ice in florida

The ravages...

It's been a long, very cold couple of weeks... this is what happens to my Russellia when it freezes--the water in the stems freeze and explode, leaving this sculpture in ice...

Well, I guess I'll get the chill hours my fruit trees need...

Still alive...

A very busy time of the year for me, so light blogging until after Christmas. The usual cool/dry season things going on in the garden: broccoli, radishes, lettuces, collards, cauliflower, carrots, potatoes, peas, beets and turnips. Ran out of seed... made an order at Johnnys:

SKU:	Product	Quantity	Price	Ext. Price
23010	Snow Crown (F1)-Mini	1	$2.95	$2.95
281210	Blue Wind (F1)-Mini	1	$2.95	$2.95
223910	Windsor (F1)-Mini	1	$2.95	$2.95
227810	Fiero (F1)-Mini	1	$2.95	$2.95
2320G10	Totem (F1) (OG)-Mini	1	$3.95	$3.95
70610	Hakurei (F1)-Mini	1	$2.95	$2.95
202810	Javelin (F1)-Mini	1	$2.95	$2.95
64011	Slick Pik™ YS 26 (F1)-Packet	1	$2.95	$2.95

Crimson Crisp Radish

I may never go back to open-pollinated radishes. Quick, perfectly round, appropriately crimson, and not a single split radish in today's harvest. i sowed 'em thick, picked the big 'uns this week, and left the rest to bulb. I've also have some Cherriette Hybrid radishes going in a windowbox, which is a great way to grow a bunch of radishes. They love a rough and quick-draining mix, which makes sense, inasmuch as they were bred to form root structure. With cool weather, it's not too hard to keep the moisture reasonably even.

Tomande tomatoes

I'm enjoying my tomato salad (tomatoes, salt, Sherry vinegar, olive oil, chopped Trinidad Yellow Seasoning pepper sprinkled atop), thinking to myself, DAMN that's a fine tomato. Tomande from Tomato Growers Supply. Very vigorous, very disease tolerant, set fruit at ninety degrees and is setting more at sixty degrees. Quick to ripen, too--maybe two weeks behind my cherries. Dark green shoulders. Sweet but a nice acidity to it, too. Honest, tomato flavor. Keep your heirlooms. I'll stick with this hybrid!

I've also been taking a box of Yellow Submarine tomatoes to work with me every day. Very sweet when completely ripe, nicer when a little greener. Thin enough skin. Good vigor, early, open-pollinated to boot.

The new wave of urban farming (and fresh food from small spaces!) | Grist

Pretty smart advice here for the apartment-bound and even for those (like me!) with some space but not a lot... I agree completely with his advice for growing potatoes in pots. Very productive...

The new wave of urban farming (and fresh food from small spaces!) | Grist:
"In Fresh Food From Small Spaces: The Square-Inch Gardener’s Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting, and Sprouting, author R. J. Ruppenthal turns a seemingly anti-urban idea—that farming has to be done outside, with a red barn and rolling fields of wheat—on its head. Because urbanites, too, can grow their own food indoors, in cramped spaces,"

Potting Mix

My new potting mix is a 5::2::1 pine fine::perlite::peat mix. It’s really doing the trick for me… I’m in the midst of repotting all my plants—rinsing off the roots, trimming them aggressively, and moving them into this new mix. The results are impressive. I just bought a Siphon Mixer - Fertilizer Injector off of eBay ($17 delivered!) that will allow me to fertilize every time I water.

Dogwoods in November...

Funny thing is that these dogwoods NEVER bloom in the spring. I'd always assumed it was the lack of chill hours, but that hypothesis seems to be proved wrong when they bloom with virtually no chilling... in November...

A quick update in pictures

Calendula. Probably my favorite winter flower. It'll bloom its head off all winter and spring. I have ten of these going in undersized pots. A great way to add a spot of color and cheer to any bleak area of the garden. These are from saved seed.

Tuscan kale and broccoli.

I was visiting a friend's garden in August, and on a whim I grabbed a single spent zinnia flower from her garden. When I found the flower in my pocket later that day, I tossed it into an empty big pot in my garden. I swear I think every single seed germinated--I've been pricking seedlings all fall long and giving them away to friends and family, transfering them to pots, etc. Very interesting that a single flower produced so much diversity--there are (in addition to the pinks and orange here) a couple bright yellow zins and one deep red one. But mostly pumpkin orange and carnation pink. These seem to be pretty mildew-resistant, to boot.

Cool season has arrived... November in the garden

Too much going on in life and the garden for a good "garden happenings" post... Cool weather has finally arrived after the hottest October on record.

Harvesting lettuces, tomatoes, eggplants, peppers... getting ready for the first radishes of the season. Zinnias, calendula, pentas, and Lions Mane (Leonotis menthifolia) and marigolds are blooming. Cool season herbs are thriving and basil is declining. Picked my last roselle and ripped out the canes. Melons have been a failure in the fall. Too much mildew. Planting beets, peas, more lettuce, chard, turnips, and carrots. My broc and cauliflower should be heading up sometime soon. First batch of greens is due next week.

Trying a new seedling mix: 6 parts perlite, 3 parts peat, 1 part dyna-rok. Some lime and micronutrients to round it out. Continue to plant a lot of pots and window-boxes with Al's 5-1-1 mix (pine fines/perlite/peat). What a great mix! It's remarkable how quickly repotted plants respond to it.

Roselle

Waste...

I thought this article in yesterday's Times was modestly provocative. The problem and its solution are not, I think, clearly identified in the article.

Recycling Goes From Less Waste to Zero Waste [...]Though born of idealism, the zero-waste philosophy is now propelled by sobering realities, like the growing difficulty of securing permits for new landfills and an awareness that organic decay in landfills releases methane that helps warm the earth’s atmosphere. [...]Americans are still the undisputed champions of trash, dumping 4.6 pounds per person per day, according to the E.P.A.’s most recent figures. More than half of that ends up in landfills or is incinerated.

Better recycling is important, but it seems like a Chamber of Commerce response to the problem--it's inoffensive and it leaves us feeling like, by gosh, I've done something good for the "environment".

For most problems, however, the solution to a given problem is to do less of whatever is causing the problem. If my problem is that I drink too much gin, the answer is not "take up smoking." The answer is, stop drinking so much gin. (It's not always so easy. A problem like "I'm stuck in a loveless marriage" involves solutions of a different sort.)

The answer to the problem if waste is not recycling because recycling didn't get us into the problem. Succinctly put, we buy too much crap. (Why we buy too much crap is another interesting question, but not apropos here.) Moreover, most of that crap is made of nasty plastic, and it's manufactured overseas. I never see the god awful mess (environmental and social) created by the manufacturing of my crap. When we tire after a few minutes playing with our new plastic piece of crap, we toss it into the waste bin, which every Thursday is conveniently picked up and moved somewhere I cannot see it, along with everyone else's crap.

The solution, then, is not "recycle better" (though that is part of a possible solution). The solution is, buy less crap.

............. Let me add that there's another solution to certain problems: Doing the opposite of what causes the problem can sometimes solve it. Sloth is undone by industry. So, not only should we buy less crap, but we should seek (in Wendell Berry's formulation) to become producing households, not just consuming ones. In our household, aside from producing a modest amount of the food we eat, we produce children, and take sole responsibility for their education. We produce much of our own entertainment (friends, music and reading) and try to ignore most of the mass-produced kind (no television). Finally, I guess, I produce most of the animal flesh that we consume...

These are modest things, and I am humbly aware of how much more I could do. But they are a start to the solution.