Gardening In Winter

     Welcome back to another episode of Lost In the Farmers Market, where we were going to continue our discussion of pruning things in the winter. Unfortunately that post is delayed because as it turns out I have to order a piece of equipment online as it is out of stock in the store. Go figure that this happened and it seems to be the theme of the last few months complete with a sad “waa-waa” sound effect. Now this means I will have to cover something else for this slightly delayed post and that will be some garden photographs. I’ve said it before and I’m going to say it again, just because it is winter does not mean no gardening can be done. The first day of spring this year is on March 20th. The last frost date for zone 8A which is most of Fayetteville is April 21st-30th, so with that in mind we know how much time we have for winter operations before the weather warms and the mosquito brigade starts being a problem again. The catch here is that our winter weather has been colder than prior years and there is no reason to suspect this will change for 2021 if all of January is any indicator. He have 95 nearly-guaranteed cold weather days left in the winter to early-spring season to work with and now is the time to do those effort-heavy labor projects.

The Winter garden at the test gardens is proof that you can have something going on in the winter.

    For today’s post there is a topic substitution while I wait for the new powered tool to arrive * Tim Allen Grunting noises intensify!*. If you planned your garden well then you should have something to harvest right now in the dead of winter. So let me show you what is in my garden at the headquarters right now.

    Those of you who hit up the market in fall of 2020 know that for the first time in several years I offered spinach plants for sale. They were not a good seller, which seems par for the course from prior experiences. I don’t know why folks don’t like spinach much but the surplus did not go to waste. These four plants were planted in a 14” pot and placed out with no expectations. They weathered frost and rain and all the cold temperatures and they are finally starting to get some size. I imagine with a bit of fertilizer in the next two months I might have something harvestable later. Maybe this is the big secret to growing spinach in zone 8A, plant in October, and let them be until late winter/early spring.

    Now this is a surprise, I never got any Rainbow Lacinato Kale to the market in 2020 and the undersized seedlings were thinned for the largest and best looking plants and stuck in the veggie garden in a big block. They look nothing like Dinosaur kale, the seed packets for them said they were variable in color and shape but, I didn’t see this coming. The picture does them no justice as they are this deep purple-green color that is quite fetching. A win for weird food plants for sure!

    The Swiss Chard I planted is showing some strange mutations as well. I planted the green type almost exclusively as a spinach substitute for when I make Henbit curry in the spring to add bulk greens to it. Well some look normal and some have these beautiful more spinach looking leaves and I am not upset about this at all. Could this be the next big variety or just a happy little accident in the seed packaging process of my supplier? Either way this just more healthy greens for me to harvest.

    Here is another biennial I sold at the market, ‘Ruby Perfection’ Cabbage. It wasn’t a great seller but then the seedlings were not very dramatically red. This more mature specimen and the other three in its row are fantastically red-purple, everything a red cabbage should be and also they indicate by color the soil is definitely acidic in pH. 

    Red Russian Kale is another variety I sold at the market; it is also known as ragged jack. It comes in a green form and some other variants but none get the extravagant purple color that this one does. It also seems to make for the best kale-bean soup base as the leaves have more chew and crunch despite cooking. Red Russian isn’t as crunchy as Dinosaur Kale but a delight nonetheless.

Accipiter cooperii

    Here is our last picture, this is a Cooper’s Hawk spotted just beyond the train tracks behind the Transportation Museum during the market on Saturday the 23rd of January. It isn’t the best picture I’ve ever taken, but still, everyone should know there are several species of Hawks in our region and they are beneficial in that they eliminate certain animal pests that might damage crops or livestock.


    With all that garden goodness covered this is the part of the blog where I have to advertise for the Fayetteville City Market. Now I know you readers probably don’t much like advertisements, but by booth at the City Market helps to cover the costs of running the test garden and literally maintains the Research & Development budget that is used to bring you the information that has made up the backbone of this blog. Also, as of the start of 2019, my booth can now process credit or debit cards thanks to the acquisition of s a Square reader so your payment options have doubled. With that said, if you want to get some GMO-free, Organic vegetables, herbs and fruiting shrubs come on down to the Fayetteville City Market on 325 Maxwell Street in downtown Fayetteville between the Hours of 9:00 am and 1:00 pm on Saturdays. Even in bad weather the market goes on though you might have to look for me under the ‘arches’ of the Transportation Museum’s front entryway.


Fresh Produce:
Soup Kit: Parsnip: $6.00
Soup Kit: Turnip: $6.00
Garlic Bulbs: $1.00
Seasoning Packets: $2.00
Shallots: $2.00
Parsnips, 1lb: $4.00
Turnips, 1lb: $3.00
Onions, 1lb: $3.00


January House Plant Collection:
Haworthia 'Fat Albert': $8.00
Haworthia 'West Jogo': $7.00
Devil's Backbone: $7.00
Sausage Spurge: $4.00
Starfish Sansevaria: $7.00
Aloe 'Sunset': $8.00
Aloe 'Checkerboard': $8.00
Rhipsalis, Slender: $7.00
Rhipsalis 'Drunkards Dream': $7.00


House Plant Spotlight!



Aloe deltoideodonta ' Sparkler' - Checkerboard Aloe

    That scientific name is quite the mouthful of Latin!  These members of the Aloe family get their name from the almost square spots on the leaves which in contrast to the grey-green leaves. This unique aloe is fairly easy to grow and does not ask for much other than occasional water and mild fertilizer (monthly) during the growing months (May-Sept). It is unclear if this particular aloe yields any medicinal gel, but it certainly is a unique addition to your collection. The two things you should never do with a succulent or this aloe is to allow the plant to sit in a puddle of water or to keep its soil constantly wet. The second thing is to never expose this plant to temperatures below 35 degrees as it can suffer frost damage which may introduce disease and cause the aloe to decline. As a final note, Checker Board aloes do best when potted in clay pots and only require repotting every 2-5 years or as needed. Pot-bound aloes will produce offsets more frequently than aloes that have ample room for their roots.


    We have a new place to share information and work on groovy sustainable stuff!  You can look for Sustainable Neighbors in our own Nextdoor.com group under the name “Sustainable Neighbors of Fayetteville”. You don’t have to live in Fayetteville to join but it is a private group so feel free to request to join us if you are signed up on the Nextdoor.com site.

https://nextdoor.com/g/ybvdm226x/?is=nav_bar

    Unfortunately, Covid-19 is still mucking up the works in terms of meeting in person. The good news is that Sustainable Neighbors does have a Discord Server. You can request access through our Meetup.com page or you can request access via our Nextdoor.com group. The meetup.com page is below for anyone looking to join us.

https://www.meetup.com/SustainableNeighbors/

    Since our meetings have an open-door policy you don’t need to buy anything or maintain any sort of attendance standard, you can come on in and join the meetings. When this Covid-19 mess calms down we may be able to resume normal in-person meetings. If not, you can always send me questions through this blog or visit the farmer’s market. This is the second LITFM post of 2021; stay tuned for our next post on or about the 5th of February. Don’t forget to check out of YouTube videos at LITFM-Garden Shorts.

Things do happen

Welcome back to another episode of Lost in the Farmers Market. This episode will be cut short, in that last storm one of the pine trees at the test gardens came down. Thankfully the damage is not too terrible, but it’s going to be an interesting clean up project. Some would view this situation as a bad thing, I see it as an opportunity, the area where the tree came down was overgrown, and really needed a clearing. Also, perhaps once the clearing is completed maybe some new garden beds can be established back there. With that said I have some photos of the downed tree, and some interesting garden photos. 

So, let me talk about that downed tree for a moment. The tree actually had been dead for a few years and I did little about it because it was a thirty-foot tall pine that realistically I had no tools to handle. I did clean up whatever fell off it  but it was in an area bordering the old woodland garden which I had only begun to clean up and recover this year. At about 6pm on Saturday the 16th during some of that high wind gust activity with the rain and such I heard a series of loud cracking noises and cringed waiting for the secondary sound no one ever wants to hear, a loud thump followed by shaking of the house. You see trees dont fall quietly, the cracking is their branches shearing off, and the thump is them hitting the ground, any other sound with that means they hit a structure and that is the worst kind of sound.When the rain east off a little an hour or so later I ventured out to assess damage thinking "please dont let it be one of the hundred footers....please not the two crooked ones..." and at first I could not tell what fell. I looked at the two crooked trees and could not see anything but a few two-inch caliper branches had snapped off. No biggie, I looked at the other trees, and the same was true, small stuff, no big deal, and then I saw the downed tree in the photographs, the dead tree had snapped at about ten feet up and came down in three pieces of trunk. It's bulk landed roughly in the path behind the crescent bed but some of it's smaller parts fell on and around the old woodland garden beds and on a rare specimen plant in the woodland gardens. That specimen is a Coastal Doghobble ( Leucothoe axillaris ), that plant was the single most successful thing planted in the woodland gardens, and the first non-food producing shrub planted on the property back in 2009. Its a rare plant because you virtually never see them in nurseries, something about how they are kind of bland, yet make an incredible living screen that gets up to seven feet tall. Well anyway, it's a big mess, but thankfully nothing irreplaceable was destroyed or damaged.

This was the top few feet of the tree.

the largest section of trunk.

The trunk ended up landing mostly on the path between the rear of the crescent bed and the old woodland garden.

I know it's not clear, but about ten feet of the tree remains upright.

 

A different angle on the same thing but with the downed tree in the picture.

With all that tree damage covered,  for the first time I managed to snap several pictures of plants that were actively being frosted by cold weather. All of the following photos were taken late at night with the flash on during the frost on the 10th of November. These same plants shrugged off the two days of 25 degree frost we got on the 12th and 13th.  There is a certain level of beauty to the silvery glazing some of the plants got. While I have discussed the mechanism by which cabbage family plants counter freezing damage, the fact is that they also counter it in the same way they counter overheating and dehydration, wilting.

Frost on Dino Kale, and Scotch Blue Kale.

Frost on Collards.

More different frost on Siberian Kale and red giant mustard.

More frosted winter greens.

With all that garden goodness covered this is the part of the blog where I have to advertise for the Fayetteville City Market. Now I know you readers probably don’t much like advertisements, but by booth at the City Market helps to cover the costs of running the test garden and literally maintains the Research & Development budget that is used to bring you the information that has made up the backbone of this blog. Also, as of the start of 2019, my booth can now process credit or debit cards thanks to the acquisition of s a Square reader so your payment options have doubled. With that said, if you want to get some GMO-free, Organic vegetables, herbs and fruiting shrubs come on down to the Fayetteville City Market on 325 Maxwell Street in downtown Fayetteville between the Hours of 9:00 am and 1:00 pm on Saturdays. Even in bad weather the market goes on though you might have to look for me under the ‘arches’ of the Transportation Museum’s front entryway.

Plants & Stuff Available Now:

All the Stuff:

Soup Kits: $6.00

Seasoning Packets: $2.00

Ginger, 4oz Packet: $2.00

Vegetables:

Collards, Green Glaze: 3” - $3.00

Mustard, Japanese Red Giant: 3” - $3.00

Kale, Scotch Blue Curled: 3” - $3.00

Kale, Dinosaur: 3” - $3.00

Swiss Chard: 3” - $3.00

Houseplants & Annuals:

Polka-Dot Plants: 6” - $5.00

Kalanchoe: 4.5” - $4.00

Coming Soon:

Whole Garlic

These days I am generally at Leclair’s General Store once a week, for the weekly Sustainable Neighbors meeting at 5:30pm through 7:00 pm. If you have questions then I will be there to answer your questions. Since our meetings have an open-door policy you don’t need to sign up for anything or join anything, you can come on in ask for us and join the meetings. If not, you can always send me questions through this blog or visit the farmer’s market or pay attention to what Sustainable Neighbors is doing at the link below.

https://www.meetup.com/SustainableNeighbors/

                        This brings to a close the twenty-third LITFM post of the new year, stay tuned the next episode which should be posted on the 29^th of November. There will be more garden updates and other cool stuff.

So much for in like a lion and out like a lamb.

Welcome back to another episode of Lost in the Farmers Market. This is the second post of March which by no measure of irony comes just two days after the first official day of spring which was Wednesday the 20^th.  So, as I always recommend, do not jump the gun and plant everything outside just yet, we can still have a freeze all the way up to the Easter weekend which is April 19^th through April 21^st. In short, we have a little way to go but, while you have to be careful about your warm season crops you can start to harden off your cold season stuff so it’s ready to go into the ground over the next three weeks or so.  For note, cold season stuff you can plant includes, lettuce, carrots, parsnips, cabbage, broccoli, kale, radicchio, mustard, turnips and some types of peas.  Now this leads to a question that I get somewhat rarely, ‘why do some plants freeze and die and others survive a front that killed everything else nearby?’  Well the simple answer is that some plants have biological adaptations that allow them to survive frost and cold with little or no damage. This protection is at a cellular level were some plants have

Leather Leaf Mahonia (Mahonia beali) prevents front damage by having both a waxy coating on it's leaves but rigid leaf structures full of fibrous lignin which makes it harder for frost to reach and freeze the water in the plant's vascular system and within it's cells cytoplasm.

The simplest answer for this is that freezing in general effects an organism on the cellular level by preventing the flow and or transfer of water between cells and in vascular pathways. This water once it freezes causes cells to burst which leads to that black color you see on plants that have frozen and thawed. This is literally the cold-induced equivalent to a bruise except the tissue destruction is far worse.  Some plants however have chemical compounds in their sap, and in the water stored in their cells that effectively lowers the freezing point for water so that they cannot as easily freeze. Literally some plants produce a biological equivalent to anti-freeze or something akin to alcohol. Before any of you get too excited about the idea of inebriated plants and consuming them, the reality is that it takes very little of these compounds to alter the freezing point of water within the plant.

Longleaf Pines (Pinus palustris) have waxy coating on their needles that allow them to survive low temperatures and freezing to a certain degree. The waxy coating on a plant's leaf is called a cuticle.

Likewise, plants also counter freezing with waxy coatings on their leaves (e.g. pines) and stems which also makes it harder for them to freeze. A third method is the geometry of the plants as is seen with some forms of cacti and succulents which may arrange their needles and spines in such a way to create airspaces where the temperature is controlled to a certain degree. This is the result of genetic selection for trails that increased the survivability of a given plant species which often produces interesting plant forms that most buyers at a garden center don’t fully appreciate or understand.  The discussion of how plants combat freezing ties into your garden planning by way of considering how wind travels through your yard which will tell you were cold and warm pockets might be allowing for better placement.  One of the interesting ways to spot where the wind forms temperature pockets is to look for where leaves swirl about in a cyclone like circle near structures or the placement of beds. Additionally, looking for spots where fallen leaves are thickest can often tell you that the wind is depositing them there due to the way it flows through your yard. Living windbreaks are the best way to control the movement of the wind and a good way to mitigate hot and cold pockets short of dramatic landscape alterations. But let’s move on to this week’s photographs from the field;

In numerous conversations and lectures I have called mosses an indicator plant because they only tend to appear where two specific environmental conditions are met. It has to be consistently moist and the soil has to be compacted to some degree for moss to reliably germinate and form colonies. the presence of moss is part of a naturally occurring terra-forming cycle where the moss will colonize an area and build up organic matter as it grows which then is colonized by other weeds that further defeat the compaction that initially may have left an area barren.

The above are the blooms of 'Kolibri' Kohlrabi plants in their second year. Honestly the deep purple stems, grey-green leaves and cheery yellow flowers are quite a combo.

Some varieties of Camellias bloom in the later winter and serve as the final indicator that spring is coming. This specimen is in full bloom right now.

With all that garden goodness covered this is the part of the blog where I have to advertise for the Fayetteville City Market. Now I know you readers probably don’t much like advertisements, but by booth at the City Market helps to cover the costs of running the test garden and literally maintains the Research & Development budget that is used to bring you the information that has made up the backbone of this blog. With that said, if you want to get some GMO-free, Organic vegetables, herbs and fruiting shrubs come on down to the Fayetteville City Market on 325 Maxwell Street in downtown Fayetteville between the Hours of 9:00 am and 1:00 pm on Saturdays. Even in bad weather the market goes on though you might have to look for me under the ‘arches’ of the Transportation Museum’s front entryway.

Plants & Stuff Available Now:

Soup Kit, Parsnip - $5.00  (Not available after March 30^th)

Soup Kit, Turnip - $5.00  (Not available after March 30^th)

Garlic, Whole bulb - $1.00  (Not available after March 30^th)

Garden Plants:

Lettuce, Cimarron, 3” - $3.00

Mustard, Red Giant, 3” - $3.00

House Plants:

Coffee Plants, 4” - $6.00

Flowering Maple, 4” - $3.00

Flowering Maple, 6” - $5.00

Polka-Dot Plant, 4” - $3.00

Coming Soon:

Basil, Cinnamon

Basil, Sweet Genovese

Cilantro

Carrot, Amarillo

Carrot, Atomic Red

Carrot, Black Nebula

Carrot, Lunar White

Garlic, Jerimiah’s Heirloom

Lettuce, Parris Island

Parsnip, Hollow Crown

Peppers, 11 varieties (TBA)

Potatoes, Dark Red Norland

Tomatoes, 12 varieties (TBA)

Pomegranate, Dwarf

Spice Bush, Calycanthus

Coneflower, Cayenne Red

Coneflower, PowWow Wildberry Mix

Datura, Black Currant

Datura, Indigo (rare!)

Datura, White Ballerina

Lupine, Carolina

Milkweed, (Asclepias tuberosa)

Whorled Milkweed, (Asclepias verticillata)

These days I am generally at Leclair’s General Store once a week, for the weekly Sustainable Neighbors meeting at 5:30pm through 7:00 pm. If you have questions then I will be there to answer your questions. Since our meetings have an open-door policy you don’t need to sign up for anything or join anything, you can come on in ask for us and join the meetings. If not, you can always send me questions through this blog or visit the farmer’s market or pay attention to what Sustainable Neighbors is doing at the link below.

https://www.meetup.com/SustainableNeighbors/

                        This brings to a close the sixth LITFM post of the new year, stay tuned the next episode which should be posted on the 5^th of April. There will be more garden updates and other cool stuff.