Companion Planting

In my never ending quest to grow more greens and to extend greens growing season I am experimenting with companion planting, and especially with growing dense and mulching heavily.

What tipped me off in this direction was the experience of harvesting sweet potatoes during some dry times of November. As I pulled the vines that covered the ground densely, I noticed that the ground under the vines was wet and cool while the rest of the garden was suffering from thirst. As I harvested all the potatoes and discarded the vines to the compost pile, the soil where the sweet potatoes were dried out within a day.

Usually regular greens like kale and collards are pretty much done by June. They simply stop growing and wilt away. I accepted that fact as part of Florida growing seasons. But this year I am trying to extend my greens well into the Summer.

The idea is to cover the soil with plants having no empty areas so that the leaves would shade the soil and keep the moisture in while lowering the soil temperature. I am diligently mulching the beds with grass clippings and so far the method works.

The bed above has collards, Buttercrunch lettuce, buckwheat, and bush beans growing together densely, and mulched with a layer of grass clippings about two to three inches deep between the plants. Granted it is not July yet, but we had some over ninety days, and the plants did not wilt. It also helps that this bed gets shade in the afternoon.

The curly leaves in the picture above is Russian Kale. I stumbled upon the seeds at Tractor Supply and just had to try them. It is amazingly juicy and tender kale, and now is my favorite. This kale is interplanted with beans, buckwheat, and broadleaf mustard greens. I am very curious as to what will happen to these beds in the mid-Summer. I am seriously hoping to have enough greens for my salads from these beds; it is definitely a worthy experiment.

A different kind of garden

The beginnings of my aquaponics garden. More to come.

Sakurajima Radish - a resilient green for Florida gardens

If you are into organic greens, check out this awesome radish that has tasty edible greens. It is called sakurajima radish. It is grown in Japan for the greens and the root, and it is heat tolerant. In Florida it is very difficult to grow greens in the Summer time. After much experimenting sakurajima radish is one green that I grow throughout the Summer. I did try eating the root, but to my taste it was too tough and too dense. It might be good cooked, or fermented like they do in Japan, but at this point I only care for the greens, which are delicious, and did I mention they grow in the heat?

Here's what the root of the plant looks like (hiding beneath the abundant seed pods):

Once you've grown a few plants, they will provide the seeds for you in excess. In fact, sakurajima will re-seed freely if you let it. After a couple of years I have sakurajima sprouting up on the lawn and in garden beds, sometimes very far from where it originally grew.

And finally, here are the greens. Young greens taste good raw in salads, bigger ones are good stir-fried, boiled, or cooked in any way you like cooked greens. They can be seeded throughout the year, but please select a shaded spot for them to hide from the scorching Summer rays.

Composting with chickens

It's September, finally! We can get ready to start our most productive and enjoyable fall season.
I am cleaning my beds, ridding them of summer weeds, to prepare for the fall planting. This summer I let my beds overgrow with weeds, just did not have the time to weed or plant any cover crops. But, too many weeds is not as bad of a problem because all of them can be composted beautifully.

I use my darling Lawn Boy with the mulching bag to shred the weeds into small pieces.

It does a great job at that, and fast! I can shred a pile about 5 foot by 3 foot high in about five minutes.
Not every time, but quite often, I also mow the lawn with the mulching attachment to collect the grass for the compost.

Here's the result of mulching a whole bunch of weeds and spent tomato vines from one of the beds. Took me just a few minutes to do this.

All that stuff goes into the chicken composting "bin". They love it. They pick out every last weed seed, as well as turn the compost many times while fertilizing and aerating it.

If you don't have chickens I do not recommend composting this way (shallow pile), because it is not hot enough to kill the weed seeds.

But composting in a low pile as opposed to the high piles with turning them over is much easier on the gardener's back. You can imitate chickens by raking the pile a few times. The other method I tried was to fill black plastic garbage bag 2/3 with chopped weeds, adding about a gallon of water, and then leaving it in the sun. It makes a nice compost in about a month or two.

And here is the result of chicken hard work:

It is nice, crumbly, free of weeds, and very fertile.

It is going on the top of my garden bed soil. I don't dig my beds, they are just getting layered in material, and worms do the rest of the work.

Greens in the Florida Summer

Greens? We know that in the summer we might as well throw in the towel, or a shovel... Nothing grows but cowpeas and okra.

Some months ago I planted, as an experiment, some sakurajima radish. Granted, I planted it a bit late, probably in late March, so when our infamous heat started frying the garden, sakurajiama went to seed. I only harvested maybe some fist size radishes, very short of promised watermelon size. But then the radish plants went into seed - not a bad proposition - I love my seeds, so I collected a few for the nest season's planting.

Well, to be fair, quite a few seed heads fell onto the ground, and now, voila! I have radishes sprouting everywhere, even on the lawn. To my surprise, this is one resilient radish.

And it is quite tasty too, if you don't let it grow oversize. To compensate for the lack of greens in my salads I now add these greens, combined with the still surviving bunching onion, purslane, some amaranth leaves, and still surviving curled parsley. It's organic, it's fresh, and it's free. Can I ask for more! Here's the start of the garden salad from the garden.

 

Note to self: next time collect more sakurajima radish seeds to have on hand for the summer greens.  Highly recommended!

Praying Mantis

That's one bug you want to attract and keep. They are a predator insect, and feed on moths, mosquitoes, flies, and crickets, among other things.

This particular individual decided to land on my seed catalog. Maybe it was hinting at something, or was learning to read... In any event, this was a pretty fun picture to take.

So, when you see a little fella like this in your garden, do not shoo it away or kill it. It might do your garden a favor by eating a few bugs here and there.

More cowpea uses

This was a hint from my fellow gardener, Carol, who makes some delicious dishes out of green cowpeas. Usually, I cook young cowpea pods like green beans, or use dry cowpea beans in soups or salads (cooked, of course :))

Who would have thought that you can use green cowpeas like you would regular green shelled peas. You would want to pick the pods while they are still green, but "a little bit pregnant". You want to see these bumps on the sides of the pods:

Green cowpea pods

Then, simply shell them:

Shelled green cowpeas

I don't have tons of these to use right away, so I simply freeze the portions that I pick and shell. Afterwards, lightly steam the green cowpeas to the desired softness and use in salads or any other recipes that call for green peas.