Wednesday in the Garden

Peppers

Only a little over a week until the 2024 Master Gardener Plant Sale and Demo Garden Open house. You need to be there. The  VegHeadz and all the other Master Gardeners,  Extension Agents and Staff are spending extra hours getting the gardens ready for prime viewing. Plants propagated and nurtured by the Master Gardeners will be sold ready for your garden and landscape.  Choose from natives, edibles, trees, and all kinds of ornamentals, or beautiful bouquets for Mother’s Day. Lots of community organizations will be on hand with information and give aways.  Honey from our gardens will be available for sale.  

We are looking forward to seeing you there. The VegHeadz garden is a great place for kids to visit and we’ll have some veggies to harvest and information to share.  Come see our new grape arbor and rain garden, working compost bins and developing banana plants.  We’ll be happy to show you how we do it.   

Cathy with a carrot harvested today

Gaillardia or Blanket Flower—a great
perennial for pollinators

Yarrow (White blooms)

Yellow coreopsis and many other 
perennial blooms

We work hard, but we love it.  We’re
looking forward to showing you 
our garden and food forest

Louie, our herbalist 

Wednesday in the Garden

Wild strawberry produces tiny, delicious fruit

There’s so much going on in our garden, it’s hard to decide what to post.  We’ll let the photos tell the story.  

Added to the forest garden this week—Wild Strawberries (Fragaria virginiana), a native throughout eastern US but in Florida, found only in Jackson and Leon Counties; Perennial Peanut (Arachis glabrata), an evergreen  legume; and Sochan (Rudbeckia lacinata), aka Cherokee Greens, a perennial Rudbeckia with nutritious edible leaves.  All good ground covers.  

The Crybaby tree which shades 
our work table and garden 
shed is blooming.  

Carole and Peggy under
the Crybaby tree
 (Erythina crustaceans-galli)

The artichokes are multiplying.  We 
learned they can bear more than
one bud per plant.  Can you
find three.

Yarrow at the base of the 
bathouse is beginning to bloom.  

Peggy and Cathy
at work in the 
forest garden

Camille is doing an inch by
inch rejuvenation of the patio 
garden.  She says it keeps her off the
street and out of trouble.  
We’ll see.

Despite 11 to 14 inches of rain last week,
the rain garden looks great. It did exactly
what it’s supposed to do by directing
water where we want it and
preventing erosion.

The Blue Flag irises in the rain garden
are beginning to bloom. 
Beautiful!

Laurie keeps the pollinator 
garden current and thriving.  

Laurie and Marie in the pollinator
garden.  Blooms accumulate throughout
summer and reach a crescendo
in fall.
 

Cathy and Nancy

Mike and Glenn hooked up
our sink.  

More weeders—Mary

and Evelyn. 

Wednesday in the Garden

The Peggy Martin roses 
are showing off

Ours is a working and learning garden.  It’s not perfectly weeded, although we try mightily.  We have plant failures just like everyone else, but in the balance we have more successes than failures.  The pleasures of watching plants grow, discovering new things, and sampling the harvests, far outweigh the aggravation of nutgrass and dollar weed.  

The biggest pleasure of group gardening is joining others engaged in nurturing plants and absorbed in their current project, asking questions, sharing information, cheering each other on.  The sound of laughter and excited conversation is a continuing garden melody, today and any time we get together in the garden.  

Peas, peas, peas

The corn is up, ready to
be combined with beans
and squash for Three Sisters.

Dill, a cool weather herb,
is seeding out.  The seed 
heads are beautiful.  

A bed full of Stem Lettuce.

Loquats are ripe

Mary picks a loquat to sample.  Sweet and juicy.  

Peggy is using Florida Weave 
to support tomatoes.  If you 
look closely, you can see the strings 
on each side of the row.  
How to video here.  


  

Mike found a good use for the
Corsican gourds we grew last summer.  

Louie’s globe artichokes are thriving.
In the middle of the plant you 
can see the edible flower buds
 forming.  

Mary is experimenting with 
different ways to grow 
sweet potato slips.  

Last, but not least, Yacon seedlings
from corms potted just a few weeks ago.  

Filling a new raised garden bed

When starting a garden in raised beds, a question always arises. How do we fill them? That isn’t too difficult when the beds are no more than 8 inches tall because you can fill them with garden mix, compost, or whatever you choose to grow plants in.

Taller beds can present a different problem. It takes a lot of compost or garden mix to fill a bed that’s up to 30 inches tall.  Most plants only need six to eight inches of soil to grow quite well so other options are available to fill a tall bed. Adopting a method used in Hugelkultur beds as we did when the raised beds at the VegHeadz garden were installed is a good choice.  This reduces the amount of expensive garden soil that you will need, provides benefits to the microorganisms and plants in the bed, and helps to dispose of yard waste that might otherwise go to a landfill.

Several installations of tall beds in private gardens recently illustrate how to fill garden beds with a variety of materials and provide an excellent growing medium for your plants.  

These beds are pre-fabricated coated steel which are available at a local nursery or online. They can be purchased in a variety of heights and sizes and their cost is comparable to building beds of this size and height from other materials.  They need no special tools for assembly and are warranted for 10 to 20 years, depending on the manufacturer.

It’s always good to put 
your family to work laying 
out the garden …

and assembling beds

Cardboard first, then rocks

The instructions that came with the beds suggested that rocks be laid first to provide better drainage, and to keep the bottom edges of the beds above the soil to prolong the life of the bed. In this instance, we went even further and put bricks under the corners of the beds to raise them off the ground. In the pictured garden, cardboard was placed on the soil throughout the garden including where the beds were to be placed to block any grass or weeds.  

Once beds were assembled, placed and leveled, temporary cardboard barriers were placed around the outside of the beds to keep rocks in place as they were added to line the bottom of the beds. Free wood chip mulch several inches deep was added outside the beds and throughout the garden area.  When all was in place, the temporary cardboard around the beds was removed. The mulch and rocks serve to hold each other in place at the bottom edge of the beds. 

Rock layer, with a cardboard and
mulch barrier holding them in 
place under the bed

Oak logs

 

Next, a layer of oak logs was laid. This can be any kind of organic debris, branches, leaves, etc.  Following the logs we added a layer of wood chips to fill in the spaces around the logs. All these materials will eventually decompose into compost, and in the meantime, will retain moisture and provide nutrients to the microorganisms and plants that live in the bed.  A small amount of heat is generated from decaying materials, possibly extending the growing season in the beds.  

Banana plants contain many 
nutrients and break down easily.  
They are excellent fill material.  

The next layer was softer material available in this particular yard including pruning debris from winter damaged banana plants and large gingers.  We were glad to have a place to dispose of these materials because they are voluminous, they don’t burn well, and adding them to the landfill is not an environmentally friendly option.  Any kind of sticks, leaves, food waste (except meat and milk products like cheese), in fact, any organic materials can be used.  Use what’s available.  

We added a final layer of wood chips up to the level where we wanted to start adding garden soil, about eight or ten inches below the top of the beds. 

Final layer of wood chips

And finally garden soil

For garden soil in this garden, we chose to use compost created without animal manure.  This was purchased from a local non-profit compost producer. Non-manure compost was used because of a problem with excess copper in manure-based composts due to copper added to animal feeds. Excess copper can lead to reduced germination rates and damaged or dead seedlings.  

Added to the compost was a mixture of amendments including slow-release organic fertilizer, azomite, kelp, and granite dust.  A dusting of about half a pound of worm castings was added to each bed before the top inch or so of compost was added and the beds were complete and ready to plant.  These materials can provide a boost to micronutrients and minerals which might be in low supply or absent in any particular compost or other growing medium.  They are said to improve root growth, yield and taste of plants, and help ward off pest and diseases.

Space was left at the top to accommodate a layer of pine straw mulch around plants in the beds.  The level of the soil in the bed will go down somewhat as the underlying materials decompose, and additional compost can be added at the top before each growing season as needed. In addition, decomposing mulch and cover crops, chopped and dropped, will add organic matter to the soil and help to maintain the bed level.

Wednesday in the Garden

Produce from the VegHeadz garden, Yacon
tubers on the right

When I was a young girl in North Dakota, my grandfather would listen to the news on the radio at noon. The announcer always ended his broadcast by saying, “It’s a beautiful day in Chicago, and I hope it’s even more beautiful wherever you are.“ Well, yesterday was a beautiful day in Tallahassee and many VegHeadz gardeners were out to enjoy it.  We hope you enjoyed it too, wherever you are.  

Major amounts of spring weeds were cleared in the forest garden and elsewhere, and more planting and spring cleanup took place all over the garden.  Peas were picked and dill harvested.  Wouldn’t they be good together?  

The bananas were cut back to get them thinned out before spring growth takes off.  If there are too many plants in your banana mat, fruit production is affected.  Search “bananas” in the right sidebar search box to learn much more about banana plants and how to care for them.   

It seems as though the deer which had been munching on our greens and roses have moved on.  We are still tying vinegar-soaked rags to a line around beds with vulnerable plants, but we haven’t seen any deer damage in a while. Perhaps because it’s spring they’ve migrated away from the area to more interesting environs, or they learned that our plants just don’t smell good. We hope they remember that if they migrate back next winter.   

Peggy and Emma and Carole dug up a big clump of Yacon to propagate for the Spring Plant Sale (May 11).  Yacon is a South American plant in the sunflower family that grows well in north Florida.  It is a tender perennial which dies back in the winter, but emerges every spring. It is one of the perennial vegetables the VegHeadz have discovered is easy to grow and delicious.  Its tubers are sweet, crisp, and juicy, very low in calories and high in protein. Some sources say that eating the roots stimulates bacteria in the digestive system, and that the plants encourage beneficial microbe populations in the soil.  The tubers can be eaten raw or cooked, and the leaves make a tea which is reported to be beneficial.

Yacon underground—tuber
on the left, corms on the right

The plant has two underground growths—the tubers, which are the edible portion and corms, which are used for propagation.  The tubers, extending out from the plant in all directions, look like a small to medium size sweet potato with brown skin and white flesh, while the corms tend to be small, pinkish, round, and bumpy, and crowd close together under the plant.   The corms the Vegheadz dug yesterday will be potted up so that growing plants will be available at the spring sale.

Yacon only grows about 3 feet tall. It has large, soft, light green, fuzzy, interesting-shaped leaves. It’s really quite a lovely plant which can be grown in your landscape or garden.  You need some.  

It’s even being considered as a farm crop in Florida 

—more information here:  https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/HS1435

Yacon (Smallanthus sanchifolius)

Emma, Carole, and Peggy, digging and potting up Yacon corms