This blog post is inspired by recent visits to some of the gardens we planted with summer crops. Every year in late May/early June the weather in South Florida officially shifts into what we call "the monsoon season". Regular afternoon rain storms, often accompanied by a generous amount of thunder and lightning as well as consistently high temperatures during the day and night define this growing season as the season for only the most hardy, heat loving tropical crops. We tend to have a hard time saying good bye to lettuce, kale and cucumbers. The transitional period which happens mostly in June can be rough. Not only are the plants adapting to the weather, but the gardeners who are also tackling pretty uncomfortable working conditions are too. 

 
Check out this before and after with only 1 month of summer growth in between them! Summer plants grow quickly because of all the rain and heat. 

  Summer crops are robust and beautifully abundant. They thrive in this intense weather which provides copious amounts of moisture and sunshine. On a recent visit to a garden we planted just one month ago I couldn't believe how lush everything was. The colors were so vibrant, all of the plants were huge and growing into each other, as if they were having a big plant family hug. The seminole pumpkins were half way up the trellis arch with their dinner plate sized leaves so neatly organized like stepping stones to the top of the arch. Winged beans were forming a tangled mess of tentacles greedily fighting for who would get to the top of their trellis first. Native wild flowers like coreopsis and blanket flower were planted throughout the garden and were poking happy little flowers in between branches of other plants. 

Summer greens aren't well known but they are very prolific. Pictured top is Cranberry Hibiscus, below are sweet potato leaves. 

All of this growth and bounty in a month can only mean one thing. We gotta harvest, cut back and prune these plants hard, not only to keep the garden some what tame, but also to harvest the edible portions of these crops. A summer garden is probably the most abundant garden in South Florida, we just have to get used to the new flavor profiles. It's undeniable that our palettes are stuck on the things we are able to purchase at the grocery store. We eat things like lettuce, kale and cucumbers so often that we find comfort in their familiarity and predictability. We all have a hard time switching to a salad made with Okinawa spinach, cranberry hibiscus leaves and katuk tips. Am I right? Sweet potato leaves are called Morning Glory in some Asian cuisine because they are in the morning glory family. They are commonly used as a cooked green in curries, omelettes and soups. If you've ever grown sweet potato you know that while you wait the 90-110 days for the roots to develop underground, the above ground portion of the plant is a sprawling vine. Pruning the vine is good because it encourages the plant to put more energy into developing the roots; so when you prune back the armfuls of vines you can bring them into the kitchen and save all of the leaves for a week's worth of cooking. Pictured above is a cranberry hibiscus harvest/pruning and a handful of sweet potato aka morning glory leaves ready for cooking. 

Okra tends to be an under appreciated vegetable, but the flavor profile of okra is so unique and special! As a plant for the summer growing season in South Florida it really can't be beat. Just like there are so many varieties of tomatoes and peppers, there are so many varieties of okra that each bring their own personality and cooking style to the kitchen. The trickiest thing about okra is that the pods mature super fast and most people miss the window of opportunity for harvesting tender pods. From the moment a flower blooms to when the pod is ready for picking can be as quick as 2-3 days! If you wait much longer (like even one day longer) the pods become woody and impossible to eat. That is one of the many reasons we love two particular varieties of okra. Hill Country and Cowhorn okra both grow into enormous and beautiful plants that produce larger than average pods which take slightly longer to mature, giving the gardener a little more time to harvest edible pods. They are more forgiving. Pictured above is a Hill Country okra plant and pod.

The beauty of summer gardening extends far into the fruit realm in our lush tropical climate. You'll need to be just a bit more patient for fruit crops, although there is a juicy list of crops we can grow that will bear fruit within one year. Our favorites are bananas and plantains which will require a large space, but can also serve a double purpose if you plant them in a circle to create what is known as a "banana circle". Banana circles are commonly used in Permaculture design and food forest designs as a composting system. Bananas and /or plantains are planted in a large circle, an average of 10 feet in diameter is typical, and the space in the center is used for piling up garden debris, grass clippings, kitchen waste, mulch and other biodegradable materials like cardboard. A banana circle is a great way to divert waste from landfills and grow a fruit crop at the same time! Some of the other one-year fruit crops we like to recommend are pineapples, papayas, passionfruit, Barbados cherry, mulberry, guava and starfruit. 

Mangos Are the crown jewel of the summer fruit celebrations, with a season running about a month from mid June to mid July. Wether the crop is a good one or not depends on weather during springtime when plants are flowering or trying to support large amounts of young fruit. This year the weather was just right and the season is insanely abundant! Every restaurant has a mango desert special on the menu and it feels like every street corner has a "FREE MANGOS" box or a lemonade-stand style setup manned by neighborhood kids. If you drive down to Homestead or the Redland, where they are farmed commercially, you can visit Mango Men to taste and buy fruit, or attend a number of mango related events at Fruit & Spice park. If you don't have lots of room in your yard and you are considering what trees to plant for yourself, you may want to carefully consider choosing a mango for the simple reason that there are all ready so many of them all over town. Mangos can reach heights of 30 feet (especially if not pruned very regularly) and the shade of a mature mango tree isn't a great place to plant other things. As a homeowner who has a huge heritage mango on the side of my property, it's also a lot of work when it's fruiting. First off, about 50% of the fruit that falls has already been ruined by squirrels, and when it falls if you don't clean up multiple times a day then the rats, raccoons, flies and fruit flies will have an absolutely bonanza in your yard. This year i had so many it filled my compost pile, which is way too buggy because of it, and it filled my kitchen, my deep freezer, my dehydrator and I gave so many to neighbors they started to say "no thank you". We definitely prefer fruit trees that stay smaller and give fruit more quickly, especially if you are working with a small space. 

Sure, most of the country gets to enjoy apple trees and blueberry shrubs, but we have the privilege of plucking pineapples, mangos and bananas from our backyards! You loose some, you win some :)

June is the true start of the rainy, humid & extra hot summer here in South Florida. It rains an average of 6” during the month of June, with average temperature highs of 88 and solid 100% humidity day and night. This is an incredibly challenging environment for plants that aren’t used to it and aren’t meant to grow in humid and wet climates. Luckily for us there are a bunch of cool plants, and in particular perennials, that thrive in this climate. We think June is the perfect time of year to plant new tropical fruit trees, because you get them in the ground right as the rain starts up. Tropical climate plants love rain and they love the humidity, so if planted now they will grow so fast through the summer you’ll be amazed!

Our favorite trees to plant are ones that produce fruit within the first year and also don’t get so big that they become the only thing in your yard 15 years later (hello mango and avocado, we see you being huge trees all over town). These fruit tree specimens also act as a great “canopy trees” if you’re hoping to plant yourself a Food Forest Guild. A food forest is a perennial planting that mimics the way nature designs a forest but uses all edible or useful plants. And a guild is a grouping of plants using that design system. Heres a diagram to help explain what a guild looks like. The idea is to choose plants that need different space in the air and on the ground so that they don't have to compete for those resources as they grow. These plantings are low maintenance because most of the plants are perennial (that means they grow for more than 1 year) and so they grow slower than veggies and require little inputs outside of regular fertilizing, mulching, and weeding.

Drawing courtesy of: https://midwestpermaculture.com/2012/07/hugelkultured-swale-with-linear-food-forest/

Here in these drawings Muriel made for our website you can see that the largest plant in the system is not a "overstory" tree but rather a "midstory" because we want to be able to produce food quickly and also keep the biodiversity of the other layers for years to come. The easiest way to create yourself a guild is just to go through and pick one plant from each category that you want to grow and then go for it! Once you become more experienced you will realize there are other nuances to consider, like watering needs or fertilizer requirements, but to get started you can use "what do i want to grow and eat" as a good decision making factor. 

Heres a few examples of fun and easy to grow perennial plant guilds. Note I focused on EASY TO GROW, so I'm choosing low maintenance, fast growing, less rare items here, because its great for beginners to start with easy stuff and slowly lean into the harder more rare items as they gain knowledge. 

MIDSTORY: Guava
Guavas are one of our favorite fruit varieties to grow for home gardeners. They are easily grown, delicious, and a high yielding small tree; a two year old tree potentially producing hundreds of fruit per season. Pink fleshed guavas are incredibly floral, pungent and aromatic. These trees are in the myrtle family and produce beautiful flowers and thick leaves. Guava remain quite small and should be considered a “lower canopy” food forest tree. Beware worms in the growing tips of your trees (if they show up and do damage simply spray with Organic Thuricide) and fruit flies laying their eggs in your immature fruit (commercial guava groves put mesh bags on all fruit to avoid this pest issue). 

UNDERSTORY/ SHRUB LAYER: Roselle & cranberry hibiscus 
Both of these beautiful shrubby plants are in the mallow family along with okra, ornamental hibiscuses & cotton, and they love the summer. Roselle is the source of hibiscus tea, and produces beautiful seed pods called "calyxes" that have fleshy petals around them. Thats what you make the tea out of, or you can just eat them fresh in salads, preserve them in syrups or jams, use the stems as cut flower branches... they really are the most amazing plant with so many uses. Its cousin, cranberry hibiscus, makes beautiful red maple shaped leaves that are tart and high in vitamin C. 
 

HERBACEOUS LAYER: Hot Peppers & Lemongrass
When it comes to hot peppers, the hotter they pepper the easier the plant to grow in heat, for some reason. I think it has something to do with the pests not liking the flavor/ amount of capsicum in the leaves, but thats just a guess. Your main issue with growing peppers in the summer is spider mites, but as i said they tend to leave the super spicy ones, like scotch bonnet, datil, and thai chilli alone. Peppers are actually perennials but if you live somewhere with a frost it will kill them, which is why theyre treated like annuals all over the country. Here in South Florida they will become perennials and can sometimes last years and years. Lemongrass is a great herb with many uses, both culinary and medicinal and its super easy to grow down here. It also adds a fun texture and shape to your garden since its a grass. 

GROUNDCOVER: Cuban oregano & sweet potatoes
Cuban Oregano is a super easy to grow and cute low growing plant that is very well suited to a perennial plant guild. It can be pruned and shaped into whatever form you'd like based on where your other plants are growing, and its easy to cook with. Sweet potato is a great ground cover for a food forest because it makes you two harvests: the leaves and the root. The root needs like 4-5 months to grow but you can harvest the leaves and use them to cook with anytime. The more you harvest your leaves the better for root growth actually, since it discourages leaf growth and forces the plant to put some energy into the more challenging task of making root tubers. 

This is a small guild in my backyard consisting of bananas, lemongrass, datil spicy peppers, ginger, rosemary, cranberry hibiscus, and sweet potato. 

Now you may be thinking…. Fruit trees are cool but what about my veggie garden beds? What the heck do I do with them during June and through the rest of the summer!? there are a number of options for you to consider in how to manage your raised garden bed during the summer.

One option is to plant a summer garden. This option is awesome for people who will be home most of the summer and want to keep experiencing their garden. In South Florida we can grow some pretty fun crops during our tropical monsoon season which are considered exotic and rare in other parts of the country. Things like ginger, lemongrass, Asian eggplants, hot peppers, roselle hibiscus, taro and sweet potatoes! A lot of common kitchen herbs grow during the summer as well, for example rosemary, thai basil, garlic chives and mint. There are some challenges to growing a summer garden, like keeping it weed and pest free. Pest pressure increases during the hotter and more humid rainy months because they reproduce faster, and the same can be said about weeds.

Another option is to put your garden “to bed” using the lasagna technique, which refers to adding layers of organic material to your garden that will break down over time, resulting in nutrient-rich compost that will help your plants thrive in the following growing season. We suggest layering the fresh plants that you are removing from your garden with horse manure, top soil and finally a layer of straw to cover the surface of your garden which will keep it weed free and pest free for the long summer months of June-September. Through the summer the material will basically compost on your garden bed and will slowly decompose, turning into new compost & soil right on the spot. In October your garden soil will be richer and more pest free than before for even better Fall crop results. One key to making this technique work is making sure that the top layer of straw (coastal straw can be purchased at any local feed stores) is super duper thick so that it doesn’t decompose and instead acts like a weed barrier to keep the garden weed free while it sits.

Another great option is planting cover crops in your raised bed. Cover cropping can sometimes be confusing to explain but basically you plant a specific plant (in Miami the most popular ones are Sunn Hemp & Buckwheat) very densely in your bed and once its mature (30 - 60 days) you cut it down and compost it in your garden bed. This is also a technique used for soil building, weed suppression, and continued pest management. If you’d like to try cover cropping we sell Sunn hemp & Buckwheat seed per pound on our website where you can also learn more about each type and how to manage it. The bonus to using sunn hemp is that is sequesters nitrogen in the soil for you, which basically means you are growing yourself organic fertilizer. Buckwheat is great to use because its fast growing and easier to cut down and incorporate into your soil… plus pollinators go absolutely nuts for the flowers. Cover cropping is a big part of organic soil based farming practices so we love to encourage home gardeners to give it a try on a smaller scale. 

So wether you cover crop your garden, replant it with summer crops, or choose to plant yourself a perennial food forest guild, theres plenty to still be done in the June garden! 

Storm clouds, heavy rain, blisteringly hot days, and humid evenings full of mosquitos... welcome to May in South Florida! While may is technically still part of "Spring", this year it feels like Spring skipped us and we are already in full Summer mode. May is your last chance to plant some heat tolerant annuals (like asian greens & everglades cherry tomatoes), and also the first chance to go ahead and replant your garden with summer loving longer term perennial food crops. We've noticed over the year that the main reason why people decide to stop gardening altogether for the summer is the big learning curve with getting to know all of the unusual varieties that like the summer. So this blog post will focus on our top 10 most beloved summer perennial veggies and herbs. 

May is basically like, the most transitional month between the last of the annual vegetables and the beginning of the perennials & fruit trees, and the below varieties kind of symbolize that hybrid of seasons for us. Some of these are annuals, some are perennials, and all of them are perfect for May. All of these varieties should last through the summer if treated properly and they can be planted in your raised bed or your landscaping depending on how much space you have available. If you've only ever grown in a raised bed consider adding a "food forest guild" to your back or front yard landscaping to provide a permanent home to some perennial food crops. 

Check out this article about food forest guilds & the accompanying diagram which easily helps explain the planting design for a food forest. Basically, gardeners take design inspiration from the way that forests naturally organize themselves so that all of the plants can live harmoniously together in a small space instead of fighting for space in the system. One of our favorite modification to the food forest guild system is to remove the "upper canopy" plant, which is typically a very large fast growing fruit tree that will make lots of shade and requires the most space. Sometimes adding an upper canopy tree to your backyard can be a bit too much, so you can use a mid-level canopy tree like a papaya, mulberry or a banana as the largest specimen in your guild and then surround it with smaller annuals and perennials like the ones in the below list to round out the system. 

Without further ado here comes our top 10 list. All of the plants on the list can be sourced from our nursery in the Redland from now throughout the summer. Happy planting!




OUR 10 FAVORITE MAY FOOD CROPS: 

1. HOT PEPPERS
Hot peppers are a great choice for a May garden because they love a lengthening day, and they love the heat and humidity. In climates like ours without frost peppers are technically perennials and a good healthy nematode free pepper plant can become quite a formidable presence in your garden, turning into a big bush and lasting years before loosing productivity. The hotter the pepper variety the easier is it to grow in the heat. We're not sure why thats the case but a guess is that the amount of capsicum in the whole plant is higher and the bugs don't like the taste! Bugs are going to be the one thing that might negatively effect your pepper plants health as one of the negative features of summer gardening is that the pest pressure increases. Keep an eye on the underside of your leaves where aphids and whitefly like to hide from your inquisitive eyes, and if the growing tips of the plant get krinkly or shriveled up that means you have a two-spotted spider mite issue. 



2. GARLIC CHIVES
Garlic chives are the closest thing we can come to growing garlic, or something that kinda tastes like garlic, here in South Florida. Garlic Chives are literally indestructible and will be the very last plant standing in your garden no matter what challenges are thrown at it. The root system of this plant is incredibly robust which means it can handle dry conditions and low nutrients pretty well. Cut your clump of garlic chives down to the base whenever you need to use it in the kitchen and two weeks later your plant will be fully grown again! Garlic chives make a great ingredient for stir fries, stuffing dumplings & gyoza. 




3 & 4. LONGEVITY & OKINAWA SPINACH
Longevity & Okinawa spinach are plant cousins so we are including them together in our list. Longevity is a lime green leafed plant while Okinawa is a big more showy with dark leaves and bright purple undersides of the leaves. Summer greens are all a bit weird, and they all have funny names with the word spinach in them, even though none of them are related to or very similar to spinach! They are commonly referred to as spinaches to give people an idea of how to cook them, since they are all a little slimy if overcooked (like spinach is) and are basically mildly flavored green leaves. Okinawa & Longevity are perennial greens and they make low lying shrubs that spread and grow in low branches. they make a great ornamental ground cover in your food forest too. 

5. WINGED BEAN
Winged bean is by far our favorite weird warm weather vegetable. This beautiful bean is scalloped ruffled and winged, and when you cut it in pieces they look like little throwing stars. The plant is easy to grow and the entire thing (leaf, flower, bean & roots) is edible. This is a vining plant so you'll need to make sure to give it lots of space and support from a fence or trellis and keep an eye on the young pods to make sure aphids don't attack them when they are small. Include a winged bean in your summer garden and you'll be harvesting the asparagus flavored beans all summer long. 



6. SISSOO SPINACH
Sissoo spinach is like the kale of summer veggies. Its super easy to grow, easy to cook with, tastes pretty good, and lots of people know about it so its popular with our customers. It doesn't have many pest issues (but worms will eat it. they eat everything....) and it thrives in lots of different situations, from partial shade to full sun. Harvest the first few inches of growth for the most tender leaves and eat them lightly cooked. As with the other "spinaches" if you overcook Sisso it will become gooey and unpleasant. 



7. OKRA 
Okra is an indispensable ingredient in many soups, gumbos, and stew recipes. The immature pods contribute unique flavor and consistency to ethnic dishes like Cajun gumbo. Okra is a tender annual that grows best in hot weather and can even thrive in our hot, humid and rainy summers. The pods should be picked when tender and immature, about 2-3 inches long, usually about 4-6 days after flowering. Keep pods removed to encourage flowering. Plants can reach 3-4 feet high and do not need trellising. A member of the hibiscus family, Okra has similar pest issues (a favorite plant of the mealy bug) and a beautiful edible flower. Burgundy Okra is a beautiful variety with dark red fruit and stems.

8. LEMONGRASS
Lemongrass barely needs an introduction since its quite a popular herb in lots of different delish cuisines like Indian & Thai, however did you know that it grows super well down here in South Florida? Or that its essential oils help keep mosquitos out of your garden? Indeed! Besides being a prolific and easy to use herb & tea plant, lemongrass can also be used in natural bug repellants and other body products. Lemongrass is luckily also very easy to propagate, just rip a piece out by the roots, cut away the top of it to leave just a few inches of plant and stick it in the ground. So long as it gets consistent watering until its rooted itll happily make a new plant. 

9. SWEET POTATOES 

This crop thrives in nutrient poor well draining soil, which we have plenty of here in South Florida. A great way to encourage the plant to produce more tubers for you is to regularly prune the vines and bonus: the leaves are edible! Sweet potato weevils are the main issue with growing this crop in south florida, as they eat small holes in your potatoes without you knowing. Whitefly on the underside of leaves are also an issue so make sure to check your plant throughout its growing season. Sweet potato is a vining plant that will sprawl throughout your garden creating a beautiful dense ground cover, which is one reason why we love growing it in the summer instead of the fall, since it can be quite competitive in a small space where you are trying to grow other annuals. If you don’t have plans for your veggie bed in the summer consider planting a few sweet potatoes and using them as a cover crop, to protect your soil from erosion and weeds. 



10. CRANBERRY HIBISCUS
Cranberry hibiscus is another super cool leaf that is really unique to summer and adds a welcome splash of color, texture & tart flavor to an herbaceous salad. The hibiscus family is full of fun summer friendly food plants like roselle, okra, and south sea salad tree, but cranberry hibiscus is definitely the prettiest with its dark purple maple shaped leaves and its baby pink hibiscus flowers. Prune your cranberry hibiscus regularly and it'll get nice and bushy and try to get it a spot in your garden in full sun because the more sun it gets the deeper the color in the leaves. 

Honorable Mention: ROSELLE!
And while we aren't including roselle in our list because it wont make you food during the summer months (because it wont be ready to harvest until fall) its still an amazing summer plant that we feel we have to mention. Roselle is the hibiscus family plant that makes hibiscus tea. It flowers and fruits based on the length of the day so it can only be planted in spring & early summer so that it can grow all summer long and then the ruby red calyxes are ready to harvest once the days start shortening in fall. Hibiscus tea is high in vitamin C and antioxidants and tastes citrusy and tart. Its great to use in cocktails, fresh in salads, or to make jams and jellies. 

Expect your Roselle bush to get about 6 feet wide and the same height if its planted in spring and gets extra happy. Roselle, like all hibiscus family plants, is particularly sensitive to nematodes, and if you see chlorosis occurring in the new growth you may need to add some chelated iron to your soil.  

Written by Mary Johnson

Every gardener knows that a surefire way to make your veggie garden pop off is by adding compost. By using food scraps, yard waste, heat, water, and time, anyone can make their own nutrient-rich soil at home. But so many people are intimidated by making their own compost. We’ve heard all the arguments - it’s too much work; I don’t want food scraps in my yard; I’m worried about pests. Fear not! We are here with a great solution for folks who want to reap all the benefits of a home compost pile, without any of the hassle.

Enter: in-ground composting! In-ground composting is exactly what it sounds like: burying an enclosing compost pile directly into your garden. By burying food scraps, yard waste, and other organic materials in the ground, you can create a natural composting system right next to your veggie plants that requires very little maintenance and produces high-quality, nutrient-rich soil for your garden.

What are the benefits of composting?

• Reduces waste: Composting diverts organic waste from landfills by using food scraps from your kitchen, plant waste from your yard, raked leaves, and more!  By putting these materials into a compost pile rather than the trash can, we can reduce the amount of methane and other greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.
• Improves soil health: Compost improves soil structure, makes the soil more fertile, and increases soil's ability to hold water. Healthier soil means less need for added fertilizers, and lower risk of pest infestation.
• Saves money: Because compost improves soil health, using compost can save money by decreasing the amount of fertilizers and soil amendments you need to buy.
• Supports biodiversity: Composting at home can attract beneficial insects and microorganisms that help break down organic matter and support healthy soil. A diverse ecosystem in your garden means higher levels of biodiversity for the greater ecosystem around you!

What are the benefits of in-ground composting?

• Low maintenance: Once it’s set up, you’re good to go! No additional labor required.
• Efficient: The basic structure of an in-ground composter is a porous divider (like hardware cloth). This allows for organisms in the soil to access the organic material and convert it to nutrient-rich soil, much more quickly than would happen above ground. 
• Inexpensive: It doesn't cost much to start in-ground composting! If you're going for a DIY route (pictures and instructions below), the materials will cost you about $15. Pre-made bins run between $100 and $200. That might sound expensive, but when you consider that you won’t have to buy any additional compost for your garden, or do the work of spreading it around, it’s a great deal! 

What’s the difference between traditional composting and in-ground composting?

• Unlike compost piles or tumblers, in-ground composting does not require "turning", or moving the pile around to stimulate decomposition.
• Above-ground composting requires moisture management in order to support the decomposition process. In-ground compost bins get all of their moisture from your regular watering of your garden.
• In other gardens, we might recommend adding some compost around the base of the plants a couple of times during a growing season. With in-ground compost, there’s no need to add any additional compost to your garden. The porous structure allows nutrients to seep directly into the soil over time. 

We recently had a chance to make an in-ground compost for out garden at the SEED School: check it out below!

Here's what our DIY in-ground compost bin looks like after assembly, before installing it into the garden.

We helped the students select the perfect location within their garden bed. They dug a big hole, and put the bin inside...

Then, they filled the bin with organic materials. The student on the left has some “brown” material, and the student on the right has “green” material. (To learn more about what that means, you can check out this graphic.)

…and Voila! A beautiful and compact way to passively add nutrients to the garden.

How can I make my own in-ground compost bin?

Making an in-ground compost like the one at the SEED School garden is so easy!

Materials: (you should be able get these at any hardware store)

• Hardware cloth
• This is the metal grid that serves as the cylinder for the compost bin. You can pick it up at the hardware store by the roll, or ask around to see if you can take a small bit from your neighbor. If you have a standard 4'x8' raised bed, a 3'x5' piece is a good size to start with.

• A lid: 
• Any type of firm circular piece that can cover the top of the bin. Garbage can lids and  plastic bin lids (like from those five-gallon buckets) work great. Personally, we love using metal trash can lids for this type of project because of their classic, vintage feel…and it low-key looks like Oscar the Grouch is hiding in the garden. If you wanted to get artsy, you could even paint your lid!
• One thing to keep in mind: if you live in an area with pests, it might be helpful to secure your lid with a bungee cord or by putting something heavy (like a garden paver) on top of it, so no critters get in there.
• Zip ties

Instructions:

1. Decide on the best location for your bin. It should be in a central spot in your garden. 
2. Roll a piece of hardware cloth into a cylinder. The height of the cylinder should either be flush with your garden or sticking up just a little bit. Make sure the diameter of the cylinder fits snugly underneath your lid.
3. Use zip ties to secure the cylinder.
4. Dig a hole in your garden big enough to fit the bin, and insert the bin into the hole.
5. Add layers of brown (leaves, straw, mulch) and green (food scraps, organic garden trimmings) materials until the bin is full.
6. Secure the lid and you are done!

This is just one way to make an in-ground compost bin. There are lots of different style out there. Don't be afraid to get crafty!

What if I don’t want to make my own?

Like the idea of in-ground compost but don’t want to spend the time or energy making your own? We recommend a couple of options:

1. Our favorite in-ground composter company is called Subpod. They make a duo in-ground compost system and worm farm that is well designed and super functional. The worms speed up the process of converting organic material into compost. If you’re looking for a way to make compost at home fast, the Subpod is a great option. Their website has a lot of helpful information about vermicomposting, microbes, and composting in general. They are currently having a 40% sale that ends April 30, so get on it!
2. We can build one for you! Our gardeners have the materials, expertise, and passion to create, deliver, and install an in-ground composter that looks similar to the one featured in the pictures above. Because in-ground composters deliver nutrients directly to the adjacent soil, selecting a location for your composter is a crucial part of the process. We’ll use our expertise to analyze your garden, select the best location, and install a compost bin . Alternatively, if you want to buy a Subpod or another pre-made model, we can install it for you.

Little River is Giving Away a FREE School Garden! 

Click here to apply         

We say it all the time, school gardens are the most important gardens. Sooo we decided to giveaway, AKA install, plant, and prepare one lucky school or youth serving institution for a bountiful & educational growing season to come. While getting the word out about this exciting opportunity, we wanted to use it as a chance to educate as to why these colorful, food abundant spaces are so important to have in our young people's lives. 

Research on school gardens tell us that they are a multidisciplinary learning space that also offer hands on insight into nutritional wellness, environmental stewardship, mental & emotional health, community connectedness, and building therapeutic practices. One of the most frequently noted benefits by multiple institutions is the observed increase in consumption & willingness to try fruits & vegetables. Considering half of students' daily calories are eaten at school, a garden present on campus can serve as an incubator for life-long healthy eating behaviors. The magic of school gardens can truly be seen in how student learning experiences are uplifted. Science is an obvious subject to connect to gardens, but history, art, math, and physics can also have lessons tied to what the garden provides. In fact, a study involving 5 classes of 6th grade students over a 10 week period indicated that kids shared feelings of pride, happiness, wonder/surprise and cooperative behavior more often during lessons held in the garden than in the classroom. 

We could nerd out endlessly as to why we love school gardens so much. We believe that they are vital spaces to support youth for successful and happy futures and that is why we are so excited to do this giveaway. While promoting people to apply, we will be sharing more compelling findings and inspiring stories to highlight people leading great work in their school gardens. Stay tuned via Instagram and Facebook to keep learning!

Help us spread the word by sharing this blog post :)

What does the Garden Giveaway include?
Delivery and installation of four 4'x8'x10" wooden raised beds (for a total of 128 square feet of growing space) 
Soil to fill beds
Organic fertilizer
Season appropriate veggie & herb plants
Plant labels for easy identification
All 4 seasons of our virtual workshop (so you can learn how to take care of it)
An arch trellis planted with peavine flowers!

Who can apply?
All educational institutions within Miami-Dade county are welcome to apply. This includes private, public & charter schools, daycare centers, libraries, community centers, and homeschool groups.

When is the deadline?
Submit your entry by midnight on Friday June 30th, 2023.

If you are getting as excited as us about school garden possibilities, you have to check out the organization KidsGardening,org. They are a one stop shop of resources, grants, gardening how-to's, and more. They even offer English & Spanish curriculum, webinars, and guided activities to make learning in the garden easy for everyone to participate in. 

Here we are already in April, where did the season go!? We consider April one of the last opportunities to plant and harvest annuals before the summer comes and wipes them all out with its intense heat and rainfall. April is a great month to also plant transitional perennial crops that will survive into or through the summer if you have some space opening up in your garden. If you planted things like kale & tomatoes in the fall those plants might be nearing the end of their life cycle by now. Many home gardeners get a bit attached to their plants because they've cared for them for so long, so they don't want to pull them out (aka kill them), but annuals are meant to grow, produce flowers, fruit & seed, and then die (or be pulled out). We sometimes get comments from people like "my beans were doing so well, producing so much food for me, but then they just stopped and now they're just sitting in my garden for months not doing anything...whats wrong with them?" to which we respond: "theres nothing wrong with them, they're just done making you food! pull them out already!". So, pull it out already is definitely a theme of April gardening. It's not too late to remove a spent crop and plant something new, especially something quick growing, like asian greens. 

"Asian greens" is a whole category of delicious and super easy to grow heat tolerant crops in the brassica family (the family that includes radishes, kale & broccoli) that we love planting this time of year. Many of these varieties are incredibly popular staple crops in other parts of the world but are relatively uncommon here in America. But remember, our unique climate is much like that found in Thailand and parts of India & Asia, so it makes sense that we would take inspiration from these areas when looking for cool heat tolerant crops. Since you may not have heard of many of these varieties let's go through some of them together. 

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Hon Tsai Tai
Hon Tsai Tai is a delicious and easy to grow green whose flavor profile is similar to broccoli, which is cool since many of the heat tolerant greens are spicy, but this one is sweet. The seeds can be planted in little bunches and the whole plant is edible at all ages so you can harvest the leaves young to eat them raw or let the plant mature and start flowering and eat the leaves, stalks and flowers then. 

   

Tat soi
Tat soi is the closest thing we can grow to "normal" spinach, the arrowleaf kind you get in the grocery store, which hates the heat and does pretty poorly here all year round. Tat soi is technically a loose headed cabbage but it definitely doesn't look or cook like cabbage, so don't let that deter you. Leaves can be harvested at any stage of growth and you can harvest them "cut and come again" or let the whole plant get big and then cut the whole head, like you would bok choi. We grow a savoy leafed variety, which means theres extra crinkly texture, which we think is fun for cooking and for looks in the garden. 

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Tokyo Bekana/ Pei Tsai
Tokyo Bekana is one of our least popular plants but thats just because no one has heard of it before. Once a customer takes the leap and tries it they become a convert and start asking for it season after season. Tokyo Bekana is also a loose headed cabbage but its very very tender, so we like to refer to it as "tropical romaine". The leaves are very light, tender and delicate, but the ribs/ stalk is very crunchy and watery like the center of a romaine leaf, so that balances out the tender green in a really nice way. We definitely prefer to eat this one raw for that reason, and it stays tender even when fully grown. 

Li Ren Baby Bok Choi
All bok choi varieties are heat tolerant and a good option for spring gardening, but over the years we've falling in love with 3 of them and grow them more regularly. Sure, we could stock like 100+ bok choi varieties but then we would need a whole other greenhouse for them! Li Ren is our favorite baby variety. Being a true baby bok choi means that we dont harvest it young, but rather it stays small when mature. So the choi in the photo above is no taller than our hand, but is fully grown and ready to come out of the garden. We plant these puppies about 6" apart since they dont get big, and you can really go for it and plant a whole little field of them in your garden if youd like. These are best harvested whole (not leaf by leaf/ cut and come again) since they mature so quickly. 

 

Joi Choi & Japonica
Joi Choi & Japonica are our two favorite extra large bok choi varieties and while they are similar in size and shape they are pretty different in flavor. Joi Choi is a super traditional mild, watery white stemmed pak choi, and japonica is more like a mustard and can be quite pungent. Both of them can be harvested leaf by leaf as they mature or you can let them become monsters and then pick the whole thing, but be careful cause they definitely wont fit in your fridge! These beauties are best suited to people who eat lots of greens and know how to handle the volume. Sometimes we get questions from customers about "eating leaves", like... how do you do it! We eat so many different leaves that its like... how do you not do it! You can cook any of this stuff like you would kale or swiss chard. 

  
pictured above are green mizuna and mz. america purple mustard greens. 

 
On the left is our favorite standard arugula, Astro. on the right, larger leafed Esmee. 

Mustard Greens
Mustard greens is a general term that applies to all of the cultivated greens in the brassica family that come from the wild mustard grandparent. it includes arugula, the most well known mustard green, but also tons of other colors, shapes and textures of mustard too. The leaves all have a spicy flavor, like arugula does, which gets more intense as they mature. A mix of colorful and flavorful baby mustard leaves makes a really cool salad, and if you let the plant get larger you'll want to cook, stew or sautee the leaves to settle their flavor down and soften their texture. Mustard greens are even used as a cover crop at some farms, and of course if you let them flower and collect the seeds you can make your very own mustard!

Dandelion
We grow dandelion pretty much year round, but it gets more popular in gardens this time of year since the pickings of sweet greens is slimmer. Dandelion definitely deserves a spot in your garden if you consider yourself a healthy eater. Bitter greens are very good for your body and for your digestive system, but people have bred bitterness out of their cultivated foods because they don't like the flavor. In Greek cuisine bitter wild greens are made into a dish called "horta" where they are blanched in water, and then sauteed in olive oil and lots of lemon. The key to making this dish tasty is the blanching part, because it mellows out the bitterness of the dandelion. 

Cranberry hibiscus is known for being a deep summer green but we threw it in this spring rundown because its so fun and tasty and beautiful and theres no reason to not grow it now. This plant is different from all of the above because its a shrub, so it'll get pretty big! it also doesn't need to go in your raised bed, you can plant it in your yard like you would an ornamental hibiscus. The beautiful red maple-shaped leaves are not just edible they're also tasty! they have a tart lemony profile and the tiny ones can be thrown in salads whole, while the large ones might need to be chopped up. This plant will thrive all the way through fall and it takes well to pruning so you can keep it smaller if you need to by just being aggressive with pruning new growth. 

Seed Saving: 

 Another fun garden activity that is unique to spring is the harvesting and saving of seeds from your plants. Many plants that you might not think make seeds will definitely do so if you leave them in your garden long enough, or if you treat them just a little bit differently. Let's take the medicinal flower calendula as an example.... If you're growing calendula in your garden you are likely harvesting all of the blooms and saving them for medicinal use. Well, if you leave a few flowers on the plant then they will get pollinated, die and turn into seeds! Let the seeds dry on the plant (that means they have fully matured and will be the right age for germination when you are ready to plant them) and then store them in a jar in the dark until next season. Saving your own seeds is an important part of becoming a self sufficient and resilient gardener. While we specialize in selling people plants and seeds we are always thrilled to see people move away from relying on us for materials and into relying on nature and their own garden to generate what they need. And then when they generate abundance, especially in the form of saved seeds, sharing it with their community. Miami Seed Share is a local non profit project that collects and gives away saved seed (through seed libraries and different spots throughout the city), check them out on instagram if you have seed you'd like to donate. 

These bronze fennel seeds are ready to be harvested for seed, you can tell because the whole flowering cluster has turned dry and brown. 

These cilantro seeds are not ready yet because they are still green. Wait until they turn brown to remove them from the plant and save for next year. 

If left on the plant many flowers & fruits will make mature seeds, all it takes is some patience. The calendula left will produce way more seed than you'll ever need for next season! The seeds in the palm right are heirloom Datil pepper seeds, which can be harvested from a pepper fruit so long as it matures into a color (sometimes orange, sometimes yellow, sometimes red). Each plant family will make useable seeds in a different way, so the best way to figure out how to save lots of different seeds is to get a guide book, like "Seed to Seed", which is a bit of a seed saving bible. You can also use seeds in a culinary way! The herb cilantro has so many useable parts including its fresh and dried seeds, which are referred to as "coriander" but are just cilantro seeds! Dill seed, arugula seed (which is called mustard seeds, like what you make mustard out of!), and nasturtium seeds are all edible and useful in the kitchen, so you can also stock your pantry during spring before composting your spent plants. 

Composting: 

Spring is a good time to start a compost pile if you don't already have one for two reasons. No, three reasons! Reason one is that many of our local tree species (like oaks and black olives) are losing their leaves now, and leaf litter is a super valuable (but free and abundant) ingredient in compost. Leaf litter breaks down faster than woody mulch, is full of minerals that the tree removed from the soil, and they are a great environment for microbial & fungal life forms to thrive in. Reason two is that as you empty your garden out of spent crops you'll get to make use of them if you add them to a compost pile. Plants added to a compost pile fresh are referred to as "greens" and they contain lots of nitrogen, a key ingredient for plant growth. Layering greens and browns (dried stuff like mulch, hay, cardboard and our friend leaf litter) is how you make a healthy and balanced compost pile, so spring has lots of greens and browns for you to divert from the waste stream and turn into future plant food. The third reason is that summer is the best season for composting because the microbial, fungal & bug life that makes composting happen (basically life forms eating detritus and pooping it out) is at its peak during the hot and sunny months of summer. If you start a compost pile now it'll be eaten and pooped out a hundred times through the summer leaving you with a much smaller but very precious pile of "compost" that will be ready in time for fall planting. See how that all works?! Its the cycle of life in your home veggie garden! 

So get out there and enjoy the new and exciting crops (asian greens!) and yields (saved seed, future compost) that the spring garden has to offer. 

Growing food has been romanticized to the point of no return. We tend to lean towards the practical side of this increasingly popular hobby, but the truth is that all of the us are completely in love with plants. Building gardens is indeed a romantic endeavor for us and we strive to share that magic with as many people as possible. 

We love a garden with arches covered with tomatoes or butterfly peavine, potted herbs spilling over and flowers in every color of the rainbow peaking out of every corner. These are the details that make a garden a magical space to experience. Growing food at home is not supposed to be entirely practical, it's also going to be beautiful and inspiring.  

Of course all of the magical elements are rooted in practicality because after all there is an end goal. In fact, the motivation and energy that comes from having an end goal is what powers us to work so hard and be so vigilant in a vegetable garden. Soil is heavy, the sun on our backs burns and pests are relentless. In order to succeed it is undeniable that we have to work for it. 

One of the questions we answer frequently is "How much garden space do I need to feed my family?" That question is tricky, but over time we've learned how to answer it, for the most part. The answer is going to be different for everyone and it's based on your end goal. Do you want to harvest a salad every other day? Do you want to grow the veggies your kids enjoying eating? Do you want them to experience harvesting their own meals on a regular basis? Is your dream garden a place where you'd like to sit in the evenings with a cup of tea or glass of wine? Are you sitting in the garden alone or with friends? 

Knowing answers to questions like these helps you figure out how much garden you should invest in. Other factors to consider are how much experience you have and how much time and resources you are going to dedicate to it. 

If you are new to gardening we may suggest a realistic goal like growing all of your own herbs; wouldn't it be nice to stop buying those little plastic boxes of herbs from the grocery store? You just need 1 raised bed or a collection pots to grow herbs. Next on the list would be salad greens, which are easy, but have a short growing season. Someone with a standard 4'x8' bed can easily grow all of their herbs and enough greens to harvest a big salad a couple of times per week. Now let's say your garden goals include growing tomatoes, carrots and cucumbers because your kids love to snack on those. Tomatoes have big thirsty root system and require serious trellising; they are a long term crop that is planted at the beginning of the season and unless you get unlucky with a disease they'll stay put in your garden until the very end of the season. Ideally tomatoes would get planted in their own bed or large individual pots. Carrots are very slow to germinate, need consistent moisture and don't compete well with other plants, so ideally they'd get their own bed or at least be paired with something compatible. In general it's nice to start with at least 2 different beds so that you can manage crops according to their different needs. Two beds also present the possibility of adding an arch between them which is a really easy way to add both beauty and functionality to a garden. An arch is a great solution for trellising tomatoes and can also work with so many different plants like cucumbers, pumpkins, butterfly peavine and other flowering vines.

If your dream garden has arches, a bird fountain, enough beds to grow most of your fresh vegetable needs and a cozy place to sit and watch all of the butterflies that visit daily, now you are speaking our language! A garden like this is busy, there is always something to do, always something to eat and always something to photograph. A garden like this will change so much from month to month as quick crops of lettuce and cilantro go into meals and flowers go into bouquets all over the house. A bed of broccoli will bloom from one week to the next and you'll make broccoli soup, broccoli quiche, broccoli for school lunch and broccoli in the freezer for later. In a big garden with multiple beds you can grow long term crops like leeks, sweet potatoes and carrots. During the peak of the growing season you'll find something ready for dinner every day. You'll have flowers everywhere and with them pollinators galore. The flip side of course is that during the seasonal transitions you'll have your hands full trying to keep up with mulching, turning soil and planting. 

Maybe that's were we come in! Our team has many years of experience designing, building and maintaining edible gardens in South Florida. We're super excited about building large gardens with a lot of magic touches like arches and winding paths lined with wildflowers. This year we've embraced a line of metal planters made by Vego Gardens™️. They are made of a metal blend that is especially rust resistant, but they are also enameled and have a rubber edging that makes them super smooth and safe. They recently released special shapes like corners and U-shaped beds which we are very much looking forward to incorporating into garden designs soon.

One of the things that qualifies us most for planting and maintaining vegetable gardens is our farming background and organic plant nursery where all of our plants are born from seed. You could say we are kind of obsessed with growing the healthiest starter plants possible. Through experience we have come to understand that successful gardening starts with robust plants. If they are given a strong start in life they are much more likely to carry that momentum into maturity. They are more likely to survive transplant shock as well as pest and fertility issues. We stand by the quality of our designs, our team, our service and our plants! 

If anyone can help you grow a productive and beautiful home garden it's us, and March is a perfectly fine month to start something new. Oftentimes people consider Spring to be "too late" to start a garden project, but adding new raised beds is a long term investment that last years and years, so if you start now you can get at least one round of plants out of it before summer, then use summer to condition the soil and come fall you'll be all ready for planting again. 

March is also a great time to start thinking about adding perennials to your space. If your veggie beds are doing well on auto pilot and you're itching for a project, consider adding perennial flowering plants to your pathways, edges or even make a new space for them that can act like a small meadow. Native wildflowers and flowering shrubs and trees are an amazing addition to your home garden and they can mostly go straight into the ground so you don't need to rely on a raised bed to integrate them into your space. 

In these photos of Muriels old front yard you can see that she only has one raised bed for veggies in the mix but all around the bed is planted with perennial flowering plants and herbs. Larger shrubs are planted up against the house so that they don't create shade for the veggies and other flowers, and smaller flowering plants like salvia and pentas are tucked up against the Vego Garden Bed so that theres still a clear pathway to walk through. Another bonus to having perennial flowers as part of your annual veg garden space is that during the summer when your bed is mostly dormant the whole space is still bursting with colors and butterflies, instead of giving an empty/ unproductive vibe. 

February is a fun gardening month in South Florida because its a bit of a sweet spot. Most of your garden is planted, the weather is cool, the pests are manageable, and the harvests are happening. We can tell when everyones gardens are happy and full because we see less customers come through the nursery! Bad for our bottom line but good for the gardeners... it means that the plants they've bought or started from seed are happy and making food and things are just cruising along, which we love. We don't mind the lull, we actually take advantage of it to prepare for our big summer inventory switch. While it might seem crazy to be thinking about summer plants already we have to start thinking about them so we can propagate the slower growing plants in time for them to be happy well rooted plants come May when we start selling them. We thought it would be fun to have this months garden blog post focus on some creative stuff you can do with and in your garden to take advantage of the bounty and beautiful chilly weather of February instead of talking about practical stuff like harvest techniques and pest identification. 

An edible garden isn't just useful for cooking theres lots of other fun activities that a thriving garden can inspire. Last year we hosted our first ever plant dye workshops with local herbalist Sun Sister and they was super fun! We did a simple immersion dye bath made with fresh marigolds and a bundle dyed scarf that we used all sorts of materials for. Bundle dyes are direct pigment transfers so you use super saturated colorful material and the color basically bleeds onto the fabric you are dyeing. We gathered all of the ingredients for this from our family garden like marigolds, turmeric, cranberry hibiscus, purple cabbage leaves, violas, begonias, geraniums, and even red lettuce! Plus we foraged for some wild ingredients like brazilian pepper and bouganvillea blossoms. If you want to give it a try heres a step by step tutorial to do this simple plant project at home. 

Now is a great time to tackle an edible flower project too! If you follow us on instagram you might have seen the beautiful creations of farmer Tiff and our team member Ale, who make these absolutely magical edible flower cookies as a side hustle. They started that project based solely on the desire to make use of an overabundance of edible flowers growing at the nursery. People have been decorating baked goods with edible flowers for as long as we've known which flowers are edible however flower adorned food is definitely having a hip moment thanks to creators like Loria Stern who is making the most beautiful edible flower creations ever. Check out her website or instagram for inspiration... she's making raw pies covered in flowers, cinnamon buns stuffed with rose petals, seedy crackers covered in herb branches, chocolates with rose and lavender on top, tons of different edible flower cookies, plus she makes gorgeous wedding cakes with dried flowers that she grows herself and presses in books. 

For these cookies we used a super straightforward sugar cookie recipe from the food network. As you can see in the process photos we completely cover the cookie in flower bits and they shrink a bit in the cooking process. The dough is easy to work with when you keep it nice and cold, so we roll the cookies out, then chill them, then decorate, then chill again, then bake. You can use anything thats edible and growing in your yard... on these cookies we've used salad burnet, chervil, thyme, mint, rosemary, bronze fennel, marigolds, citrus gem marigolds, nasturtiums, pentas, begonias, borage, geraniums and pansies. If you want to tackle a baking project that requires more bake time then you'll want to press and dry your flowers and use them to decorate after baking. The key to using them fresh is a quick bake time, otherwise they'll shrivel up into boring brown clumps in the oven. 

Other flower based creative crafts that we've tackled over the year include egg decorating and dyeing, flower crown making, raw cookie decorating, sun printing, and making and painting with plant pigment. And paper making! Oh, and soap making! There are tons of resources online if you want to try your hand at getting creative with plant material, and with lots of blooms & herbs in your garden most of the material you need is free and right there waiting for you. 

If you are more info food projects we indulge in lots of those thanks to the bounty of the winter gardening season. This time of year farmer Tiff is making all sorts of preserved goods for the French Farms farmers market booth, like sauerkraut, spicy pickled carrots, fennel & cherry tomato confit and her famous kimchi. Lacto-fermentation is a great technique to learn for preserving all sorts of veggies like cucumbers, radishes, turnips, green beans and cabbage. Wild Fermentation, by Sandor Ellix Katz is the bible of lacto-fermentation and a great place to start if you are a newbie. Once you master a few simple techniques you can really start to get creative with whatever your garden is making too much of. Confit is a cooking technique that is basically super slow poaching something in fat. The most famous type is duck confit, but you can use olive oil and confit lots of vegetables too. Tiffs favorites are fennel and lemon confit for which she uses this recipe (ignore the terrible photo this stuff is delish...) and a simple sungold cherry tomato confit that she found in the Gjelina cookbook many years ago. The process of removing all of the cherry tomatoes skins is tedious but worth it, since you end up slow cooking the flesh and juices with thyme, oregano, lots of garlic and olive oil. If you submerge the solids in the fat then you can keep this stuff in the fridge forever and use it as a flavorful base for cooking or something to pour over crusty bread when you've got visitors to impress. 

Spicy taquiera style pickled carrots from Kevin Wests, Saving the Seasons. 

A simple sauerkraut with turmeric juice added for health, flavor & color. 

Kimchi made with purple napa cabbage from the farm using this classic recipe. 

 

If you need some fermentation inspiration these are Tiffs favorite resources that she turns to again and again for inspiration and recipes. While recipes are great they oftentimes call for lots of unique ingredients that you have to go hunt and shop for, so once you have some basics down get out there and freestyle with whatever you have in the garden. Slugs got your swiss chard? pickle the colorful stems! Arugula got too big and spicy? Add some kale to tone down the spice and make a pesto. green beans really pumping? Add some dill and lacto-ferment the suckers! or quick pickle them with garlic and apple cider vinegar. Wind knocked a bunch of unripe starfruit off of your neighbors tree? pickle them umeboshi plum style! ok, ok, we'll stop. you get the point. Gardening can be so rewarding as a hobby on its own but its also a great inspiration point for branching out into new creative endeavors. 

If those aren't enough ideas to get your creative juices flowing we wanted to quickly mention easy to make items that use medicinal plants and herbs. A tincture is an alcohol or glycerin based botanical extraction that people have been using as medicine since well... medicine began! Heres a super thorough explanation of the basic process from a very reputable herb company for you to check out. typically different types and strengths of alcohol are used for different types of material (like, fresh leaves versus something hard like a resin or wood) and you can use fresh or dried herbs. Oil is another substrate that can pull aromatic, flavor and medicinal qualities out of botanicals, and typically one uses dry herbs for that since oil and water don't mix. Fire cider is a popular herbal concoction used for general health and immunity building that uses apple cider vinegar as a base and it has lots of tropical garden goodies in it like ginger, turmeric, spicy peppers, rosemary & oregano. 

dried calendula soaking in olive oil so it can be strained and mixed with beeswax to make salve.

an herbal glycerin based tincture being made using fennel seeds, mint and other medicinals used to soothe the digestive system. 

The most inspiring book we have found for gardeners who want to get into preserving and using what they grow it Self Sufficient Herbalism by Lucy Jones. This book is full of information about the herbs she uses but she lives in England which is a very different growing environment, so don't get too hung up on using the exact same plants that you read about. Easy to grow beginners medicinals that you might already have in your garden or neighborhood down here in South Florida include tulsi (aka holy basil), chamomile, turmeric, ginger, barbados cherry, lemongrass, aloe vera, calendula, yarrow and spilanthes. And don't forget that most culinary herbs also have strong medicinal properties, like thyme, oregano, sage & rosemary. 

If you'd like to learn more about using medicinal plants we have three medicinal workshops scheduled for the month of February, check em out and join us to learn about making medicine yourself with plants you grew. 

The only thing we at Little River Cooperative love more than growing vegetables is growing flowers! We've always incorporated flowers into our gardens and as most of you probably know our nursery stocks a healthy selection of edible and cut flower starter plants. Over the years we've also had the opportunity to plant purely flower gardens! For example these raised beds we installed and planted with cottage style cut flowers. 

Flowers add so much value to any type of garden. They attract pollinators and wild life like bees, butterflies and birds. Native flowers have the added benefit of providing food and habitat for native species which is always a good thing for the environment. In the cut flower garden pictured above we incorporated our state wildflower Coreopsis as well as one of our native salvia varieties, Scarlet salvia. In the small raised bed pictured below you can see a sample of flowers selected for attracting pollinators. They include a mix of native and non-native plants, annuals and perennials. A flower garden like this will go through many phases of blooming, attracting different pollinators at various stages. The perennial plants will most likely be part of the garden for a few years, needing to be pruned here and there. The annual flowers like zinnias and sunflowers will last for one season and then their spot can be replanted with something different. The beauty of growing flowers is seeing all of the changes and evolutions of their arrangement. 

Some of the beauty in growing flowers also lies in their fast changing life cycles. Most annual flowers produce seed pods pretty quickly and then reseed quickly too! Their blooms are incredibly beautiful for a fleeting moment, then transforming into something else. Seed pods are often fascinating in their geometry and engineering. Sometimes their sheer numbers are what impress us the most! As gardeners we are amazed by every step of the plants life cycle, from seed germination to blooming and back to the seed itself. Wild cosmos, pictured below, is one of our favorite wild flowers. They are prolific in many ways; one single plant can get as tall as 4 or 5 feet, blooming profusely for a short period of about a month and making enough seeds for the whole neighborhood! When they are planted very close together (which is what happens naturally when the plant is allowed to drop seeds into the garden) they remain a bit shorter and more compact, which is kind of nice too. Just a few weeks later and the volunteer plants are blooming again for an almost continuous year round flower display. 

Flowers add bursts of color and beauty to all types of gardens, wether they are dedicated to native plants or vegetables. Mixed into veggie and herb gardens they break up the sea of green created by things like tomatoes, kale and arugula. They not only break things up for our eyes, but also for insects. It is common practice to use certain flowers to disturb the spread of pest issues. For example, marigolds, nasturtiums and calendula have a strong smell and can be used to "confuse" or "distract" insects that are targeting the leafy greens in your garden. Many flowers are not only beautiful and beneficial for insects, but also useful in our kitchens and medicine cabinets. 

Many of the medicinal plants commonly grown in a home garden are annual flowers and can easily be incorporated into an herb or vegetable garden. Tulsi, lemon balm, anise hyssop and chamomile to name a few, are all easy to grow annual plants that compliment veggie gardening. One of our personal favorites is calendula. Calendula is pretty compact plant in the daisy family, easy to grow from seed (p.s. they have the coolest looking seeds ever). They are fast growing and when the flowers are harvested regularly can be extremely productive. One plant alone can provide a handful of blooms every day for a period of 2-3 weeks, if not more! PRO-TIP: to keep any flowering plant in bloom longer you should prune spent flowers on a regular basis. Pruning flowers encourages the plant to continue producing more fresh blooms. We've been growing calendula and drying flowers for many years. The flowers contain a healing oil with many medicinal uses related to the skin. Muriel first started making a coconut oil based salve to use on her baby's booty for diaper rashes. It is great for sunburns, tattoos, dry lips and many other common skin discomforts. Her salve recipe is simple to make at home. Flowers should be harvested daily and set out to dry. You can lay them out to air dry in a single layer as you collect them; when you have enough to make a batch of oil put them in the oven for 15 minutes at the lowest setting (or even just a warm oven after turning it off) to finish drying them completely. A batch of oil can be any size. Choose a jar to use and fill it with dry flowers, then pour coconut oil to the top to cover the flowers. You'll let it sit in a warm place like a window sill anywhere from 2-6 weeks before straining the oil. Giving a jar a gentle shake (flip the jar unside down a few times gently) every once in a while will help to coax the natural oils in the calendula flowers into the coconut oil. Over time the clear coconut oil will turn yellow or orange. Strain the oil using a tea strainer or a piece of muslin or cheese cloth. The strained oil can actually be used as is, but in order to make it easier to apply, store and carry around it is mixed with a bit of beeswax to get a salve consistency. It's always best to use local organic beeswax which you can find a local farmers market. Put your oil in a small sauce pan on very low heat and add chunks of beeswax, stirring and allowing them to melt, lift your spoon from the oil periodically and allow it to cool so that you can test the consistency of your mixture. When you get a consistency you like stop adding beeswax and pour into a jar or small tins. Your salve will keep for months and makes sweet little gifts for loved ones. 

Flowers in the garden provide endless possibilities for crafting! Flowers that dry well such as Celosia, Strawflower and Gomphrena are great for making flower crowns. Flower crowns are probably the simples craft project ever and can be done with literally zero materials. Flower stems can be loosely braided or woven together for an impromptu flower crown moment right in the garden! Of course you can always get more involved in making them a bit more "professional" by using floral wire, tape and ribbons, but there's something very satisfying about the ephemeral nature of a 100% garden flower crown. You can add it straight to the compost after wearing for a little while. Doing these types of activities is amazing with kids because they can see the awesome potential of making something out of "nothing". Showing them the cycle of harvesting and composting in one activity is also pretty cool :) 

Last but not least is the vast world of edible flowers, probably the category we have explored the most in our nursery and farm. We eat flowers because they are cute and sometimes add a bit of flavor, but lets face it, flowers have very little nutritional value. Don't underestimate the value of cuteness though! Most of us eat with our eyes anyway. Edible flowers will brighten up a dish and turn it into something special. For example, take a salad which has a hard time competing at a holiday table; sprinkle brightly colored petals on it and peopel will be taking pictures of the salad instead of the turkey. Flowers are an inspiration for decorating cakes and cookies, they can really dress up a charcuterie board and pizzas! Some of our favorite varieties for decorating food include violas, borage, dianthus and citrus gem marigolds. 

This is a holiday charcuterie board that Tiffany brought to a party a few years ago. A quick visit to her backyard herb garden provided sprigs of thyme, rosemary, sage & bronze fennel to use as a base. She then added all of her fruits, meats, cheeses and nuts and then tucked various edible flowers into nooks and crannies throughout the board to brighten things up! 

Tiffany is also well known for the edible flower cookies that we sell occasionally for holidays like Christmas and Easter, and they are SUPER easy to make yourself. She uses this classic sugar cookie recipe and then pulls apart edible flowers into their smaller pieces and uses them to decorate, along with the tiny growing tips of herbs like lavender, sage, thyme, lemon verbena, bronze fennel & mint. Pro tip:  the flowers shrink a little bit during baking, so really cover the whole cookie if you want to replicate the look of her cookies. This is the recipe she uses, and it's critical to use something with a short bake time so that the flowers don't get ruined. 

These holiday versions are made with begonias, chervil, salad burnet, citrus gem marigolds, geraniums, and the little berries are foraged Brazilian pepper. 

These are made with nasturtiums, violas, pentas, borage, salad burnet, bronze fennel, citrus gem marigolds, and a sprinkling of sugar right before they go in the oven for the sparkle. 

Heres a close up of a simple cookie made with just Citrus Gem Marigold pieces. The whole plant is edible and really flavorful so Tiffany just picked some flowering parts including buds, and then some mature leaves to create this cute little botanical print inspired layout.

If you're looking for even more edible flower inspiration theres an amazing bakery in California that has pioneered edible flower baking and they have a book, online classes, plus its super inspiring to just browse their website for inspiration. They add edible flowers to granola, pies, sugar cubes, chocolate bars, brownies... really its endless the fun creations you can make with just a couple of flowering plants in your garden. Check out Loria Sterns website to buy her book and admire her creations!

 To get started adding flowers to your garden, check out the Edible Flowers section of our website and the Cut Flowers section too! Keep in mind that many of these delicate flowering plants only thrive during our winter season, so now is the time to plant them, don't delay. 

Hellooooooooo December! How we gardeners (who work outside year round) missed your short cool sparkling days and slightly cooler breezes. This time of year most of our big garden projects have been planted with fall crops and the heavy work has been accomplished. If you planted some quick growing crops in October then they are likely ready to harvest, and we know that harvesting is a big sticky spot for beginners. We wish there was an easy answer to “how do I harvest things” but every single plant requires a slightly different harvesting technique. While we cant show you how to harvest every single crop you might have planted we do have a few general tips to help you get comfortable approaching your new garden with a pair of snippers.


All of the veggies in this bountiful photo were harvested using different techniques, from pulling or cutting the whole plant to picking ripe fruit & using cut-and-come-again for flowers & leaves. 

This is a harvest from a maintenance visit of a large garden in fall. We removed the sweet potatoes & turmeric that were growing all summer and gave their first round of greens & herbs a big haircut. 

Our first tip for learning how to harvest is “google it”. Now, we know that doesn’t sound as helpful as we mean it to be, because like, you know you can google it. But seriously... use the internet wisely and look for easy to understand resources including the websites of seed companies that have things like maturity date for all of their varieties and videos of people doing exactly what you want to do. Let’s use French Breakfast radishes as an example. According to Johnnys Select Seed, these radishes are ready to harvest at 21 days old. Make sure you also notice the photos of the variety and any other listed info, like maybe how big they are supposed to be at maturity (for this radish it says 2” long and finger thickness) because you can also just use your eyes many times to compare what you have in your garden to what you’re used to seeing at the store, on your plate or online and using that as a cue that your crop is ready. After reading about the variety on the Johnnys website we googled “how to harvest radishes” and found this cute video of a home gardener harvesting his radishes. Now, after watching this you might be thinking like, it wasn’t very technical and he didn’t do much more than pull it out. But guess what?! That’s how easy It is to harvest a radish… you just determine wether or not you think its ready, and then pull it out! Also, for many crops there isn’t a moment that the plant becomes “edible”… Its always edible, so really you can harvest it anytime. Radishes are a perfect example of that, because people eat radishes as micro greens at 7 days old and they eat them fully grown at 21 and every day in between.



At the farm we love growing french breakfast radishes. This is what they should look like if they were appropriately thinned and harvested at the right age. 

Now... this is what "french breakfast" radishes look like after 21 days of growth in full sunlight with proper spacing. But that doesn't mean all radishes look the same or grow as fast. Daikon radishes are much larger, need more space per plant (thin to 4-6 inches) and about 50 days to reach maturity. When they are fully grown they are about 8-12 inches long! Every variety is going to have different coloration, dates to maturity, and growth pattern depending on their size and other genetic traits, so make sure you make note of what varieties you are planting, either on tags in the garden or in a notebook. 

Mature Daikons after 50 days of growth, harvested and washed. 

These are all different radish varieties! Cherry belle in the top left, french breakfast on the right. The lavender ones are purple daikon, and the electric pink in the lower left are shunkyo. 

Our second tip for figuring out harvesting is if you want to eat it, just do it! Like we just said, many plants are edible at every stage of their growth, so if you use proper harvesting techniques you can really eat things anytime. Kale is a good example to use here, because you can eat kale at any point from micro greens to baby leaf to mature, but if you snip the whole growing tip off of your plant when harvesting it then its done, no more kale no matter how old the plant is. Heres a detailed and clear video of a gardener harvesting his kale properly that we found by googling “how to harvest kale”.



In this photo the yellow arrow is pointing to the growing tip of a young kale plant. If you think of the growth pattern of the kale as like an ornamental fountain shooting into the air, the growing tip is the center of the it where the water is shooting up in a concentrated stream. All of the new leaves start as tiny leaves in the center and get larger as they mature and become the outer leaves. 



In this copy of the same photo the yellow arrows are pointing to the most mature leaves. note how they are on the most exterior part of the plant and their stems attach lowest down to the main stalk. to properly harvest this kale you would simply remove the outer leaves by cutting them off at the base. 

This technique, of strategically removing the oldest leaves from the bottom of the plant, is referred to as “cut and come again” and we do it for most greens including baby ones like mustards, arugula & lettuce. Tiffany was just lamenting not having made a video of us using this method to harvest but rejoice! Lots of other gardeners have done that before us, so here’s a great clear video of a home gardener using this method to harvest his lettuce. In this video he shows two techniques, one where you tediously harvest leaf by leaf, and one where you cut the whole head with a knife just above the crown (so as to not damage it) which is how we tend to harvest denser plantings like arugula without having to go leaf by leaf.

 

Mustards and arugula are harvested at about a fingers length for baby salad leaf use. We like to use the messier cut and come again method for them which is basically like giving them a short hair cut to take all mature leaves while leaving the growing tip intact. If you buy arugula and mustard 6 packs from us those plants are 21 days old. Two weeks after transplanting them into your garden they should be ready for their first "haircut". After that you can wait for them to grow back, and 2 weeks later harvest again! So long as the plants remain healthy and pest free you can harvest like this multiple times per season before replanting. 

These yardlong beans are ready at about 1 foot long and need to be harvested every day if you want them all to be tender and crispy. After a few weeks the plants will slow down, make less fruit and we will remove them. 

Fruiting plants, including long term crops like tomatoes and quick crops like cucumbers, zucchini and bush beans needs to be harvested on a regular basis for a good yield. When I say regularly I mean every two to three days! All annuals are biologically designed to make seeds within a short period of time and then die after dropping their seeds for the next generation. Fruits are vessels for seeds so crops like cucumbers, zucchini and beans are basically seed pods that we eat! Once a plant puts on fruit it is triggered to stop making new flowers and new fruit. In order to get a bigger and longer lasting yield we harvest their fruit regularly to encourage new blooms and new fruit. Keep in mind that we eat the majority of these fruits when they are very young because that is when they are edible. A cucumber or bean that has been sitting on the plant for even a few days too many becomes so tough and fibrous that it is no longer edible and the seeds start to mature and become hard. Also keep in mind that quick fruiting plants like cucumbers, zucchini and bush beans not only mature quickly and produce their harvest quickly, they also die early! It's normal for these plants to produce fruit for about 2 weeks and then sort of crap out. In order to make the most use of your garden it is up to you to remove these "spent" plants and add them to the compost. Doing that promptly makes room for a new batch of crops and also helps to prevent disease from spreading which often builds up on older plants. 



This Gretel white eggplant is a great example of how important it is to know what variety you're growing. If as a newbie gardener you were waiting for this thing to turn purple before harvesting you'd certainly miss out on it while its young enough to eat, because its never going to turn purple! This variety is a small white variety that is mature at a hands length.

In this photo there are some perfectly mature white and purple eggplants, and some that were left on too long and now are too mature. All Eggplants go a bit yellow when overripe. The white varieties look practically photoshopped! While the purple ones go a bit warm toned and brown when overripe. 



In this photo there are both mature and immature sugar rush peach peppers. All pepper varieties can be eaten green/ unripe or ripe (red or orange depending on the variety), however the flavor of the pepper really comes in when its allowed to color. Even green peppers like shishitos and cubanelles will color if left on the plant long enough. 

At farms lots of effort is put into “post harvest storage and handling” to keep the harvest fresh for as long as possible, and while that isn’t as important in your home garden because you aren’t distributing a product its still good to know the basics so that your harvest stays crisp in the fridge. First, make sure to harvest either in the morning or the evening instead of during the heat of the day. Plants sweat via their leaves and they are the most dehydrated when its the hottest and sunniest, so harvesting your leaves in the morning when the plant already has lots of moisture within its cells is pretty much the number one key to long term storage success. The second technique for crisp hydrated greens is “hydro cooling” them which is just a fancy way to say “dip them in cool water”. To do this fill a bowl bucket or the sink with cool water and throw the greens in. You can agitate them a bit if they’re dirty but you can also just let them float around for 10 - 15 minutes to cool down and soak up some extra moisture. Once they’re done with bath time they need to be dried or they wont store well. Drying can happen passively (lay out a clean kitchen towel, spread the greens out, let them slowly dry) or actively (with a salad spinner) and once the bounty is ready to go in the fridge it needs to be kept in something that will hold humidity, like a used plastic bag. While we don’t like adding more plastic to the world plastic is the best material for storing green leaves since they will dehydrate if kept bare (even in the crisper drawer) or in something porous like brown paper bags. If you shop at French Farms and buy his infamous salad mixes keep the reusable ziplocks that he sells his product in and use them at home for your veggie storage, they are sturdy enough to be used over and over again and are designed for long term high quality salad storage.

Our pal Chris over at French Farms spent years researching the best bags to sell his salad mixes in and he loves these because they have a little bit of perforation for breathing, are thick enough to reuse and have a ziploc top. If you buy his salad wash out and save your bags for reuse!



Some freshly harvested baby bok choi enjoying a float in a cool water bath. harvested greens and herbs are similar in biology to cut flower stems.... Its a piece of a plant that is full of moisture and has been removed from the main plant so it cant get its own anymore, you need to provide it. giving the cut part access to water lets it rehydrate. Its a good idea to keep fresh cut herbs in a jar of water in the fridge so they can keep drinking from it.

If you have some plants left over from summer like sweet potato, roselle or turmeric now is the time to harvest them too, which is great because it means you’ll then have more space for fall plants when they come out. Roselle is harvested by the branch when the calyxs are nice and plump (see pic below for reference). Once the plant has made a bunch of roselle for you its best to remove it because it’s an annual, so it wont just start over again and keep growing to make you more. Also, it flowers based on day length, so once the day starts lengthening again in January it wont receive the natural trigger it needs to produce flowers and calyx for you.



This roselle calyx is perfectly ready for harvest. 

Sweet potato is another summer crop that might be ready to come out around now, depending on when you planted it. Just loosen the soil around the base and dig around for tubers! The leaves and vines can go into the compost pile and you can either eat the sweet potatoes right away or brush the soil off (don’t get them wet) and cure them in a dark area of your home to let them sweeten up a bit. And finally, if you planted turmeric in the spring you may want to harvest it now. It can also stay in the ground until you’re ready for it, or you can harvest it just a little bit at a time as needed, but your turmeric plant has likely started to die back and look bad and you may want the space that its taking up for other things.

Good luck getting to know the ins and outs of harvesting in your winter garden. While we know it can be intimidating we encourage you to go for it (and make some mistakes along the way) and start eating from your garden. If you leave mature food in your garden we assure you someone else will come along and make a meal out of it. Now is the time to take advantage of all that your garden has to offer, not just in experiences and beautiful weather but also in arugula leaves and zinnia blooms.