Home    About me    Gainesville Cow Pool    Cow Pool FAQ    Gainesville Food Swap  

Garden Updates

Lemon & Basil Spaghetti Squash Salad

18 Jun 2013

0 Comment

I harvested 52 pounds of spaghetti squash! That is, by far, the largest harvest of anything I’ve ever grown short of oranges.

spaghettisquash3

Many of them were immediately baked, shredded and frozen for future consumption because the thick rind had a bug hole in it. If the squash has a hole, cook it immediately or it will rot from the inside out. The squashes are stored in baskets in the pantry in the laundry room, by far the coolest and driest room in my house.  About a week after the first of the spaghetti squashes were put in the pantry, I noticed a dripping hole in one of them. I took it out and figured I would trim off the bad spot and bake the rest. When I started cutting into it I found the entire center was rotten. Lesson learned- only store hard-skinned squashes with no holes!

To cook spaghetti squash, simple cut in half, rub the cut sides with olive oil, and roast in a 400 oven until a butter knife slides through the thickest part. You can also put an inch of water in the bottom of a baking dish and bake the squashes cut side down, though this method of steaming makes the cooked squash quite watery. Many people suggest steaming spaghetti squash in the microwave, but this gave me uneven results, so now I only bake them. Baking several at a time saves energy!

spaghettisquash2

Lemon & Basil Spaghetti Squash Salad

This salad takes full advantage of the mildly sweet  flavor of steamed or baked spaghetti squash. My family loved this so much we ate it two days in a row! Don’t skimp on the ingredients. This is one of those dishes that expresses the ideal of “local and seasonal” since so many of the ingredients are available right now at the farmers market or in the garden.

3-4 pounds spaghetti squash, baked, seeded and shredded (about 4-5 packed cups of cooked squash shreds)
1/2 lb good ripe cherry or grape tomatoes, sliced in half
large bunch of basil, trimmed of stems and sliced thinly
3 lemons, rind peeled and juice squeezed
4 oz goat’s milk feta, crumbled
Good quality extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper

In a large bowl, toss the warm spaghetti squash, tomatoes, basil, lemon juice, and lemon rind with a fork until evenly combined. Then toss the feta through. Add enough olive oil, starting with 1/4 cup, until the flavors are evenly balanced. Refrigerate overnight to allow the flavors to meld. Before serving, toss thoroughly and adjust with salt and pepper.

By: Andi Houston Category: Garden Updates, Recipes!

Learning From My Mistakes

10 Jun 2013

7 Comments

One of my gardening philosophies is Try Everything. I am constantly trying to overcome “paralysis of analysis” where I get so caught up in the planning and research stages I never feel ready to implement. If I view all of this as an experiment, and the implementation is the research, then I free myself to make mistakes without guilt or shame. So in the spirit of recording the outcomes of an experiment, here are a few of the mistakes I’ve made this season.

1. Bush beans + sprawling cantaloupes= tangled mess

mistake1This is what the bed looked like a month ago. Neat, orderly. I was excited because this was the first time I ever used inoculant on my beans and I was sure it would contribute to healthier plants and greater yields. I prepared the bed carefully so the plants could survive pest pressure… remember, no pesticides here.

This is what the bed looks like now:

mistake2

A verdant but extremely tangled mess. I’ve never grown cantaloupes before. I knew they sprawled so I gave them plenty of room from each other… and then planted beans in between, expecting to lose 50% of the plants like I did last year. I’ve lost TWO. The inoculant really worked! So. Mistakes here: planting too closely together, not paying attention to mature plant size, and forgetting the permaculture rule of “lumpy texture” in polycultures. Two twining, sprawling plants together in a limited space is poor planning.

2. Tomato cages are not just for tomatoes

mistake5

I decided not to grow tomatoes this year at all. Everything eats tomatoes. I decided to grow tomatillos and ground cherries instead, more “primitive” nightshades with fewer pests and disease concerns. They are healthy and vigorous plants, but they’re just as “tipsy” as tomatoes. They grew tall quickly and then fell over. I put cages over three of the tallest plants a few weeks ago as a precaution before I left for the weekend. By the time I got back, the rest of the plants were already too sprawling to try and add cages.

mistake4

The three tallest tomatillos in the bed are caged. The others have sprawled, smothering their companion ashwaganda in this bed and eggplants and cantaloupes in the other bed. Mistakes here: planting too closely and not caging them while young. From now on, cage all tomato-like plants.

Overall I think the garden is doing quite well. I have been keeping notes in a loose garden journal for the past year, but I think I need something more structured. Keeping a card file of plant notes, one plant to a card, is an idea I am adopting from one of the permaculture books I read last year. Keeping notes on each plant, taking measurements, I think will help me remember all of these lessons from season to season.

By: Andi Houston Category: Garden Updates, Permaculture Projects Tags: , , ,

Hope of Harvest

31 May 2013

0 Comment

ripe blueberry

One blueberry has renewed my faith.

This evening my mom came over, and since she hadn’t been here in a month or so I walked her around the yard, showing her this new plant and that one.  The best part was her spotting the first ripe blueberry. She saw her first tomatillo plant, watched the monarch butterflies cavorting in the buddleia, and found several baby cantaloupes.

babycantaloupeWalking around with my mom, hearing her exclamations over how all the plants had grown so much, helped me see the garden anew. I sent her home with a tiny harvest- five tiny tart goji berries and one of the four precious peaches- and a promise for much more. I went inside with a renewed sense of purpose, a reinforcement that I’m heading in the right direction. The more I care for this land, the more this land gives back to us.

By: Andi Houston Category: Faith and food, Garden Updates, Permaculture Projects Tags: , ,

An Observation on Squash Vine Borers

17 May 2013

1 Comment

Here’s a photo of my man-eating, hostage-taking squash polyculture bed. It’s hard to tell, but there are dragontongue beans, cosmos, tomatillos, and a young Fuyu persimmon tree in there too. These are all planted in the center hill-bed. The squash vines have spread 10 feet in every direction.

squash vines1

I thought these were going to be Seminole pumpkins, but they are a mix of Spaghetti squash and an as-yet-unidentified squash or maybe pumpkin with green stripes.

Obviously spaghetti squash.

Obviously spaghetti squash.

And obviously not spaghetti squash.

And obviously not spaghetti squash.

Here’s an interesting observation on Squash Vine Borer management. I planted my “pumpkins” early, the first weekend in March, in straight compost with a little blood meal. In April I found some squash vine borer eggs and squished them. After that I knew I couldn’t get them all, the plants are just too big. So this morning I was checking the plants and saw this. This is obviously where a squash vine borer emerged, but it didn’t kill the plant! It only killed the leaf stem, not the whole vine. I then found five more holes like this on other vines, all fine and growing healthy with fruit on them.

vineborerdamage

My theory is that these vines were old/large/strong enough to withstand the borer damage because I planted them so early. The squash vine borers may have emerged late because of that late frost we had in March. Whatever the factors, next year I will plant squash a week earlier than I did this year and hope for the same results. This means that SVB are not always  instant death to squash plants, older healthy plants can withstand the damage and still produce.

other squash 1

This is a whole ‘nother issue. About half the fruit produced by both types of squash die in this manner, discolored and shriveled but with no visible insect damage and no visible larvae inside. This might be the result of leaf-footed bugs sucking the life out of the young fruits, I killed probably 50 juvenile leaf-footed bugs this week.

I am deeply happy at the success of my developing food forest overall. This patch of ground was weedy sugar sand just a year ago. I will be disappointed if none of these plants end up being Seminole pumpkins, but that’s the risk you take with home seed-saving and planting home-saved seeds. Good thing I like spaghetti squash!

By: Andi Houston Category: Garden Updates, Permaculture Projects Tags: , , ,

The Olive Tree Bed

14 May 2013

4 Comments

Sometimes I look at “before” and “after” pictures of the yard and even I’m astonished, and I’m the one who created the change.

Here’s what I call the Blast Furnace corner. This is the south-west corner of the front yard. This area is in full sun all day and gets absolutely blasted in the late afternoons, the hottest part of the day. This is what this corner looked like for the first year because I just couldn’t decide what to put here. The requisite useless boxwood hedge, a couple of struggling duranta bushes, the far corner taken over by cape honeysuckle (Tecoma campensis) and the near corner taken over by Mexican petunias. The whole area in front of that…

olivebed1

If you take no other lesson from this post, let it be to never ever use weed cloth as a long-term solution in Florida.

olivebed2

This is what happens when you leave weed cloth in place long-term. The really persistent weeds, the ones that are especially tough and hardy? They’ll eventually just grow through the weed cloth, making pulling them impossible. I’d guess this particular weed cloth was in place for several years before we moved in, because not only were the grass and weeds one with the weed cloth, the plastic was disintegrated enough to tear like tissue paper as I tried to pull it out. I worked for an entire morning with a pickaxe, ripping up the ground to take out the weeds, grass roots, and shredded plastic weed cloth. I try very hard to be no-till, but there was no helping it here.

Here’s a wheelbarrow full of this mess.

olivebed3

After ripping it all out we cut the useless boxwood hedge to the soil level with heavy loppers, below the root crown whenever possible. They have an extensive root system and as you can see from the above picture, there is a large orange tree right on the other side of the fence. Orange trees have shallow root systems so ripping the boxwoods out of the ground with their roots, or digging up the roots, would have damaged the roots of the orange tree. The roots will decompose in place and add nutrients to the soil.

After the boxwoods were cut down, chopped up, and taken to the compost pile, we chopped back the cape honeysuckle and mexican petunias. Both are moderately invasive and sending runners underneath the fence. I would have preferred to remove them entirely if possible, but my husband thinks they’re pretty. I may add aluminum flashing as a runner barrier to keep them in check.

Then it was time to plant!

olivebed5

That stick in the ground at the right corner is my baby olive tree. It’s hard to see against the mulch. Here’s a better photo.

olivebed6

Olive trees grow slowly so I can only hope to eat olives off of my own olive tree before we move. Goji berries are a trendy “superfruit” that we can grow. Goji berries are also used in Chinese medicine, Chinese soups and Persian rice dishes like zereshk polov. They’re sold at Chinese and Persian grocery stores for a tiny fraction of the cost of health food store goji berries, but I’m interested to find out how they produce here. I’m not sure how large or productive these bushes will get but they’re already covered in delicate blue flowers. The beach sunflower is a native low-growing drought-tolerant spreading groundcover with yellow flowers that attract pollinators. The only piece missing in these beds are nitrogen-fixers, so I’ll probably add some buffalo clover and/or pigeon peas.

It’s so much more attractive already. Here’s one more photo.

olivebed4

By: Andi Houston Category: Garden Updates, Permaculture Projects Tags: , , , ,

A Butterfly Bed on Beltaine

1 May 2013

7 Comments

I can’t believe how well my mostly-native butterfly bed is coming along only six short months after I started planting. Last weekend was the Spring Native Plant Sale, and I added several new plants. This is the perfect picture to share on Beltaine, all about fecundity and growth!

Here’s where we started in October. A blank slate.

butterfly bed 093012

And here’s what it looks like now.

native bed

There’s a common saying in permaculture books, talking about planting perennials- “The first year they sleep, the second year they creep, the third year they leap.” Here in Florida we didn’t have much of a winter so I think the oldest of these are starting to “creep” already. Eventually this bed will meander along the whole fence, with small trees, native grasses, and lots more flowering vines, and at some point I’ll add a decorative border. I can’t wait to see what this looks like in another six months!

By: Andi Houston Category: Garden Updates, Permaculture Projects Tags: , , ,

New Annuals Bed

30 Apr 2013

0 Comment

Isn’t it funny when you angst over a problem in your head for weeks or even months, building the problem up to be this insurmountable giant… and then when you decide to just jump in, the answer presents itself almost immediately? It’s like pushing hard against a door and finding it open.

Last fall I asked for advice on the previous homeowner’s bermuda grass-infested raised bed. I tried to sheetmulch the bed last summer and the grass was not only undaunted by my attempts, it subsumed the cardboard in a matter of weeks. Unable to commit to using glyphosate and completely daunted by the idea of digging it out, I just laid thick outdoor carpet over the whole thing and left it alone for the winter.

So a few weeks ago we pulled back the carpet to see what was happening. The carpet trick had worked on the less-grass-infested of the two annual beds, the one on the left. We easily dug out the rest of the grass, filled that bed with fresh compost and planted tomatillos and ashwaganda last weekend. On the right bed the bermuda grass was not much affected. It was yellowed but still growing. I had to do something though, the seedlings were ready to plant out and this is where they were supposed to go. So I pulled the wood frame up and out of the way, cut laboriously all the way around one corner with a sharp spade and yanked… and the whole corner came out of the ground! The grass was rooted through some thin felt-type weed cloth, but once I cut the weed cloth and got a good hold of a corner, it all just lifted right up out of the sand like a mat. I just stood there gaping for several minutes, then ran into the house, hollering for my husband.

annualbed2

Thankfully his additional weight on that sharp spade cut through the grass, roots, and weed cloth like butter. (Well okay, maybe not “butter”, but easier than me balancing on the spade and jumping up and down) He cut the grass into sections in less than 10 minutes. Then I loaded the sections, which were each a foot thick mat of grass, roots, sand, and weed cloth, onto my trusty red wheelbarrow and carted them across the street to my growing weedy compost pile. I cleared the grass, dug out the remaining roots, and raked it all smooth in less than 30 minutes.

annualbed3

After that I laid down a thick layer of newspapers and shredded office paper and wetted it all down. The sky clouded up briefly, as you can see.

annualbed4

Then I filled the whole bed to the top with compost.

annualbed5

And then I planted!  Everona tomatillos, Rose Bianca eggplants, and a few cantaloupe seedlings in the back corners. I’m hoping the cantaloupes will sprawl out of the bed and across the grass to the fence.

annualbed6

Now it’s all mulched with straw and we had a good rain today. I’m especially proud of those seedlings, these are the first I’ve ever started from seeds. I’ve simply moved the piece of carpet over to lay on the spot next to this bed for the summer. Hopefully this will kill back the grass underneath and I’ll add a new raised bed there in the fall. This took about two hours, start to finish. I am so thrilled this is done!

annualbed7

By: Andi Houston Category: Garden Updates Tags: , ,

The Parable of the Betony

25 Apr 2013

4 Comments

Sometimes, this whole gardening thing? It’s not about us.

When we moved into this house almost a year ago (a year!) I decided that the worst “weeds” in my yard were purple nut sedge and Florida betony. I spent countless hours digging the tubers and roots out by hand in my larger beds, pulling top growth constantly. I killed one established rose bush and two expensive golden rain tree seedlings with my vigorous weeding. Then we started sheet mulching, and though the deep sheet mulching suppressed the hated nut sedge, the Florida betony punched right through. There was nothing I could do except keep ripping out top growth- disturbing the sheet mulching layers would invite more weeds and grass to come through. One day my husband, ignorant of the war, commented “Those are pretty flowers, what are those?” when we were walking around in the yard, checking on the plants. “Florida betony.” I gritted my teeth, angry that I had overlooked such a big clump. “Aren’t those native?” says my husband, knowing that I am pro-native plants. I made some noise of assent and we moved on.

Our mild, cool winter caused many of my plants to start shooting and budding early. Then in February we had our first hard freeze, and everything in my yard that was starting to bloom was frozen back… everything except the Florida betony. The Florida betony exploded into rapid growth, blooming like crazy despite the frost.

And the next sunny day, those small purple flowers were absolutely covered in bees. Big bees. Little bees. Bees everywhere.

Florida Betony

Florida Betony (Stachys floridana) blossoms

So I left the betony alone in certain areas- around the front porch, along the edges of the food forest, around the duranta bushes that were struggling to come back after the hard frost in March. I realized that the Florida betony was the only plant of any number blooming in my yard. It was in fact, the major early spring food source for the bees until the citrus trees started blossoming.

I read this essay today by Benjamin Vogt, and this passage struck me as wonderfully Pagan:

Gardening with natives is about giving up certain levels of ownership to your landscape. Life isn’t a battle royale with nature. Gardening with natives is about sharing, about living with the world and not in it; with the world and not against it; with the world and not apart from it. Bridging the gap. It’s about taking a leap of faith that you are this planet’s faith given momentary form, bound to its rhythms, and when you struggle to remake or ignore those rhythms everything seems intangibly off kilter — we suffer higher food prices, eroding shorelines, dirty water and air, new bacteria resistant to antibiotics.

I had been battling Florida betony without learning about it first. I was acting out of harmony with the land, and out of harmony with permaculture principles too, which state “Observe, then act.” I was reacting without fully observing, without fully learning, like the person who kills the spider out of fear. I thought I had learned about Florida betony last year by learning the human uses- harvesting the roots, learning how to cook and eat them. 

floridabetonyroot

A particularly large Florida betony root, which tastes rather like Romaine lettuce and radishes

We name a plant, and then assign it value. “Weed”. That is our judgement against a plant. The plant itself is not bad or good. Our judgement assigns it value, important only to us.  This plant which I assigned the value “weed” and tried to eradicate has a significant role to play in my yard’s system. Now I have to learn how to live with it, how to design with it, how to incorporate it into the overall system I am guiding into being. This is an important reminder as I move towards Beltane and the season of explosive growth. I will slow down and observe the land mindfully and without judgement, living with the land.

The nut sedge, on the other hand, is still a weed!

By: Andi Houston Category: Faith and food, Garden Updates, Permaculture Projects Tags: , ,

Seedlings everywhere!

15 Apr 2013

0 Comment

I have been woefully neglecting my blog for weeks now for a couple of good reasons. My granddaughter was here visiting for the past couple of weeks with my step-daughter. They live very far away, so while they were here, spending time together was priority #1. My second priority was due on Friday, which I am proud to say was submitted on time and complete. This is my first time ever writing a grant and it took more time, energy, and brain-capacity than I expected. I am amused that writing a grant about growing medicinal herbs has set me so far back from my goals in actually growing them, but I expect I will catch up soon.

seedlingscomposite

Yesterday I waved goodbye to the last of our houseguests and got to work. I started jolokia chiles, eclipta prostata/han lien cao, aconite/fu zhi, and Hales Best muskmelon to replace my magical disappearing cantaloupe seeds. I planted the muskmelon seeds in  pots made from recycled newspaper pulp that can be planted right in the ground when the seedlings are large enough. I also teased out the germinated  hookweed/chuan niu xi and passionflower seeds and potted them up. That’s an experiment I’m cautiously surprised worked- the seeds were packed in damp sand and put in the fridge in mid-February. About three weeks ago I placed the jars in a warm protected spot outside, making the jars into damp mini-greenhouses. Then I watched them for germination. 100% germination on the passionflower seeds, but only about 30% on the hookweed, so I’m cautiously optimistic.

This is more seeds than I’ve ever started, and I’m only about halfway done. I must plant out the ashwagandha, tomatillos, madder, and eggplant seedlings soon, and then still have to figure out whether to direct sow or start in pots the rest of the medicinal herb seeds: dang shen/ codonopsis, xuan shen/figwort, jie geng/Chinese bellflower, and jiao gu lan/sweet tea vine.

I am still bringing all the seedlings in the house most nights and anytime rain threatens, and then putting them back outside in the morning. I can’t wait for the greenhouse to be built!

By: Andi Houston Category: Garden Updates, Permaculture Projects Tags: ,

A Garden Mystery

9 Apr 2013

7 Comments

One of the garden projects I was most excited about this Spring was the cantaloupe project my daughter and I were supposed to be working on together. We were going to test three different cantaloupe varieties to see which grew best in our yard. This bed was full of butterbeans up until January when I pulled the last one, mulched with straw which had already begun to decompose. Then I dumped 10 square yards of rabbit manure on top of the decomposed straw. I raked the rabbit manure into hills, added a few scoops of fine potting soil on the top of each hill, and deeply mulched between the hills with spoiled hay. Elizabeth helped plant the seeds when they got here. And then we waited. And waited. And waited. No seedlings.

After two weeks I started to get worried and poked around in the beds. We did have a light frost during this period, but there were no seedlings to freeze. The soil surface seemed undisturbed. Some seeds were there but were broken open and empty. Most of the seeds were just gone. I chalked it up to birds and re-planted, patting myself on the back for keeping back some of the seeds from the original planting “just in case”.

lonelysprout

This time after two weeks only four of the seeds have sprouted. Two of the six hills have no germination at all. So this time I dug down even deeper in one of the hills and pulled back the rabbit manure and old straw… and the sandy soil underneath was seething with tiny black ants. Are the black ants the reason for the seeds not germinating? Should I try to get the ants to move by disturbing the nest? Should I just give up and plant something else?

frontbedHere is a photo of the whole bed with six hills of rabbit manure on top of rotted straw, mulched by spoiled hay. I planted the back edge of the bed against the house with multi-branching sunflower seeds three weeks ago and not a single sunflower has come up yet, either. Most of those green plants you see are either oxalis or betony, which I have given up trying to eradicate.

Suggestions welcome, even if it’s “give up and plant something else”.

By: Andi Houston Category: Garden Updates Tags: , , , ,
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 »