A Story of Squash: Seed to Table

Tahitian Melon winter squash in the field.

I am happy to report our guests are dining on winter squash from the garden this fall.  But my what it took to get these enormous beauties to the table this year!

It was a long labor of love that began with the patty pan summer squash I planted in the raised beds.  I trimmed the winter rye and cut holes into them where I direct seeded the squash. These dwarf plants came up lovely, green and gorgeous, but just as they began to fruit, the pickleworms bore holes in their vines and their fruit, so there was none left for the kitchen!  The pickleworm is the larval form of a night moth which lays eggs on the leaves of cucurbits and once their eggs hatch, the young bore into the flowers of the squash, into the vines and into the fruit.  We were quick to pull those summer squash plants in an effort to get rid of the worms, but in hindsight leaving them in as a trap crop may have been a better option. Just as soon as they had no more patty pan to feed on they descended upon the cucumbers on the backfield trellis!

"Frass" from hole where a pickleworm bore into cucumber.

I left those cucs in place because right next to them were the winter squash.  Now, pickleworms, according to research, typically aren’t keen on winter squash like they are on cucs and summer squash, but just in case, I covered the backfield with row cover, which also would protect it from the dreaded squash vine borer should it have decided to make an appearance this year.

A pickleworm inching its way through the vine of a cucumber.

Row cover on the winter squash.

When the squash started blossoming, I was faced with some choices: hand pollinate and keep them covered; uncover them by day and let the bees do the job and cover them again by night (when the night moth emerges again); or uncover them and see what happens.  Well, I tried all three options but soon found the last was the most practical, and least laborious!  However, within weeks of uncovering them, I noticed some holes in the vines and some fruit shriveling up with a worm in it eating its way through the flesh. 

After more research, I decided to try a biological pesticide called Dipel. It’s a bacteria that attacks the worms.  The trouble with spraying this stuff on the squash plants is that it has to make direct contact with the skin of the worm.  Now, these guys are borers and are usually protected not only from the cover of the huge squash leaves, but also from their comfy abode hidden in the hollow of a vine and fruit!  So in order for this to work, I had to thoroughly spray at the base of every flower, around every fruit, along as many vines as I could, lifting the protective leaves as I went.  Well, I was determined! And...

Naturalist Rachael harvesting some long-in-coming squash this summer!

To the kitchen!

The chefs have been serving up winter squash off the grill, mashed up as a side dish, and in savory soups for months! 

Sheet-mulching: composting in place

Cardboard, an excellent source of carbon, placed around our winter squash mounds.

We all know the wonders of good compost in the garden, but turning piles can be laborious. And spreading it wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow to the beds is lot of work.  Well worth the effort, don’t get me wrong.  We have an extensive operation here on LSSI, but we also use another method to build soil. It’s called sheet-mulching, a.k.a. composting-in-place or lasagna-gardening.

If you have a manure source or a load of coffee grinds and leaves, you’re in good shape.  We need nitrogen (think: manure, coffee grinds, vegetable scraps) and carbon (leaves, paper, cardboard). Whatever sources of wastes you have you just layer them right on top of the ground you intend to grow in and let it break down in place.  A great time to do this is in the fall, so it can degrade over the winter. Come spring, you’ve got soil ready for your seeds and transplants.

Here’s the method:

1. Soak the planting area. Water heavily. Let sit overnight.
2. Slash vegetation, weeds, veg. residue, roots and all, and leave as “green manure.” Do remove stumps or woody vegetation, however.
3. Amend your soil with lime, sulfur, gypsum, any raw mineral, etc. as needed.
4. Take a spade fork or pitch fork and crack the earth open a little. Don’t turn the earth, “just poke some holes to create better moisture retention, root penetration, and soil-critter movement” as Permaculturist Toby Hemenway says.
5. Put down a thin layer of nitrogen material: manure, cottonseed meal, fresh grass clippings, or other lush greens or veggie scraps.
6. Spread cardboard or newspaper to smother weeds.  Cardboard is a better suppressant because it’s thicker and takes longer to break down. (Be sure to remove tape, etc. and DON’T use the produce boxes covered in wax or lots of colorful dye.) Overlap sheets and SOAK them.
7. Add another thin layer of nitrogen-rich material.
8. Pour on the bulk-mulch: 8-12 inches of straw, hay, yard waste, leaves, seaweed, saw dust, etc.
9. Add an inch or two of finished compost if you have it. 
10. Then another final layer of carbon.
    
    
    A word on C(carbon):N(nitrogen): As you layer, pay attention to the C:N ratio. It will ideally be at 30:1.  Get an idea of what the content of your materials are.  For instance, if you’re working with sawdust which has a very high carbon content of  500:1, you’ll want to be sure to add a lot more nitrogen, than if you’re layering with tree leaves. 
     

    

    from Steve Solomon's Gardening When It Counts

    
    

    
    

    Now, sheet-mulching is not an exact science and the method is pretty forgiving, especially if you’re giving it six months to break down.  Just sure to add both the elements as you have them and you’ll be doing wonders for your soil. 
    
    

 

Sweet Potatoes=Greens All Summer Long! (and yams come Fall)

Spring was a whirlwind of activity in the garden. Summer arrives oh-so-quickly in the south, and we need to plant everything in the ground as early as possible before the heat and the bugs set in! Right now we're seeing the fruits of our hurried labor in the forms of cherry tomatoes, eggplant, cucumbers, and sweet potato greens. The latter is what I'd like to celebrate in this post.

Sweet potatoes are near sure-fire successes in the summer garden.  They're a southern staple. After the kale and collards have long bolted and gone to seed, they keep providing the table with greens.  Their roots store excellently too, providing nourishment year round.

On a farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia a couple summers ago, I came to know their virtues well.  They were my “power bars” throughout the day.  We baked dozens of the last year’s crop at a time, put them in the fridge to easily grab and get reenergized. At dinner, we stir-fried their bountiful leaves with onions and garlic for a tasty side dish.

This Spring, we planted several rows and a couple beds of sweet potatoes on Little St. Simons Island. All of the “seed” came from the potatoes we grew TWO YEARS AGO in the backfield. An attempt was made to grow watermelons in that field last year, but the sweet potatoes left in the ground from the summer before took hold and won out.  When I first arrived in the garden this winter, the first task at hand was to pull all those potatoes out of the ground. And can you believe after carting several crates of them out of the garden last winter, still this spring dozens and dozens of seedlings, called “slips” in the world of tater-growin,’ came peaking up out of the rye cover in that back field!

    These are the sweet potato slips my husband grew for our home garden.
 If you're going to grow your own slips, just cut the spuds in half and
put them in a tray of water and they'll start spouting.

All this to demonstrate what a hardy vegetable the sweet potato is and how easy it is to grow.  A city-dwelling friend of mine grew them in her kitchen windowsill solely for their greens. If you’re growing for their spuds, sweet potatoes like well-drained, loose soil and sunshine. You can mound them up in a raised row to give their roots plenty of room to swell.  You can also plant them in raised beds. We did both late last Spring.  I plucked those slips out of the backfield as they were coming up, put them in trays for later-transplanting, and now, they’re sprawling beyond their beds and rows... clipped every week to supply Charles with a substitute for one of his lunch staples, navy bean and kale soup.  Come fall, we’ll dig them out of the ground, to be cured and ready for the baking come Thanksgiving. 

Herbs Galore

If you’re going to grow anything, grow herbs. They virtually grow themselves! They attract few, if any, pests and most herbs grow back year after year. The Little St. Simon’s Island garden has been host to an array of herbs for years, but this winter we’ve taken it to another level by installing four huge raised beds right in the middle of the garden designated just for them.  What an orchestration it was getting them in!

  

Naturalists Mike and Laura build bed #3.

The gardener (that's me!) filling the beds.

The whole team of naturalists took part, sawing lumber, nailing boards, raking dirt, and now, we have 368 square feet more growing space to supply Chef Charles with all the herbs he needs to dream up savory delectables for your palate.

Clearly, it takes a lot of growing space to supply a commercial kitchen, but not so for your home kitchen.  You can put a lot of different herbs in a small space in a beautiful display called an herb spiral. Along with the four large traditional raised beds, we built an herb spiral as the centerpiece to our garden.  You can put one by your door so all your herb needs are within reach.

Herb spirals are a permaculture garden design you can adapt to your needs. They’re especially great if you’re short on garden space because you build up rather than out.  By creating height with a wall of brick or stone, you’re also helping to create microclimates in your bed. The stone traps heat. And it creates sunny and shadier places in the space as the sun moves across the bed. The top-level, which you fill with sandy soil, is well suited to herbs that like it warm, relatively dry and super-sunny, like rosemary and oregano and thyme.  Then as you move down the spiral, you add a little more compost and plant herbs that prefer loamier soil like cilantro and basil and parsley until you get to the very bottom where herbs, like mint, need a moister cooler place to thrive. Some herb spiral designs even incorporate a pond at the bottom. 

If you’re inspired to build one yourself, follow some of these links to get started. Spirals can be as little as three feet wide or as big as eight! We watched this herb spiral tutorial on-line, perused a bunch of designs and scouted around the island dump for recyclable materials. For our spiral wall, we had a bunch of old bricks from buildings we’ve been refurbishing on the island.  We also have lots of oyster shells piling up from the evening oyster roasts each week. We used them to build height in the center of the spiral. Many designs call for gravel, but with the mountains miles away that’s not an easy find.  The gravel/shell layer not only builds height but it also helps with drainage.

Part of the beauty of the design is that your garden herb spiral will suit your needs, your own aesthetic and help you make use of whatever you have lying around to repurpose for a wall.  It’s about a day’s work for one person to put together the infrastructure. Wait about a week to let the soil settle. Then beautify it by planting your favorite herbs.  Keeping consistent with permaculture principles, the spiral is low maintenance, requiring little energy and water. You just water the top once a week.  Research says after a year when everything is established, you can just rely on the rain.

Happy planting!

Useful Links:

Frugal Kiwi: Building a Herb Spiral

The Kale Yard: How to Build a Herb Spiral
EcoFilms: Building a Herb Spiral

Here comes the sun... and the cold

The budding green in the ground is perking up to the sun as it slowly returns to our hemisphere, but the cold of winter is surely upon us. The Polar Vortex and “Snowpocalypse” that gripped the southeast stretched its icy fingers to the coast and brought frigid temperatures to the Little St. Simon’s garden. Our aloe plants, some lemongrass and a favorite pineapple sage have all gone indoors for the season, and we’ve been tucking in our garden beds nights it dips below freezing.

Here are some tips to protect your plants from cold weather:

1. Harvest.  Before a light frost, take tender herbs, vegetables and fruits to the kitchen. Spinach gets picked when we know the temperatures will dip below 32.  The peppers go, too. We harvested all the lemons left on the Meyers in early January when temperatures dipped into the 20’s.

2. Cover-up.  Many tender veggies can be left in place if you put a blanket over them.  Our lettuce and chard beds stay tucked in tight with frost cloth. It’s light and water permeable, so it can be left in place for days.  Old sheets work well, too. Just be sure to take them off so your plants can see the light of day.

3. Insulate.  Mulch your beds or rows with compost, straw or other organic matter.  Do it after the frost to prevent heaving—the contraction of soil as it freezes and thaws which can move your plants up and out of their soil beds to expose their roots. You can also insulate the trunk of vulnerable trees. Polyurethane wrapped around the graft of some of our citrus trees keeps their most vulnerable part protected.  You can also do this with soil, too; it’s called soil banking (and more on citrus protection). Mound the soil up the trunk above the graft union. Do this before the freeze, and remove the soil when temps begin to warm again to prevent disease and pest problems. 

4. Water. A generous watering before a light frost can help retain some of the day’s heat. But don’t do this before a hard freeze—four consecutive hours of temps below 25.

5. Plan and plant what’s hardy in your region. Consult a planting calendar for your hardiness zone. In coastal Georgia, Brassicas produce all winter. And generally, carrots, garlic, leeks, parsnips, radishes and turnips can all survive a hard freeze. 

Helpful links:

Predicting Frost: http://www.almanac.com/blog/editors-musings/blog-how-predict-frost

Citrus Protection: http://www.seminolecountyfl.gov/extensionservices/adults/horticulture/english/article480.aspx;
http://farmerfredrant.blogspot.com/2010/11/citrus-protection-in-frost-or-freeze.html

Greetings from the garden!

A new year is a new beginning. The stuff of last year gets turned into the ground to become fodder for this year’s pursuits, to become the nutriment for new ideas and dreams to take seed and fruit. I’ve recently come “ashore” here on Little St. Simons Island to tend the gardens. I bring with me the experience of growing food in a community more inland in Jesup, Georgia. I also carry the knowledge of my teachers who have guided my hands in their gardens and farmsteads, and in my own soil by their spoken wisdom.  However, nature is the greatest teacher when you’re working with the land, and that knowledge is so particular to place. I’ve much to learn from this island as I work with it to create nourishment for you all when you come to visit.

My! Has the year gotten off to a chilly start.  The sun is returning, providing much appreciated light to the new greens in the ground, but winter is truly upon us.  The island was no refuge from the Polar Vortex that swept in bringing frigid temperatures that dipped to 27!   We had to tuck in our lettuce beds and harvest the remaining citrus fruit. The blustery winds blew the covers off of the trees, but luckily the most vulnerable among them was insulated at the trunk. The freeze zapped the pomegranate leaves to brown and shriveled, but new green growth emerged from the branches just a week later when temps rose into the 70’s again. 

So it goes with maritime winters; the temperatures flail wildly. But as the sun continues to fill the day-sky, the land will warm again and we’ll be planting for Spring.  Look for an array of salad and cooked greens to accompany our new menu selections.  We’ll be growing plenty of fresh herbs for Chef Charles to simmer into delectable sauces— beurre-blanc with a spurt of lemons from our recent harvest for his infamous crab cakes and a delicious mint sauce on seasoned rack of lamb. That’s a just a little taste to stir your senses for what’s to come.

Here’s to a good year and a bountiful harvest,

Melissa Stiers

Gardener, LSSI