Potato harvest

Geez, I had no idea about how productive potatoes are.  I planted 'eyes' here and there in my satellite beds among the tomatoes.  So, I spent time this evening harvesting; some were actually in soil, some were in straw, and others were in between. But there were LOTS of potatoes.

This evening's harvest were from a bed that was a straw-bale experiment and a more conventional block at the end of some tomatoes.

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A mushroom foray

One of our neighbors in the mountains is the president of the local mushroom club (which has upwards of a 150 members!) 

An offer to tag along this afternoon on a mushroom foray found LOTS of interesting mushrooms, some edible, some not tasty (but technically edible) and a few Amanitas (definitely not to be eaten).

We had a delightful time (our dogs whizzed around the woods, plopped themselves in the creek, and spent a lot of young dog energy).

Here's a sampling of what we found (that is, the mushroom expert, not me). But I was fascinated by the diversity of the mushrooms that we did discover.  I don't remember which were edible and which weren't (the scientific names that were provided weren't familiar to me!)  But they were all interesting and beautiful.

the final harvest

Woody cooling off in the stream

The woods in the Bent Creek Forest are relatively intact, so great for native plants as well as mushrooms!

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Sowing wildflower seeds

I've had a nice selection of native (and non-native) wildflower seeds that I've been meaning to try to sow and nurture for awhile. The natives included  Liatris species (punctata, ligulistylus, pyncnostachya,  and squarrosa), Rudbeckia triloba, Heuchera americana, Tiarella cordifolia, Rhexia mariana var. exalbida, Angelica atropurpurea and Ratibida pinnata. The non-natives included another Angelica ( I think a European species) and Smyrnium olusastrum.

I sowed them in small pots (in an aluminum tray for watering from the base), and will wait to see what happens. As a plant ecologist (who in a previous life studied germination ecology of native plants), I know that the germination biology of most native wildflowers is normally driven by environmental triggers that break dormancy only after successive seasonal warm-cold cycles, etc. depending on the circumstances of the species' native habitat.

One of my purposes of growing more natives (and other plants) is to support pollinators of all sorts.

I recently received an e-mail about a bee-a-thon, sponsored by YOURGARDENSHOW.COM. 

bumblebee 'sleeping' in Catawba rhododendron flower

Sounds like a worthy endeavor (promoting awareness about all of our native bees as well as European honeybes), and I'm planning to join in this Saturday, July 16.

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Gratitude

Sunroom

My gardening companion and I have been fortunate to have two gardens in the last couple of years, at least until we 'graduate' and consolidate back to one.  A different view of our back porch transformation had me feeling especially grateful for our blessings.

It created a sunroom as a studio space (for me) -- how nice is that, and it's still a space to be developed more.  I'm grateful.

 Puttering around replanting a couple of young Lithodora plants (tests from Bressingham) and filling up pots for sowing seeds of wildflowers that I'd like to have, I saw a view that I hadn't appreciated before.

back deck view

I had no idea that our neighbors in the apartment next door saw this view. 

I'm always hopeful that we're inspiring them (as younger folks) that it doesn't take much effort to create green space to delight, and a garden to come home to.

front door view

We're not religious, but gratitude is a grounding practice.  We have a lot to be grateful for.  Notice Woody hanging out below the deck.  Mocha did good.

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Mid-summer plantings

The front perennial beds and the raised beds with herbs and vegetables are looking great.  It's so nice to have the front of the house softened by green, a welcome change from its previous mulched condition (see below).

early July, 2011

Here's a photo of our new gardening assistant looking out the door!

when there was just mulch (not to mention the gravel driveway, now covered with mulch and raised beds)

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Garlic and carrots

carrots from the deep raised bed

My deep raised bed has actually produced some pretty big carrots, in spite of my fussing about not being able to grow good carrots.  These are big, and tasty, too, especially when cooked.

Apparently in the mountains, I can start sowing carrots for fall in mid-July.  I think I'll do that!  Maybe they'll be extra sweet after a bit of fall frost.

A quick trip down to the Piedmont meant harvesting a block of potatoes and a lot of green tomatoes (I didn't like the idea of leaving them for the resident woodchuck).

Hopefully the tomatoes will ripen and be decently tasty, for cooking at least.

fresh garlic ready to use

I've 'processed' plenty of garlic; it's all cleaned and ready to use.

I'll probably use it up more rapidly this year, as curing conditions weren't so good for long-term storage.

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Local food and thanks to farmers

Fresh garlic needing to be cleaned

I've been cleaning a lot of garlic, potatoes, and onions lately.

Much is destined for fresh use in the next couple of weeks, rather than storage, but preparing vegetables for either requires work - removing dirt, extra foliage and roots, sorting out for drying, taking all of the clippings out to the compost pile, etc.

I'm quite certain I didn't appreciate the effort required in producing a bag of onions in the grocery store before I started growing them myself.

Maybe they bounce down a river of clean water in industrial agriculture, but someone still needs to trim their roots and stems and remove their tops (maybe this is a subject for a web search-- Hmm... check out this article about onion cleaning procedures on a small farm).

Fresh onions are totally delicious, of course, being juicy and succulent when cooked.  Quite a different vegetable than the cured ones for long-term storage.  Ditto with garlic.  And fresh potatoes are exceptionally tasty, too.  But, it's worth considering what it takes to have a bag of red potatoes at the grocery perfectly cleaned and ready to take home. 

This is about as big as my carrots ever get.

I'm not complaining, really, but am glad for the experiences which remind me how fresh food, grown locally (or far away), ultimately depends on the folks who grow, harvest, clean, and package fruits and vegetables.

And whether we buy at a tailgate market or at a supermarket, it's well worth thinking about who grew those vegetables and how, and what it took for you to be able to put them in your shopping basket.

Cleaning a couple of bushels of small onions has reminded me to be (more) grateful for folks who grow our food.

(Here were some previous thoughts along the same subject, but focusing on greens).

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A newly emerged pipevine swallowtail

pipevine swallowtail

After noticing the chrysalises last week, I was delighted to see a newly emerged pipevine swallowtail this morning, hanging on the ledge outside the bathroom window (near the pipevine plant). 

Its wings were already expanded, but it wasn't yet ready to fly.  It stayed there for maybe 45 minutes, then finally flew away.

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Interesting hoop houses

Chade and Tuscan kale with tomatoes beyond

On a garden tour last weekend, I saw both small-scale and commercial scale hoop-houses being used. 

They were similar in being used in summer and had sides rolled up to provide airflow.

preparation for winter greens (erzly spring)

The "homeowners" hoop-house was a shared one;  the gardeners who established it on a nearby (to them) lot estimated that it could feed 6 families (with vegetables) over the course of a year.

I was totally impressed.

Neighborhood hoop house

This hoop-house had tomatoes and eggplant that were huge (in comparison to my open-grown ones), surrounded by healthy-looking blocks of Tuscan kale and redbor kale (hmm, now, in late June...)

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Pipevine swallowtail pupae

Pipevine

A large pipevine (Aristolochia macrophylla) rambles up to the roof on a trellis outside my study window in the Piedmont.

Some years, it's a great host for pipevine swallowtail caterpillars; in other years, we don't see any.  This has been a good year for early sighting of butterflies and caterpillars, maybe because of unseasonably warm temperatures early in spring.

Pipevine Swallowtail caterpillar

Chrysalis

I noticed chrysalides (=chrysalises) in numerous places on the top of the porch arches and along the base of the gutters. They'll probably emerge this summer (I saw some empty ones).

I hadn't noticed so many in previous years.

Chrysalises and (probably 4th) instar

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Late spring flowers

A visit to the Biltmore grounds this morning (our early morning walk) found us admiring a couple of flowers, and enjoying the early morning peacefulness.  (Biltmore is a busy place on weekends and summer afternoons).

Woody cooling off

I would have been up for hikes off the Blue Ridge Parkway, but the poison ivy at lower mountain elevations is LUSH (and I'm terribly susceptible).  Woody would be a magnet for poison ivy's urishiol, hhrmph, and a hug would be not a good thing. (I know this through experience).

But Biltmore's gardens and grounds are always fun to visit (we have season passes), and we passed the place where Mocha fell through the ice in the Bass Pond in the winter, and thought about how we actually took Woody home from the entrance to Biltmore (our meeting place).

But check out this wonderful lily flower (on a cart with lots of others destined for planting).

Monarda didyma

And ditto to these fabulous Monarda didyma flowers, too.

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Restoring the ecology of your backyard (and front yard, too)

We've embarked on our second restoration project, in the landscape of our small house in the mountains of North Carolina.  I was reminded of this, prompted to reflect on how I became a gardener.

I was an ecologist first, as was my gardening companion (aka my husband Tim), but we were glad to transform our barren (read lawn-rich) landscape in the Piedmont, to a habitat garden full of life today. 

It's what I count as being one of the most rewarding experiences that I've had as a gardener.

It wasn't hard, or especially time-consuming; it just required finding the plants we wanted (largely native), digging holes (Tim did most of that), and getting started. I added vegetable garden beds in two areas (and would love to expand them, but, you need to be mindful of the time it takes to tend to pampered domesticated crops!...)

In the mountains, we had nothing much more than mulch with a few plants in front, and below the house, a few plantings descending to an invasive-rich forest. 

Uh, we thought we wanted a low-maintenance landscape, but it was SO depressing to have bare gravel and mulch, where plants could thrive.  So that didn't last long and I've made a number of posts already about the progress of our mountain landscape and garden. 

Thinking about a garden studio down the slope encouraged us to embrace that part of our landscape;  the studio project turned into a sunroom and deck expansion project which was much more rewarding and makes a lot more sense.  I'm looking forward to using the sunroom as my 'studio' this summer (it's almost finished)!

Thank goodness my gardening companion enjoys the physical activity of moving mulch and rooting out invasive ivy, privet, honeysuckle, etc.  He's a leaf collecting devotee, too. 

It's my 'job' to put in the understory woodland herbaceous layer on the ravine slope -- a fun one, to be sure.  I'll be planning the bed layout this summer.

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Growing vegetables

A friend of mine (CEN) said that you need to be a cook to grow vegetables. 

She's definitely right, I thought, as I was scrubbing yet more beets, onions, and leeks for part of dinner tonight.  It takes time to prepare vegetables, whether they're from the supermarket or your own garden.

I'm being a good local eater and cook (and by extension, my gardening companion is, too).  We've been diligently eating greens all spring (kale, collards, spinach, and chard) and recently have been eating beets, carrots, leeks, and onions, seasoned with home-grown garlic.  Uh, I'd like to have a bit of broccoli, but with all of these other veggies, it's hard to justify buying any!

I do buy fresh mushrooms (shitake and button) and the occasional hot-house red pepper (I always feel a bit guilty, but hey, they're terribly healthy.

It's an interesting conundrum, in a time we can buy almost anything we want (vegetable or fruit), in the global marketplace. And it's also a 'get real' thought as many of us try to eat more 'local' food.

This was an interesting graphic from Roger Doiron at Kitchen Gardening International about the disconnect between what we grow to eat (modelled after the White House kitchen garden) and what we subsidize as tax-payers in the US.

From Kitchen Gardening International (Roger Doiron)

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Harvesting beets

It's been a lot of fun to have decent beets.  Our mountain raised beds (filled with compost) are ideal;  I've never managed to have much luck growing beets in the piedmont, even with heavily amended soil.

But we've been enjoying beets (and onions and garlic from the piedmont vegetable beds) -- hard not to like freshly harvested beets and their greens.  Yum.  Here are two views of the same bunch, directly after harvest (hmm, and just prior to being part of our dinner).

beets, onions, and garlic

beets, fresh from the garden

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Home gardening

I've seen a huge resurgence in vegetable gardening over the last 5 to 6 years.

When I first started offering classes about growing vegetables (at the botanical garden where I work), there was a tepid response at best.

But then master gardeners and others became interested in attractive edible landscapes, kitchen gardening, and lasagna gardening.

Then the 'Great Recession' hit and lots more folks were interested in 'growing their own' vegetables.

There have been numerous recent books about vegetable gardening rolled out (most of which are great) -- just get started, is my thought.

My friend and colleague, Bob Polomski, (author of Month by Month Gardening in the Carolinas) forwarded a link to this great graphic that documents our resurging interest in vegetable gardening, from the National Gardening Association.

I'm totally amazed (and excited) to see that a quarter of Americans, more or less, are growing vegetables.  How cool is that!  There's nothing more local than harvesting your own vegetables of whatever sort.

 

I'm not surprised that tomatoes are number one, in  terms of what folks are growing.  I'm always bemused by cucumbers (as they're among the few vegetables that I don't have much affinity with).  Sweet peppers (yeah!), carrots (difficult for us in the SE, unless we have very deep raised beds, summer squash, nice if we avoid squash vine borers (and I do hope the local woodchucks stay in grassy areas far from us)

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A wonderful sunset

I didn't manage to capture the brilliant oranges of the final sunset, but the back-lit puffy clouds were amazing earlier in the evening.

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Rooting tomatoes

I've been a bit late in trying to get my tomatoes properly supported, so they've been growing in all directions.  The unseasonable heat is encouraging growth!

The first order of business was to get in the tomato supports and twine the leader shoot around them (I like to use the curvy poles in the raised beds, although I'm also training some up trellises in the side beds).

In wider beds, I like to use sturdy tomato cages, but in the narrow raised beds that I have here in the mountains, the poles look nicer and don't take up as much space.

But, in pinching back the exuberant axillary shoots, extra branches, etc., I thought I'd propagate an offshoot of one of the Cherokee Purple tomatoes, which was already showing plenty of root primordia on the stem.  As I harvest beets, carrots, and onions, there'll be more space for other things, whether more tomatoes or more shade-tolerant veggies like chard.

I just received a nice e-newsletter from Fine Gardening, a favorite gardening magazine, with an excellent article about pruning tomatoes -- more than I usually manage to do, but informative!

I was delighted to see that my shoot (tucked in a very deep pot) managed to survive a hot afternoon, and perked up by evening.  It'll be ready to plant in a week or two.

lower bed looking towards ravine

Here's a view of the lower raised bed (with the original tomato plant marked).   It doesn't really get enough sun to be very productive for tomatoes, but I've planted several, along with some squashes.  We'll see!

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Raised beds

The raised beds in front (of our house in the mountains) are looking good.

The last sugar snap peas are giving way to tomatoes and pole beans (greasy cut beans - an Southern Appalachian heirloom bean and yard-long beans - the Asian version (twining) of our southern cowpea -- but much better in my opinion.

I harvested bunches of beets, carrots, and onions from the raised beds this afternoon -- they'll be tasty roasted for tomorrow's dinner.  (And I'm thinking I need to head down to our Piedmont vegetable garden to harvest the rest of the garlic, maybe most of the onions, and check the potatoes.)

A new red potato popped up when I was checking some "leftover" plants that I'd stuck in a corner here in the mountains. What fun!

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Eastern Black Bear sighting!

Late afternoon yesterday, I noticed that the seed feeder was pulled down on its side.  I remarked half-joking, to my gardening companion, who had been at his table downstairs busily working, "hey, I think a bear's knocked down the bird feeder.  Surely, you'd have noticed, I said."  He said, "sure, I'd have noticed that and went outside to check the feeder."

That's when he saw the culprit, a young male black bear, who'd had an excellent snack, washed down with the sugar water in the adjacent hummingbird feeder, disappearing back down the ravine.

I didn't manage to get my camera in time, but we did have a good laugh about his not noticing that a bear was at the bird feeder basically just a stone's throw from the windows!

In the mountains of North Carolina, black bear populations are high enough that young bears (usually males) sometimes wander into urban areas.  We're close to downtown Asheville here in the mountains, so it seems pretty amazing to see a bear this close.

A young bear two summers ago at our feeder

Here's a link to our last backyard bear sighting in July, 2009.

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Wildflowers along the Blue Ridge Parkway

One of the benefits (totally) of being in the Southern Appalachians for the summer is proximity to great trails.  I joke to friends and colleagues during the academic year that "they don't let me out much" meaning that I'm at the Garden all the time, not out hiking.  But nothing to complain about that really.

Squaw root (Conopholis spp.)

But it was a joy to spend time on the Mountains to the Sea trail this morning, on a segment just off the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Silene virginica on a rock outcrop

a checker spot (?) basking on a Crateagus branch

There were lots of plants in flower, even though we're past the 'main' spring wildflower time.

Bowman's Root (Poteranthus), Fire Pink (Silene virginica), and Mountain Laurel (Kalmia latifolia) as well as Flame Azalea were in flower.

Kalmia latifolia (Mountain Laurel) in flower

Sedums, Tradenscantia, and Opuntia were on the rock outcrops, segregating themselves to wet and dry areas.

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