Month: November 2022

Week one:

At our first garden club meeting we prepared a bed and planted kale. While we were working in the bed we had to pull out some of the okra plants and the two ground cherry plants. The kids tried fresh baby okra and a few of the ground cherries that were still good. What did they think about these vegetables? Watch the videos and you’ll see!

Week 2:

At our second garden club meeting we dug up all of the sweet potatoes we grew from the slips my friend Jason Roland had donated to the garden club. We ended up with 52 potatoes from only 3 slips! We also found a ladybug! We cleaned off the trellis in this bed where the yard long squash was growing over the summer and pulled out the basil too. Later Señor Frank planted kohlrabi and yellow cabbage-collards in this bed.

Week 3:

This week we went around to the beds on the other side of the school to start getting them weeded and ready to plant. We had strawberry plants that we got from Lina, a 4th grade student who sold them to Señor Frank. Señor Frank was happy to pay a Lena for her plants since it’s very hard to find strawberry plants this time of year and she said that her plants had been growing well in her yard since she planted them there last year. She actually said that she and her mom had planted them in a kiddie pool and that they spread so much that they had climbed out of the pool and were spreading into the lawn! Now those are the kind of strawberry plants we want!

We left a bit of space in front of the strawberries so we can plant some vegetables there this season. We also plan to plant garlic and shallots between the strawberry plants since garlic, shallots, and strawberries all like to have straw under them. The straw helps to keep the ground from freezing in the winter so our plants won’t freeze, and in the spring/early summer when the berries grow, it will help prevent weed growth and keep the berries off the ground so they don’t rot.

You might have noticed how much space there is between our strawberry plants. We space these plants far apart (about 16 – 18 inches) because they will eventually send out runners with baby plants on them that will take root far from the mother plant. After a year or two, this entire bed should be completely full of strawberry plants!

So you can see that the intercropping garlic and shallots trick will only work for a season or two…

Chris Smith is an organic farmer, author, and founder of a nonprofit organization called The Utopian Seed Project. Through the Utopian Seed Project, Chris offers vegetable seeds to small farmers, back yard gardeners, and school gardens who promise to grow them until they flower and produce seeds, then collect the seeds and return some to Chris at the project.

By having lots of people grow the seeds, Chris can get many more plants grown each season. The plants cross-pollinate creating seeds that have many combinations of traits inherited by the parent plants. For example, if one plant produces purple leaves and another produced a slightly pink leaf, the seeds from the cross might be both purple and pink.

Collards are in the brassica plant family which means they are biennial. They generally have to survive a winter in order to flower and produce seeds. If the farmer lives in a place with a very cold climate, some of the collard plants might die over the winter. This would mean that the surviving plants would be only the cold-tolerant ones, so the seeds they produce should inherit that trait and be cold hardy like their parent plants.

At my last school we participated in Chris’s first seed project growing Whidby White Okra, an old Okra variety that used to be grown by the Whidby family in central Georgia back in the 1850’s. We selected the plant that produced the palest, whitest pod and forced one flower on that plant to self-pollinate so we could send it back to Chris. He took the pods from over 800 farms and gardens and is now growing those seeds trying to select for the whitest okra pods hoping to restore this heirloom variety of okra to its original color.

In this video Chris is showing how they collect collard seeds by crushing the dried seed pods, sifting the seeds and bits of dried seed pod and stems (chaff) through screens, and eventually blowing the smaller bits of chaff away with a fan.

I have done this on a much smaller scale with blue kale seeds. It’s a lot of fun crushing up the pods and shaking the seeds and chaff in a colander to separate the seeds out. It takes a little work, but the seeds you save can last a few years and can be shared with family and friends or traded with other gardeners for other seeds they have that you might want to try. In fact, we saved 1 1/3 lbs of blue kale seeds one season at my old school and I gave some of it to my buddy Jason Roland to plant on his farm. Later that year Jason had that blue kale in his CSA shares, so those seeds actually grew plants that fed many people!

Hopefully we will be able to let some of our brassica plants go to seed so we can collect them. What brassicas do you want to collect seeds from? Should we try to isolate one plant so we get the same vegetable or should we let a bunch flower at the same time so we can see what we get when they cross?

By KaleahF

Lemongrass’s scientific name is Cymbopogon citratus.This plant is commonly called Indian lemongrass, fever grass, Mallisa grass, oil grass, and its most common name, lemongrass. Lemon grass is native to southern India and prefers a warm sunny area to grow. This plant grows best when it receives water when the top layer of soil is dry. Lemongrass is a perennial grass, but is not often left outside to grow for longer than a year. The average height of lemongrass is about 1 foot when it is ready to harvest. Lemongrass is not a flowering plant, so it does not need any insects. Lemongrass is not a butterfly host plant,and is even used in insect repellents! Lemongrass is edible, and is often used in Thai food, and a lot of teas. Lemongrass is a vegetable and a herb that is very well known, so many farmers grow it. Few plants go near lemongrass, but occasionally, spider mites attack it. We are actually growing lemongrass, but we are growing it in a pot that is not close to many flowering plants, because this plant reppells pollinators.  Lemongrass grows best in Miracle Grow soil. This plant is very easy to grow, and if you love the smell of lemons, this is a good plant for you to grow.

Sources: Source1:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3217679/#:~:text=Cymbopogon%20citratus%2C%20Stapf%20(Lemon%20grass)%20is%20a%20widely%20used,countries%2C%20especially%20in%20Southeast%20Asia

source2:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780857090409500187 

source3:https://bonnieplants.com/blogs/how-to-grow/growing-lemongrass#:~:text=Plant%20lemongrass%20in%20spring%2C%20once,Space%20plants%2024%20inches%20apart. 

Yesterday in our garden club meeting we were reading the blog posts on Gardening at the Glen. Then we took out the vines in the garden beds and we dug up the sweet potatoes. We also found a bee but it ended up being dead and then we found a ladybug on a plant and were counting the spots   on the ladybug.

– HarperF

The garden looks great so far! Yesterday we cleaned out the bed with the squash, sweet potatoes, and basil in it to get it ready for planting kohlrabi and yellow cabbage-collards. From the 3 Bayou Belle sweet potato slips donated to us by Jason Roland of Organically Roland Farm, we dug 51 potatoes! The kids each took a couple of big ones home to eat with their families. They also took home a big bunch of basil each. Parents were talking about making pizza later in the week with it!

We checked our compost pile and found that the temperature had dropped, so we added more alfalfa pellets to try to get the bacteria working more again to raise the temperature and speed up the decomposition process. Señor Frank added our old sweet potato vines to the pile this morning and mixed them in with what we already have to try to help feed those bacteria even more.

We did find a big black bumblebee on the basil flowers. It was very cold so it barely moved. It was probably still alive, but it is reaching the end of its life cycle with the freezing 29 degree temperatures coming Thursday night.

We took a picture of the ladybug we found and we plan to send it to the Lost Ladybug Project so the scientists there can identify it and let us know what kind of ladybug it is.

We read our first student-written blog post together and read part of Señor Frank’s post about wild pigs in Congaree National Park. We watched one of the videos of the pigs. We learned how to write a plant, butterfly, or bird profile post for the blog and started writing a post about Jerusalem Artichokes together.

Is was chilly and a little wet outside so we took a few breaks from working outside to come in and warm up while we read. Now we are all excited to start writing our own blog posts!

By StellaB

The ingredients in the picture are:

1. One super large sweet potato (Ours came from Señor Frank’s school garden).
2. Two small apples
3. One package of breakfast sausage
4. One onion 
5. Your favorite syrup  

You will also need:

• Salt and pepper
• A knife
• A wooden spoon/ spatula
• A parent

The first thing you do is cook the sausage in a skillet with an adult’s help (temperature medium high). While the sausage cooks, chop up one half or more of onion. My family likes more than one half of a onion.

Once the meat is browned, drain the grease from the pan. Add the onions. Cook until onions are slightly brown. 

Next, poke a few holes in the skin of the sweet potato. Then microwave the sweet potato until it starts to become softer. Peel and cut the the sweet potato into large chunks. Also compost the peel and apple cores.

The next thing to do is chop two small apples. We like these to be larger chunks too. Add in the apples and let them cook a bit.

Finally, add in the sweet potatoes. Stir alittle as the mixture cooks. Test the apples by inserting a fork into them. The apples should be easy to stick a fork in; however, you don’t want them to cook so long that they become mushy (unless you like mushy apples….).

The last step is to add syrup and plate it for dinner, breakfast, lunch.

Did you know that November is National Native American Heritage Month? As we approach Thanksgiving, we often think about Pilgrims from England and “Indians” – the native people of the Americas who were given this inaccurate name as a result of Christopher Columbus’ mistake in crossing the Atlantic and assuming he had reached India.

While that first Thanksgiving was probably nothing like the popular myth of Pilgrims and Indians sharing a feast to celebrate the Pilgrim’s success in the New World through cooperation with the Indians, Native Americans or Indigenous people of the Americas have made many important contributions to the world’s culture and even diet! From the chocolate that we eat on most holidays like Halloween, Easter, and Christmas (and all year long if you can afford it) to other much more important foods like squash, tomatoes, potatoes, and corn, the vegetables and grains that Native Americans developed over thousands of years from native plants of the Americas now form the base of a food chain that feeds our country and the rest of the world!

One food that we often forget was gifted to us by Native Americans is popcorn!

Popcorn has long been associated with the movies, or in recent years, the microwave, but although many of us may have wondered why popcorn pops, few of us have asked where popcorn actually came from.

The Indigenous people of the Americas first domesticated the strain of corn which produces popcorn thousands of years ago.
Europeans learned about popcorn from Natives. When Cortes invaded Mexico, and when Columbus arrived in the West Indies, each saw natives eating popcorn, as well as using it in necklaces and headdresses.

In fact, popcorn artifacts dating back to 6,700 years ago were discovered in Peru. So the next time you grab a handful of your favorite snack, remember it’s not just Orville Redenbacher you should be thanking.

If you read about how farmers will use daikon radishes to help loosen up the soil and how farmers with pigs can let them dig up the radishes to eat speeding up the natural plowing process, then these videos will seem familiar.

Today I took a walk around the boardwalk loop at Congaree National Park to get back to Westin Lake and do a little fishing and clean up some trees taking the fishing lures and line out of them along the edges of the pond.

On the way out on the low boardwalk I noticed large areas that looked like they had been disturbed and trampled right next to the boardwalk. I wondered if the torn up ground was the work of wild hogs, but soon forgot about it when I got to the pond.

Then on the way back a young couple in front of me stopped me and pointed into the woods along the boardwalk. Sure enough there were two wild hogs rooting around in the soil and digging under logs!

I have heard that there are a lot of wild or “feral” hogs in South Carolina, but I had never actually seen one! It was really cool to be up high and be able to just watch them digging for food.

They weren’t afraid of us at all!

Unfortunately as helpful as domestic hogs can be on a farm, I have heard from my farmer friends that wild hogs are a real problem. They will dig up farmer’s crops and eat them and it is very hard to stop them from getting into a field.

Also while these little piggies might look cute and cuddly, remember that they are wild animals. They are very strong, very fast, and they can really hurt you if you come across one in the woods when you’re on the ground. I was glad to be so high up where I could observe them safely!

I grew up in a place where everyone’s yard was right next to everyone else’s yard and there weren’t very many wild places where I could see animals like deer, rabbits, or turtles. We would have birds come to our bird feeder in the yard at my house and there were squirrels, but to see a hawk or a Canada goose or a blue heron, I would have to go to a park.

In fact, there was so little wildlife where I grew up that one day my mother noticed a snowy owl on a telephone pole and she got us together to take pictures and tried to call someone at the park to ask if it was healthy and if the park rangers wanted to try to capture it to check it out and try to help it!

Where I live in Columbia now there are woods and a creek behind my house. We see and hear barred owls all the time. There are red tailed hawks in the tall trees, hummingbirds feeding on nectar from a trumpet vine on my shed all summer long, skinks and anoles all over the place, and even deer that walk through the yard from the woods and stand under my fig tree in the early morning right outside my front door.

But one of the coolest animals I find in my yard and in the woods behind it is the box turtle.

I had seen some growing up at parks – mostly ones that had been injured that were being kept in fish tanks that couldn’t be released into the wild any more, but sometimes I would find a wild one in the woods when hiking to a stream or pond to fish.

When I lived in Washington, DC, my house wasn’t far from Rock Creek Park – A National Park that is like Washington, DC’s version of Central Park in New York. I never saw a box turtle there (although there were deer and other animals). I learned later that this was probably because people were searching for them to take and sell as pets. This made me sad since I knew that box turtles could live for 100 years and taking adult turtles out of the wild would make them impossible to find in the park in only a few years.

So after I moved into my house in Columbia the first time I found a box turtle in my yard it made me very happy!

I now know that there are a few of them living in the woods behind my house and I will find them hiding in leaves or under Ivy, or just sitting in the tall grass in the back yard if I let it get tall. (I always check the whole yard before I mow!)

These little guys just go about their lives eating insects, plants and mushrooms and occasionally small animals like frogs and stay hidden in the leaves. I used to have a compost pile in the woods so I think they came to eat the vegetable scraps I left there to rot. They are beautiful animals and very calm. You can pick them up, but watch out because like any animal they can bite it scratch you, and if you touch them you should be sure to not touch your face or mouth and wash your hands really good right after you do. They can carry a bacteria called Salmonella that can make us sick.

Now that you have read all about my experiences with Box Turtles, here is a radio article about the 100 year study that is underway researching Box Turtles in North Carolina. You don’t have to read this article, just click the “play” button to listen to the story at this link:

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/27/1131981766/100-years-of-box-turtles

Daikon radishes are traditionally grown in Asia, but they can be eaten pickled, roasted, and braised besides being fermented into a Korean side dish known as kimchee. They can be spicy when raw, but when cooked, the flesh of this large root turns sweet just like other radishes.

Daikon radishes have another purpose for organic farmers though. They are used as a “tillage crop”. This means that the farmer grows them so that their long tap root can drill down into the soil in places where it is hard to help loosen the soil and break it up when they can’t (or would rather not try to) dig the soil themselves. When they do this they usually won’t even pick the radish to eat, just letting it decompose in place when the cold kills it in the winter or after it goes to seed.

The long roots of a Daikon radish can absorb nutrients from much deeper in the soil than many other plants’ roots can reach, and when they decompose, the nutrients they have gathered are released into the soil at shallower levels making the topsoil richer.

The technique of using these large radishes to help break up hard soil to help prepare a garden bed can be much easier than actually digging the soil, but it also can take time – two or three years – since it depends on growing these radishes over and over, and adding compost to the top layer of soil to attract earthworms that will also drill down into the soil and mix the compost and its nutrients into the soil, doing the digging for you. It’s a gardening technique that can be very effective, but one I have never had the patience to try since I like to be able to grow other vegetables right away when I make a garden.

In this post by a garlic farmer, he explains why he grows Daikon radishes in his garlic beds.

Notice that he has a working farm with livestock (animals) that he uses to help do the work of digging and fertilizing naturally. He mentions hogs. Pigs are natural plows. They dig through soil looking for roots and mushrooms to eat, and when they leave their droppings, the manure enriches the soil.

I actually have seeds for a cherry tomato that came from a local pig farm. A friend of mine, Eufren Ramos, sold me the cherry tomatoes years ago saying that they came from a pasture where they had kept pigs for years. After the pigs were removed, the farmer found these large, sprawling tomato plants growing that grew small, dark red cherry tomatoes with the flavor of a big beefsteak tomato. He said the plants crawled along the ground and covered an area that was 10 feet wide! The farmer had no idea what kind of tomatoes they were. All he knew was they had grown from seeds that had ended up in the pigs’ manure once after the pigs ate the tomatoes!

Anyway, here’s how one garlic farmer uses Daikon radishes, sheep, and pigs to dig up and enrich the soil in his garlic farm.

Had you planted Daikon radish after you harvested your garlic you would be harvesting daikon radish right now.
I sowed these bad bhoys in mid august and a select few , the ones on this crate , are over a kg . This one in particular is 2,330 grams or like 5.1 lbs !!!

Daikon radish is an amazing veggie everyone should grow even if you hate radish
. Having it’s origin in Asia, where it’s grown for food, I primarily use this as a “ tillage radish “ or as a “Pasture radish” and this was taught to me years ago by Amish farmers .

Using Daikon as a Tillage radish leaves behind a cavity in the soil when the large tap root decays, making it easier for the following year’s crops, such as potatoes, to bore deeper into the soil. Potatoes grown in a rotation with tillage radish do not experience growth restrictions associated with having a shallow hardpan, as the tillage radish can break the hardpan, and makes transfer of water, and other important nutrients, much easier for the rooting system.

Likewise they sequester both macro and micronutrients that might get lost in drainage keeping this valuable nutrition available for rotation crops like tomatoes or corn.

The roots store well well and are awesome fermented

I will sow them with mixed crops in a pasture for the hogs who absolutely love these and dig deep to get them. First I let the sheep have at the tops and then the hogs come in to dig them up. They mix both manures together when digging in a mob grazing scenario. Using both animals in this fashion sequesters carbon and creates a healthy diverse biome of beautiful soil for healthier pastures . I’ve turned clay into deep chocolate cake soil this way The best part is THEY do all the work 😂 and carbon is sequestered the natural way .
These ones I’m going to put into a radish slaw …. Yup radish slaw !!! Tomorrow I’ll put in about 1/3 grated radish and 2/3 grated cabbage but if I wanted a little bit spicier I’ll do it 50-50. Like all the slaws I make , it will be a vinegar based slaw because that’s what I prefer .

Our very first garden club meeting!Today we learned how to plant kale, and also looked at many different kinds of kale like Red Russian kale in the garden. We also got to try basil, peppermint, okra, and sorrel. They are all very tasty. To plant kale, we got to dig in the soil, and we got to transplant the kale from its pot to the garden bed. We also got to learn about the creatures that are good and the creatures that are bad for your garden. Slugs are one of the things that are bad for your garden, and insecticides are another. Insecticides are bad because they repel, or keep away some of the good things like bees which pollinate our plants. We got to explore the ways worms break down bacteria. This was a truly amazing, and fun experience, and if you are interested we encourage you to join us by filling out the application on the blog.