The Garden Tour 2026 Part III

          On the blog for a few weeks we’re taking a break from the Fort Liberty series to talk about an event that happened in June.  There was an event at the Trial gardens, garden tour which is a yearly event held in the spring. You can see the full details of what the tour is, when it is held and other information about it on the July 16^th post at the link below.

 

https://bl2-litfm.blogspot.com/2026/07/the-garden-tour-2026.html

 

 

In today’s post we’re looking at the reconstruction of the Tall bed. Now despite what you see in the photos, this bed used to be even taller. Erosion of soil and the sinking of masonry caused it to lose height as I removed layers of bricks over the years. The only good solution was to use the same raised bed kit that I had used on the vegetable beds. Since it was a modular kit with a couple of standard shapes it could fit the shape perfectly.

 

The existing survey of plants in the bed with measurements based on old notes.

 

As the saying goes, measure twice cut once. I took a second measurement after I did the sketch just to be sure. That document in the  picture is the info pamphlet that comes with the modular garden kits and the cat is Kiki, she's the neighbors cat who comes over every time I'm in the garden.

 

Technically this isn't part of the process but, Kiki likes to ride around in then wheel barrow.

 

 

The next phase was brick removal, and at first I was moving them by the wheelbarrow load.

 

Then the supervisor got involved.

 

Finally I just started piling the bricks off to one side. This  is partially because I needed to see how deep the bricks had sunk into the ground.

 

Due tot he weight of the brick border the entire thing sank two full bricks in. this was both a good and bad thing because it wasn't too deep but also it still meant I had to carefully get a trenching shovel under the deepest layer to get them out.

 

The next step now all the bricks have been removed was to install the new raised bed kit. This is part of why I did extra measurements, I needed to know what the internal and external area of the bed was to make sure the raised bed kit would fit and what you see with that small amount of gap is exactly what you want.

 

The bed has been back filled with a mix of soil and mushroom compost in this picture.

 

 

This is the final product, hanging baskets, and the whole nine yards.

 

 

 

 

The Garden Tour 2026 Part II

 

          On the blog for a few weeks we’re taking a break from the Fort Liberty series to talk about an event that happened in June.  There was an event at the Trial gardens, garden tour which is a yearly event held in the spring. You can see the full details of what the tour is, when it is held and other information about it on the July 16^th post at the link below.

 

https://bl2-litfm.blogspot.com/2026/07/the-garden-tour-2026.html

 

Today we’re going to take a look at the reconstruction of the vegetable patch, which is an area dedicated to producing food by way of annual or biennial vegetables and fruit. During the summer it has historically produced Cucumbers, Tomatoes, Eggplant, Basil, Cowpeas, and Elephant Garlic. During the cold months its specialty is Cole crops such as Broccoli, Cauliflower, Collards, Kale, Arugula and, Radishes. Also this area has been used to produce Carrots and Celery. The bed however had a persistent issue with soil erosion and the encroachment of non-hybrid Bermuda grass and shoots form the neighbor’s Tree of Heaven. The soil erosion was the big problem because if I could not keep good soil in place, then any irrigation I did was less effective since what soil remained was not holding on to the water long enough to support my vegetable crops. The Vegetable bed was the first area to be upgraded as part of the plan to renovate ahead of the Garden Tour. The following series of pictures will show you what I did so that you can decide if it is something you would consider doing in your garden.

 

The first step is always measuring your area and then drawing up a plan. Each bed was six feet long by 3 feet and eight inches wide, and although not marked the area in between them is about two and a half feet wide. Because the modular raised bed kids have rounded corners in later planning sketches you'll see shadowed hard corners indicating negative space.

 

This is what it looked like before I started work. Only the four poles the surviving collard plants, the group of chicory plants and the nearly-buried paving stones in the middle indicate this was productive last year.

 

After the weeds and unwanted plants were cleared, the remaining amounts of decent soil were run through a compost sifter and put on the blue tarp. Some folks would not bother with this but I believe that in the sand hills even gray colored soil that doesn't look great is still better as a sub soil in a raised bed then buying bags of questionable topsoil at a place like Home Despot.

 

 

The excavated soil is then covered with a plastic sheet and the entire amount is covered to keep it dry while the rest of the preparation work is underway.

 

Once the first two raise bed kits are assembled, they are placed where the old vegetable beds used to be and the soil under the tarp is added. The two large pots off to the side are tree pots and they once contained annual crops that are now dead. The large pot's soil is added to the mix since it counts as being potentially near depletion. In the time between this picture and the last, I have cut down a Cattle Panel fence section, and you will be surprised at what I did with it.

 

Ultra Gross! Looks like my Sourdough recipe has gone horribly astray! Jokes aside, this is a storage tote full of stored Mushroom compost. It's sat in there for months and was set aside specifically for this very moment. The white stuff is fungi, but so is the  gray stuff. The liquid is from a process called Guttation, in which the very much alive fungi push out excess water  through their pores. Since this was in a sealed storage tote the extra moisture cant go anywhere and forms the yellow pools. It's harmless but mushroom compost that looks like this is worth it's weight in gold as a soil amendment and as a fertilizer.

 

The compost is hacked up to bits in my trusty wheelbarrow, and then distributed equally in both beds. It is a nutrient rich cap for the subsoil layer and in fall the mushrooms may emerge and produce caps.

 

Over the mushroom Compost is a fresh layer of potting soil straight from the 72 liter bag. The type I use is just soil, no wetting agents, no fertilizer, no additives. 

 

The Cattle Panel Arch is installed in the middle of the filling process to make sure the support rods and everything holding it in the earth is deep enough. After that one bed is fully topped off with Potting soil and then the other which is unfinished in the picture gets the same soil treatment.

 

Now for the planting, take a look at the next two pictures for closeups.

 

 

Here's the right side, and from the bottom left: Fern Leaf Yarrow, Lavender, Elephant Garlic, Green Fennel, Patio Baby Eggplant, Marigolds, Cherokee Purple Tomato, Cucumbers, Yellow Salad Onions, Sweet Basil, Green Fennel, Orange You Sweet Pepper, Brandywine Tomato, Summer Squash.

 

The left side bed, plants from lower left: Lamb's Ear, Lemon Thyme, Mounding Blue Rue, Marigolds, Dandelion, Patio baby Eggplant, Green Fennel, Lemon Cherry Tomato, Yellow Salad Onions, Cucumbers, Sweet Basil, Lemon Cherry Tomato, Orange You Glad Peppers, Green Fennel, Summer Squash.

 

Just as I thought I was done, Polka who is one of the farm cats reminded me I forgot to put the pine straw out and put back the pavers.

 

This is how it looked when finished.

The Sugar Cane Exposé

Special note: This is not your normal post for the blog but to limits in the number of characters I can use to talk about this weeks YouTube Episode. I will post the full description info here. The description was almost 10k and the limit is 5k characters and well you can't really discuss Sugar Cane in short form. So here's the full thing, link to the channel is below this text.

The video is here

 

 

Pink Sugar Cane which in it's second year is not very pink. There are two crowns in the pot it's growing in and Malabar Spinach is growing up the stalks too.

 

 [Picture Coming Soon]

 Season Seven, Episode 00302

 

Botanical Latin Name: Saccharum officinarum

           

             Today I have a special video for you that has been long in the making. Instead of doing this in a exposé format with a chunky script in an overly serious tone, I’ve opted to handle it like a normal video because honestly, I hated all five scripts written to cover the topic. Today we are talking about Sugar Cane, a member of the true grass family Poaceae. This plant isn’t a perennial in my climate (Zone 8b) but some close relatives are. This means it has to come in for the winter and since it’s a grass with razor-edge sawblade-like leaf edges I have to keep it away from the cats and be very careful handling it. I found that it grows just fine in regular potting soil but is very thirsty needing water almost every day and it responds to liquid fertilizer rapidly. Although in the ground Sugar cane can get as tall as sixteen feet, the specimen shown in the video which is Pink Sugar Cane is about six or seven feet from soil surface up. It’s not a hard plant to grow however I’ve been growing it as a novelty in a garden. In the process of researching this plant and it’s very checkered past I found out that the plantation system of growing it is very different than what I was doing. For instance the average Cane stand lives about five years, the plants are typically harvested for their stems before the plant’s bloom. In the video I do say that and an acre of well grown Sugar Cane can yield about thirty nine tons of sugar, this is partially incorrect, that’s tons of stalks. A single box car filled with Sugar Cane can hold up to forty tons, which processes down to two-thousand pounds or a single ton of refined sugar. According to some sources this means there are about thirty teaspoons of refined sugar in every Sugar Cane Stalk.

 

            How do you get the sugar out? Well the stalks have their leaves and other unneeded greenery removed and they are then crushed, soaked and squeezed to wring out every drop of juice which is then boiled until syrup is created. The Sugar syrup is then spun in a centrifuge to get rid of the fluids and impurities out and create raw sugar. The raw Sugar is then melted and filtered again to take out any remaining impurities and extra color and the remaining sugar is then crystalized and spun in another centrifuge to remove liquids. In the process of the second spinning a side product is made, Molasses and after this the sugar is dried and packaged for distribution. Notice where I talked about filtration and removal of color? That process can be rigorous for white ‘bleached’ sugar, or less so for the naturally colored sugars like you find things like Turbinado, Demerara and Muscovado. The light, medium and dark brown sugars are normally just regular Sugar with varying amounts of Molasses added back into get the color and sticky texture. I need to mention that there is also Panela, a traditional solid block or cone of unrefined Sugarcane juice that you can find in the Spanish section of some grocery stores or in Spanish Markets that is another form you can get Sugar in. Now briefly I’d like to talk about the ugly side of how the table sugar is made because it’s as much a part of this discussion as is health effects of consuming the stuff (links about that below). 

            Sugar Cane isn’t native to the Americas at all despite it being grown here and Brazil being the lead world producer followed by India. In the United States alone, the top producing states are Florida, Louisiana and Texas. How did Sugar Cane get here though? Well you can blame one of history’s worst navigators Christopher Columbus who brought it to the New World in 1493 on his second voyage. He brought it in from the Canary Islands and planted it in what was then called Hispaniola which is now the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Before that though, before any European had ever heard of the stuff, the original Sugar Cane was Domesticated by the Papuans from the native Robust Cane (S. Robustum) around 6000 BP*. This strain of Sugar Cane was spread to Maritime Southeast Asia after contact was made with the Austronesians and it hybridized with Wild Sugarcane (S. spontaneum). From there it spread into mainland Asia and the second centers of domestication were Southern China and Taiwan. The earliest known production of crystal sugar like we know it was in Northern India from around the Eighth century, it was in Mesopotamia by the Tenth Century and transported to the Canary Islands by the Spanish in 1420,  where they used forced labor (slavery) to force the native Guanche People to farm the plant for export to Europe. Sugar Cane arrived in the Americas by two vectors, I already mentioned Columbus, but the Portuguese brought it in from their fields in the Madeira Islands in the early 1500’s. The original Brazilian plantations growing Sugarcane were started in the 1530’s by the Portuguese who used guess what? They used Slave Labor of course, because you can’t talk about colonialism without the slave labor and genocide. Some folks will brush that off and claim the Conquistadors were ‘civilizing’, or elevating people out of a less fortunate standard of life, some will say that the conditions were not that bad or even try to peddle manifest destiny or some other bigoted nonsense. So now in brief because of that I have to mention the Taino Genocide. In the seven seasons of this YouTube channel I never thought I’d have to talk about Genocide in any serious level of detail, but here we are.

            The Taino Genocide was an organized campaign of subjugation and eradication applied against the Taino people by the Spanish during their conquest of the Caribbean in the 16^th century. It is estimated that the population of the Taino on what the Spanish would start calling Hispaniola before Columbus showed up was around ten-thousand to a million people. Records on the population numbers are unclear because a lot from that time period was destroyed by the Spanish and of course as a conquering force they killed a lot of people who could have passed that information on to a new generation or historians. After about 1504 the Spanish began to enslave, and massacre the local population at a level that indicated that whatever their prior population numbers were, there were about thirty-two thousand Taino left in 1514, and by 1565 200, and then by 1802, they were declared extinct by the Spanish. Three other factors played a part in the extinction of the Taino people, Disease, Famine and Colonial Classification. As with any encounter with Europeans during the time period, the Spanish brought their diseases with them and that caused fatalities in the Taino Population. The activities of the Spanish (theft, tribute conquest) on Hispaniola disrupted the normal agricultural practices of the Taino resulting in Famine. But perhaps the most insidious of things done to the Taino People was paperwork. People of mixed heritage were not counted as Taino by the Spanish colonial authorities and simply were erased from history by way of intentionally inaccurate population accounting. Disease Famine and Colonial Classification paled in comparison to the violence perpetrated on the Taino people. I’m not sure I can go into fine detail here about this because of how YouTube is, but there is a link to a Wiki article to get you started further down. The point is that the Sugar Industry in Europe and the Americas was originally built on slavery, murder and conquest. In the present times there is no shortage of credible articles covering how bad the Sugar Cane plantations are. Even in the best of circumstances it’s not easy work there are a lot of hazards and workers battle with heat stress, kidney disease (from Pesticide exposure), chemical exposure (Herbicide), physical injuries and smoke inhalation from field burning. This is all not counting the financial debt that sugar cane farmers often carry, then there’s the pollution of the air, and the runoff from Sugar Cane fields that gets in local water sources. It’s estimated that about two-hundred and thirteen gallons of water is wasted to produce a pound of refined sugar. Amidst all this there are a number of companies in the USA lobbying against sugar regulations such as Coca-Cola. So I urge you to check out the links below and do some reading,  I stand by my belief that Sugar Cane might be the legal crop with the most messed up history of violence and exploitation.

*Before Present i.e. before January 1^st 1950. This is a time scale used in Archaeology and Geology used to indicate that something existed before the origin of reliable radiocarbon dating in the 1950’s.

 

 Here are some links with extra information:

https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu/plants/saccharum-officinarum/

https://plantfinder.mobot.org/PlantFinderDetails.aspx?taxonid=285293

 

Here are some links to information about the history of Sugar Cane:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/sugar-slave-trade-slavery.html

https://kauaitourguy.com/reason-hawaii-gave-up-sugar-cane/

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12992-023-00963-4

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat

https://medium.com/ucsf-magazine/uncovering-the-secrets-and-sickness-beneath-the-sweet-surface-f522c8c8b51d

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/sugar-a-killer-crop.html

https://www.vitalstrategies.org/not-sweet-seems-real-costs-sugarcane-farming/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_plantations_in_the_Caribbean

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta%C3%ADno_genocide

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sugar

LITFM is intended as a series of videos highlighting a specific plant/family in the Botanical Testing Gardens. The Gardens are located in North Carolina (Zone 8b). Hopefully this video gives you some good garden ideas and if you have questions or comments let me know.