Grow luffa in your home garden

What is luffa? It is a gourd type plant, also sometimes spelled as loofah or even lufa, and is mostly known for using its mature fruit as sponges. The idea of growing my own organic sponges appealed to me, so I decided to try out luffa this year in my garden. I had the seeds for about two years, just never got around to planting them, so I germinated the seeds in styrofoam cups to see if they even come up. They certainly did, what a resilient plant, and were transplanted into the garden:

I seeded this luffa plant on June 16th, and it is not too late to seed it now, but probably not in August since it requires about 150 days to mature. If you missed this growing season, there will always be spring to try this plant out.

In less than a month the vines covered my six-foot fence completely. These vines love to climb, so the taller the support you have for them, the better:

At a month and a half of its age luffa started flowering. Here's the male flower:

As with any squash-type plant, male flowers come first and in abundance. Many of them will drop off prior to female flowers being ready. But no worry, once female flowers start to open there still will be plenty of male flowers to pollinate. On this picture (in the middle) you can see a young immature female fruit that will start flowering in a few days:



Not every female flower will result in a mature fruit, that's just the rules of Nature. But I already can see that luffa will be a very productive plant, based on the number of female flowers getting ready. Young fruits of luffa can be eaten just like zucchini, and mature fruits can be dried and used as free organic sponges. I am looking forward to update you on the progress of this beautiful plant, I like it already.

Cowpeas as a cover crop and green manure

What a versatile vegetable! Not only it is insanely productive, not bothered by pests and requires little attention, it also provides fertilizer for the garden even after it stops producing. The idea of a cover crop is to grow nutrient-rich plant, such as legumes, and plow it under to improve soil fertility. A cowepea in Florida is just that plant. We can plant cowpeas from March to September and dig them in even after we harvest the crop. Ideal time for digging cowpeas in as a green manure is when they are still young, have lush green leaves and their stems are not too thick, like this:

Granted, if you plow cowpeas under at this stage you will forgo most of the crop. If you need to improve soil fertility in a hurry, then this method is acceptable, after all a pound of cowpeas at a grocery store is only $1.69 or even cheaper. But in the event that you want to have a harvest and utilize cover crop quality of cowpeas, the more mature stage of this vegetable is still acceptable. Below is a picture of a cowpea patch that I kept harvesting until the plants are mostly dry:

In this situation you will just have to chop them smaller, for the stems - about three to four inch long, if you have patience.

Then just dig the stems and leaves into the ground. It will help if your shovel is sharp because you might have to break stubborn stems with it:

Keep the soil moist, water it if there is no rain. It might also help to cover the soil with newspapers or cardboard to keep it moist. This cover crop should decompose in about a month, just in time to transplant tomatoes into the ground.

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Can you learn how to garden?

I used to belong to the "brown thumb" league. Seriously. Houseplants or outdoor plants that somehow ended up at my house were promptly killed. Not intentionally, but nevertheless. My first attempt at vegetable gardening happened about seven years ago when I purchased a tomato plant from Lowes. I had no idea how to do a vegetable garden, but the tomato was doing pretty darn good in a container, so I decided to give it some more "love" in a form of lawn fertilizer. Needless to say, it shriveled and died in a couple of days. This experience was a disappointment, but it did not stop me from trying further. I started buying bookshelves of books and trying different things with plants and seeds. Well, seven years later, I can proudly say that I grow more than half of our family's food from my not so large garden.

There is a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow, but you have to go on a journey. Gardening is easy if you master a few tricks. I must confess that the most important thing about gardening is soil preparation. Granted, I am biased towards growing organic, so my soil preparation is a bit more labor intensive than non-organic gardening approach.

Once you have your garden beds ready, you need to learn about the seasons, or what can be grown at your location at what times. Then you have to plan your garden so you do not grow too much of one thing and too little of the other.

Do not get discouraged if your first crop fails, it can happen. When we first moved on our property almost two years ago I did not have the time to properly prepare the beds, so my first harvest was dismal. This was a fall harvest, but I spent the winter double-digging the beds and the following spring I had a boat load of tomatoes and squash. Step by step, it is a learned skill. I hope blogs like mine are an encouragement and help in your quest of becoming a gardener and providing some wonderful produce for your family.

My bookshelf has many gardening books, but if you are interested, the following three are my favorites, as in most entertaining and useful:

1. Vegetable Gardening in Florida

2. How to Grow More Vegetables and Fruits (and Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops) Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine

3. The New Self-Sufficient Gardener

When to harvest cowpeas and okra?

My readers asked, when do you pick okra and cowpeas? "When they are ready", seems to be an obvious answer, but it is not always that simple, especially if you grow these vegetables for the first time. Okra and cowpeas mature very fast once they start producing. If you miss just a couple of days of picking, it is very easy to let the harvest run away from you. This okra pod is almost twelve inches long and is not dark green color anymore, so it is too late to pick this one:

Usually it is advised to pick okra when it is three to four inches long. But what if you missed that stage? I have my own test for okra: squeeze it between your fingers, and if it feels soft and easy to squeeze, as well as moist to the touch, then you can still pick it. I missed two days of picking and now have okra over six inches long, but it is still edible. Here's what a pound of okra looks like:

This overgrown okra will make a fine roasted okra dinner. The "non-pickable" okra should be left on the plant to mature and go to seed. Did you know you can make coffee out of okra seeds? Just roast them on a non-greased pan and grind in a coffee grinder. Then brew like regular coffee, it tastes almost the same, but probably does not have caffeine.

Cowpeas, as I learned, are best picked when they start showing "bumps", but are still dark green in color:

It is easy to miss some cowpea pods as they like to hide under the leaves. But no worry! Let them mature on the vine and you will have dry cowpeas for cooking or the seeds for the next season. Yellowish cowpeas can be picked when they are dry or almost dry and then threshed to get their seeds:

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Cowpeas as cover crop and green manure

Grow chickpeas from a grocery store

I've been just a pantry sprouting queen lately. Everything I plant turns to green! The latest project was seeding chickpeas (garbanzo beans) from the grocery store bag. As usual, I buy store brand. I'm not even sure if they have a name brand beans in the store. But anyway, the project turned out very successful. I got myself some chickpeas in a bag:

Filled 16 ounce styrofoam cups with soil and let it moist from the bottom by placing the cups in the container filled with water up to two inches or so. Then when the soil felt moist on the top I placed one chickpea into each container about an inch deep:

About a week later all four seeds have sprouted:

The reason I planted chickpeas in the cups is to do a "controlled germination".  You usually do this to determine germination rates. Let's say you have some old seeds or some unknown seeds and you do not know how well they will germinate. You want to know germination rate before you commit effort and garden space to these seeds. So you would plant ten seeds and see how many germinate. Let's say seven germinated, then you know that your germination rate is seventy percent, and you take that number into account when you plant these seeds into the garden.

In my case with the chickpeas I had a hundred percent germination rate. I am comfortable seeding these beans into the garden. The only thing I would change is I would pre-soak the beans before planting. Just put the beans you want to plant into some container, cover with three inches of water and let sit for twelve hours. Garden conditions are not as perfect as styrofoam cup germination, so we want to give the seeds some heads up. Other than that, keep in mind seed spacing; for chickpeas it's about four inches all around. They grow lean and tall and do not spread out. I would not bother installing supports for them as they would most likely lean on each other. Give chickpeas a try!

Vegetable yields per plant

My cool new little toy, mechanical kitchen scale. Green, baby!

Would not it be nice if we could plant a garden and always have plenty of vegetables and desired variety. Actually, yield planning is the hardest part because of so many variables that are out of our control, e.g. pests and weather. I read somewhere that an old farmer said "plant one plant for the weather, one for the pests and one for yourself". We probably should not take advice literally because it's quite an overkill, but it would be prudent to plant maybe 10 to 20 percent more than you need to account for the losses.

Many county extension offices post vegetable yields files on their websites. I also included that very common information here for the convenience of my readers.

How do you use this information? Look at your grocery store receipt. For example, if you are buying a pound of carrots per week, then you need 10 feet of row of carrots every seven weeks because 10 feet row yields 7-10 pounds of carrots. We can see that spacing for carrots is 2 inches, therefore you need to plant 60 carrot seeds (10 feet = 120 inches. 120/2" = 60). Multiply that by 120% (for the losses) and you get 72 seeds. Easy.

A one foot row of carrots spaced 2 inches:

I have to mention that I don't plant in rows, I plant in blocks of square feet. A 10 feet row can be broken down in 10 smaller rows of 1 foot each and 6 of these smaller rows could be planted in one square foot of a garden because the 2 inch distance now becomes the distance all the way around.

If you are planting square foot method, I would recommend increasing the suggested distance. The plants need room to breathe; they get that room if planted in rows, but will be crowded if planted the same distance in a square foot garden. How much to increase? I would double it to be safe. Even with the increased spacing you will still need less land to plant the same amount of vegetables compared to rows because the space between the rows becomes planting space.

Here's the updated schematic with increased spacing:

 

Now, a square feet will produce 9 carrots, but you only need eight of these squares to produce the desired 7 pounds of carrots, which is not a lot of land.

Woodpecker at work

I caught this woodpecker on camera this morning. He looks like a well dressed gentleman in a black tuxedo and a little red hat. He sure is hardworking, just pecking away.

Click on the picture to enlarge.




Also, got him on a video: