The newest section of lawn to bite the dust will be the unmowed portion next to the front meadow.

We've been reducing the lawn since my husband and I moved into this house in 2004. In the top photo, the lawn sodded with St. Augustine grass extended almost to the fence. The previous owners had left some mature trees around the edges of this part of the lawn, which we now call the front meadow. We stopped mowing it because the ground was uneven and often had a large puddle in the center after a hard rain. We maintained it as a meadow for a number of years, but now we've stopped cutting it entirely and a nice assortment of oaks, sweet gums, and pines are becoming a forest. Read my post from a few years ago Reducing the lawn in your landscape for a better perspective on the process and to find out why what we have is a freedom lawn.

Fall edibles



Newly planted fall garden next to the garage.

This bed next to the garage has been sitting fallow for the summer. I've buried kitchen scraps, as they became available, about six inches under the surface, until about four weeks ago.

On Labor Day, our unofficial beginning of fall, I planted some cool-weather crops in wide rows and some sugar snap peas at the base the three tomato cages. There was no trace of the kitchen scraps as I rearranged the bed, only good black garden loam.

Arbor Day Foundation & Florida...

The Arbor Day Foundation has played a big part to help people, cities and towns plant more trees since 1865 when J. Sterling Morton started this foundation.

In Florida alone there are 165 Tree Cities. We've discussed this organization in these previous posts: Florida's Arbor Day: Third Friday in January and our followup post on our members' favorite trees: Your Favorite Trees.  So yes, The Arbor Day Foundation has done a lot to increase awareness of the importance of trees even in urban and suburban environments and presents a lot of good educational material.

BUT... is this organization doing more harm than good? 

Read more on my post over on the Florida Native Plant Society blog.

Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt

Maryland flora I pine for

A view of the Naval Academy from across the Severn River with a fringe of cordgrass in the foreground. 

I spent much of my adult life just north of Annapolis, a delightful place for so many reasons. Last week my husband and I made the trip north to familiar territory for a send-off party for grandson Weber Stibolt, who's heading off to the University of Delaware this fall. He'd just come back from an orientation, which included two days on campus and four days hiking the Maryland section of the Appalachian Trail with a group of ten other freshmen.

I don't love crape myrtles, but...

A crape myrtle in Ginny's back yard.

I don't love crape myrtles (Lagerstoemia indica & spp.) because they are sooo over planted in Florida. Most species are native to India and other parts of Asia, but they certainly do well here and new varieties are released each year. The Atlas of Florida Vascular Plants shows that it has escaped in a number of counties in central and northern Florida.

As a native plant enthusiast, I would not plant crape myrtles in our landscape. I would choose something native and not so commonly planted.  This way I would add to the diversity of the canopy in our yard and in our neighborhood, which is what we strive for when creating habitat and balanced ecosystems.

That being said, as a sustainable gardener, I let established plants stay as long as they are not invasive. When we bought our house in 2004, there were a few crape myrtles already in the landscape. As is the custom around here, they had been hat-racked at about seven feet high. We did a little judicious pruning to reduce the number of sprouts at the seven-foot level, and now eight years later, this crape myrtle has become a lovely, 25-foot-tall tree.

The insect-eating birds use it as a perch as they wait to pounce on bugs in the lawn, plus the hummingbirds drink the nectar. So while I would not have planted it, I think the crape myrtle enhances our backyard and its ecosytem.

Not more queen palms!

A restaurant wins a landscape award with its queen palms, but why?

The St. Augustine Beach Tree Board and Beautification Advisory Board for landscaping awarded this restaurant with their Best Commercial category. See the article in the St Augustine Times, The Groove landscape wins honor.

Do You Know Snow Squarestem?

Great purple hairstreak on a snow squarestem.

Snow squarestem or salt and pepper (Melanthera nivea), a member of the daisy family (Asteraceae), attracts a high volume of butterflies, skippers, bees, wasps and even hummingbirds. It has only white disk florets in its flower head. Unlike a sunflower, it has no ray florets that look like petals. Its common name comes from the white flowers and its square stems with a mostly opposite leaf arrangement. Many members of the mint family (Lamiaceae) also have square stems and opposite leaves, so when I first heard the common name I assumed that this was in the mint family, but the plants are classified mostly by their flowers’ characteristics, not by their stems or leaves. (See A plant by any common name…)

Cats in the Landscape Controversy


USA Today posted an article House cats kill more critters than thought by Elizabeth Weise, which reported on a study where 60 cats near Athens Geogia were outfitted with tiny crittercams to record what they did while they roamed around their neighborhoods. The results were startling and showed that not only did the cats kill more than previous estimates, but they also endangered themselves.


Screen shot from USA Today