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.

The Garden Tour 2026

 

          On the blog for a bit we’re taking a break from the Fort Liberty series to talk about an event that happened last month. Some of you folks out there have heard about the Garden Tour event on this blog or in passing and it’s a yearly event in which the headquarters property is open to the public for just a few short hours. That property is about a half-acre, out of the total five acres in the operation. The tour this year was on June 14^th 2:00pm to 5:00pm which is a bit late but, just before the weather got really hot.  Normally the tour is in May on the weekend after Mother’s Day weekend but the garden upgrade timetable didn’t get far enough along to allow the tour to happen at its usual time. The delays came in several forms, at the time we were getting rain, shipped materials had delays, and arranging the funding for materials was a bit hectic. However, the tour this year had a good attendance and despite a sudden rain shower which forced everyone off the field for about twenty minutes things turned out ok. Undoubtedly some of you are wondering what a Garden Tour is, and the short answer is that it’s the continuance of a tradition that goes back to 2010.  Way back when, a group called Sustainable Sandhills ran an organized Garden Tour that focused on the exchange of information from urban farms, victory gardens and other local green-oriented operations to encourage folks to grow more of their own food. At its height there was a tour in two counties at least a dozen locations in Cumberland County alone and the event was almost an all-day affair. The original tour is how my Nursery operations started because visitors asked me for what I was growing at the time and I had a few starter plants and no idea it would turn into anything. Years and acres later the nursery is a not-for-profit microbusiness of sorts operating as part of a bigger farming system.

 

          This year’s garden tour had quite a bit of a lead up, months of planning and early operations went into the arrangements that intrigued and delighted guests this year. As I mentioned, the tour almost didn’t happen. When I started the planning phase of things in November of 2025, it was decided that I had to renovate at least five critical areas and at a bare minimum three out of five needed to be completed in order to have a tour. Those areas were the Vegetable patch (two beds), the Tall raised bed, the old flower bed, and the Reinforced Mound Bed. Almost all of those beds were brick-lined, so part of the planning was figuring out what to do with the brick. The problem was that it was easily hundreds of bricks and in the case of the garden beds that were walled with brick over the last decade plus, some of them had sunk into the soft sandy soil. In the case of the Tall Raised Bed, the brick had sunk a full two layers in. Recovering the masonry was partially planning for new uses as much as it was excavating and cutting the old bed edges to fit the new raised bed material, moving earth and of course calculating for the amount of back fill. There was math and a little bit of masonry and a bit of engineering involved here and I don’t even want to think of the labor hours expended. The cost of the upgrades to the garden was not exactly expensive compared to what it cost when I built the garden, but they were not free either. Truthfully, had it not been for all the Mushroom Compost that came from Sandhills Mushroom Farm, this project would have exploded its budget for back fill.  So in that light, Today, I’m going to start the Garden Tour series with the garden construction in progress and via photographs show you the process of the Reinforced Mound Bed’s reconstruction.

 

 

As you can see, after clearing of weeds and overgrowth the RFMB has seen better days. The soil has shifted, the brick edging is hogging pretty badly and there's nothing useful growing in there at all. Original measurements indicated the bed was a little over six feet wide and just over twelve feet long.

 

 

The first step of any good plan is to take measurements and draw out what you plan to do. The RFMB was a rectangular bed that I decided should be split into two separate beds and the sketch above is intended as a herb-bed with a Fig planted in the middle.

 

 

 

 

 

As I'm fighting off the weedy masses the Neighbor's cat Kiki decides to help me dig out weedy tree saplings.

 

Exploratory digging is next, I needed to know how deeply the bricks had sunk, and thankfully it was only about half a brick down. This is good because I do not have to do any serious masonry extraction.

 

Aggressive clearing of the weedy population comes next. I had to keep an eye on conserving the existing soil because, well look at it, that's some decent stuff in there. With the weeds gone you can really see how bad the brick walls were hogging.

 

 

At this point I take another set of measurements because the bed is being split in two. The trench dug there is as much to save the decent-quality topsoil as it is to tell me where to stop extracting bricks.

 

The trench I dug also serves another useful purpose, it shows me where the new path will be so I can maintain access to the side gate in the background.

 

The last of the bricks are extracted from the work area which creates a nice little pre-dig allowing the new raised bed to settle in, using the same space.

 

Here is the new raised bed, it's a nice square 5x5 made of coated steel and each modular kit takes about 45 minutes to assemble. These things are pretty hefty and held together by hex nuts and screws.

 

Put in it's new home, the new raised bed looks pretty good. Btw, in case you are wondering, I picked the white color to reflect heat away from the soil during the hottest months to reduce plant stress and watering needs.

 

The first plant to go in, because it was the largest is the unknown Fig. I traded to get this fig and have no idea which variety it is, but the person who traded it to me claims it's an LSU type. Since it will displace the most soil, it has to go in the ground first.

 

The next step is back filling, and this garden bed got 6 cubic feet of Mushroom compost as a additive between the original topsoil and the soon to be applied new topsoil.

 

The new topsoil is a basic promix styled potting soil, that is added to bomb the bed with organic matter and guarantee it's ability to retain reasonable amounts of moisture.

 

 

 

The finished bed looks like this on the day of completion. Expect a more current photo in the next blog post.

So folks, this is how half of the RFMB got renovated. It was the last bed I worked on before the tour and was completed about a week or two prior. At the current time it contains an unknown Fig, Chives, Fern Leaf Yarrow, Hurricane Lilies, Jalafuego Peppers, Italian Chicory, Garnet Stem Dandelions, Wintergreen, Texas Tarragon, Parsley, Coneflower, Cutleaf Coneflower, Southern Wormwood, Berggarten Sage, Celriac, Lovage, Juniper Thyme, Santolina and Lavender.  Basically it's a nice food and herbal medicine garden which is what the original garden it was built on was intended as.