Six reasons to use pine needle mulch in vegetable gardens

I use pine needles in between my wide rows in the edible gardens.

Here are some of the reasons for using pines needles in wide-row edible gardens. (Read my post "Wide row planting & trench composting" for the details on this planting method.)

Pine needle mulch:
1) does a good job at limiting weeds.
2) doesn't form a crust, so even a light rain filters to the soil and doesn't roll away.
3) is easy to handle and remove when it's time for a crop change.
4) lasts for 2 or more years.
5) does not significantly acidify the soil below.
6) is free if there are pine trees in your neighborhood.

Harvesting corn: Down on the farm

A guest post from my grandson Weber who is working on a farm in Delaware this summer. 
 

Summer at Magee Farms: Part Two

(Summer at Magee Farms: Part One)

Hi everyone – I would have sent in another post sooner, but once we started the sweet corn harvest, I have been working 12-hour days and haven’t had time to sit down and write this. I certainly was not expecting how busy it was going to get. After these first two weeks of harvest, I have much greater appreciation of all the work that goes into large-scale farming. In this post I am going to talk about the life of the corn – how it’s harvested, what happens to it at the packingshed where I work, and where it goes to be sold. 

Terrible taro and other invasives

The taro removed from the bulkhead garden.

Removing invasives, sooner rather than later

Just this last April, we redid this weird bulkhead space to fix a slumping problem. At the time, I thought I'd removed all the taro roots and corms (Colocasia esculenta) and the soil we used to fill in the space was from another area of the property with no taros. So in just these few months, they've rebounded. I pulled this whole bouquet from this space which is approximately 4' x 4'.  I'll have to check for new growth more often. I also pulled out some native elderberry  (Sambucus nigra subsp. canadensis) volunteers, which are small trees.

Note on taro (aka dasheen): it was brought from Africa by slaves and then again in 1910 by the US Dept. of Agriculture as a potato substitute for the south. Big mistake. Several people suggested that we include it as a crop in "Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida," but I refused. If it's invasive, we should not be encouraging people to grow it. Another interesting feature of this plant as a crop, is that every part contains calcium oxalate crystals, which can irritate your mouth and other tissues. To prepare the corms to eat, you have to boil it in at least three waters and then grind it to a powder.

Removing lawn and other adventures

Clearing the rest of this section of lawn.

Digging grass...

After putting it off for some time now, I finally finished removing the lawn in front of the shed. I started removing this part of the lawn last fall when I planted the coreopsis. My post on fall seedlings shows the beginning of this project.

It's not an easy task to rip up well-established turfgrass, but I was side-tracked numerous times.

Harvest-based tempura and more...

The harvest for some tempura.

The harvest & recipe

I had some okra, but not enough for good-sized batch of fried okra, so I supplemented it with 5 little sweet onions, some zucchini, and not shown here, about half of a garlic bulb.

I don't have a deep fryer, but this method for tempura works pretty well.

Results: the nematode experiment

In looking at all the broccoli & parsley roots, there was very little damage
by root-knot nematodes. Yay!

The problem...

For the last several years, the root-knot nematodes have damaged roots of several of our crops, but we were not aware of it until they were pulled up. Most of the time the crops had been producing well anyway, but why not take all the organic precautions we could to prevent the damage?

In doing research for "Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida," UF agricultural professors informed us of their work with marigold cover crops for fighting nematodes.    

I took action last year and planted a dense cover crop of marigolds and dug them into the soil. See my post Nematodes, marigolds & crop rotation for the details. Last fall I planted my cool weather crops hoping for the best, because previously marigold plants scattered around the garden had not had any effect.

Success! Today we pulled the parsley and broccoli, both of which had been seriously affected the last few years. The roots were clean! No lumpy knobs caused by the nematodes.

Zucchinis, garlic, and kites: summer is here!

Oooh tiger zucchinis.

Changing seasons for our edibles

The tiger zucchinis are doing very well this year and I scramble to harvest them before they get too big. Half of one of these beauties was grated into a tuna salad, while the other half was sliced and was added last to a stir fry featuring onions, garlic, garlic chives, parsley from our garden, plus store-bought celery & 2 Boca Burgers (our favorite non-meat patties). The other one and maybe an additional one still growing in the garden will be the key ingredient in some zucchini bread. Yummy.

The last lettuce crop and the parsley have bolted and the broccoli is done after many months of come-again picking. My husband made a nice tabbouleh from the last of the parsley crop. I've allowed the plants to remain in the garden so their blooms will attract pollinators.

Down on the farm

A guest post from my grandson Weber who is working on a farm this summer. 

Summer at Magee Farms: Part One

Hi! My name is Weber Stibolt, and I’m one of Ginny’s grandchildren. This summer I am working at a produce farm in southern Delaware, and she asked me to write a few columns for you to show you a little bit about what goes on behind the scenes. I am a rising junior and am studying Food Science at the University of Delaware. 

Although there are many paths that I can take with this degree, one of the aspects that interests me the most is food safety. With increased capability to detect foodborne pathogens and an increase in food safety regulations like the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011, there is and will be an increased demand for specialists to help producers of food ensure that they are taking the necessary steps in order to reduce the risk of microbial contamination. 

A family farm

Magee Farms has been a family farm since 1865 and this is the fifth generation farming the land. 

I have been hired as a Food Safety Manager to assist the produce farm in keeping records and making sure everything is in order for the annual food safety audit. I will mainly be overseeing the packinghouse where the watermelons and sweet corn that the farm produces are packed and put onto trucks to be sold at local supermarkets. 

The picture below shows just some of the paperwork that goes in to all of this! The government agency completing the audit is the USDA. The paperwork isn't necessarily being turned in - it's being reviewed by them to make sure we are in compliance with everything that needs to be done and is just a means for collecting data like temperatures of water and proper levels of chlorination and a whole list of other things that I will cover in more detail in later posts.

More pictures and posts to come. ~Weber

  

Have you thanked your farmers today?

Green Gardening Matters,

Ginny Stibolt

A sweet onion harvest, Frostproof, and more...

A sweet onion harvest

The sweet Granex onion harvest was variable from 5 inches across to less than an inch.

Last week (before the rains came) most of the Granex onion leaves had fallen over, so it was time to harvest them and hang them to dry in the garage. Earlier this week I harvested the short-day onion sampler crop. I talked before about rogue onions that bloomed instead of going dormant--most of the blooming onions came from the sampler crop, especially the purple ones. I made some more rogue onion soup, but this time I used some leftover rice instead of potatoes and pureed it in the food processor. It still tasted great and was so good served cold on these warm days. I planted the onions last November, so it's a long growing season, but we go through a lot of onions, so it's worth the effort. Sweet!  

Onions not suitable for drying included some blooming onions, ones without a enough leaf to hang by, and those that were too small to bother with.

I pureed the rogue onion soup this time.

A hairy chickpea pod

The cycle of crops continues with the sugar snap peas turning brown with the warmer weather, the third and last crop of leaf lettuces is beginning to bolt, the third and last crop of carrots is almost ready, and we are still enjoying our come-again broccoli and cabbages, but they'll begin to fade soon. The chickpeas and cucumbers are beginning to bear fruit. The butternut squash and zucchinis are coming along, too. Some of the okra plants have already set their first buds, so maybe we'll get a crop in a few weeks. I love our edibles--there is something new to enjoy every day.

Cucumber vines in a container and the chickpeas next door.

The Ashley cucumbers are fat.

A Mother's Day (Re)Treat

My daughter proposed a meetup in central Florida for Mother's Day. I headed south and she headed north and we met at 8:30am in Frostproof, an historic town set between 2 large lakes. The plan was to hike in 2 preserves and then have lunch before heading back to our respective homes. She knows me well. What a great day.

Frostproof, Florida mural at the unlikely-sounding intersection of Wall St. and Scenic Hwy.

Scrub morning-glory

We met at the Frostproof library, left my car there, and headed out together to Hickory Lake Scrub where there are 14 rare and endangered plants. Some are endemic only to the scrubs on the Lake Wales Ridge in the center of Florida's peninsula.

I learned a few new plants for me, including this beautiful scrub morning-glory with its soft pastel blue color. I also liked the Feay's palafox shrub--such beautiful flower heads. I could have spent more time there, because there is so much to see in a scrub if you just slow down to observe.

Feay's palafox (Palafoxia feayi), a Florida endemic shrub in the aster family with a beautiful flower head. 

Dori on the bank of the Peace River.

Our second hiking spot was the Peace River Hammock, which was more heavily wooded and more mosquitoed, but still some interesting plants including this beautiful spring-run spiderlily. The Peace River has a pretty good current. It would be fun to float down it sometime.

After the 2 hikes, it was time for lunch. Dori had scoped out a cool 50's diner called Frostbite, where you can get "ice cream and more." I enjoyed my apple, pecan, & chicken salad; Dori liked her shrimp & chips; and then we did of course order ice cream sundaes. What fun.

A spider lily in the Peace River Hammock.

I stopped on the way home to admire the cloud formations in the Ocala National Forest. A storm was on the way, but it didn't start raining until about the last 10 minutes of my drive.

Clouds outline the landscape in the Ocala National Forest, the 2nd largest forest in Florida.

Do you know your snails?

Rosy wolf snails doing their thing on our sidewalk.

Another view of the snail sex.

These rosy wolf snails (Euglandina rosea) are predatory and will feed on slugs, other snails, worms, and other small critters in your gardens. You don't want to kill these helpful snails, so use caution in fighting plant-eating slugs and snails. After taking these photos, we gave them privacy so they could continue their procreation duties.

It runs in the family: my grandson Weber is majoring in chemistry and food science at University of Delaware. He'll be putting his education to good use at his summer job at a Delaware farm.

Ooh, the Stoke's asters (Stokesia laevis) are attracting the native bees.

Summer's upon us. Sustainable gardeners know to get out in the garden only in the early morning hours when it's cool enough to be comfortable.

Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt

A field trip, a Florida native plant hero, & pasta salad

I traveled over to Gainesville on May Day to meet with my editor at University Press of Florida and Marjorie Shropshire who will be illustrating my third book, "The Art of Maintaining a Native Landscape." It was a productive meeting and good progress is being made on the book--it's currently out for review. We discussed likely photos for the book and looked at Marjorie's drawings so far. (Marjorie also did the illustrations for "Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida.")

Marjorie and I had more work to do on the drawings, so the plan was that she would come back to my house and spend the night before she headed back to south Florida. On the way back to my house we stopped to talk to David Chiappini in Putnam County, but were interrupted by this gorgeous wildflower meadow.

Wow what a great-looking roadside wildflower field.