Marilyn Donelle Simmons

Posted: Saturday, January 5, 2013 3:20 pm
|


Updated: 3:41 pm, Sat Jan 5, 2013.

FarmGirls: Gardening in the New Year

By Marilyn and Donelle Simmons
FarmGirls

Waxahachie Newspapers Inc.

The FarmGirls are very excited about the New Year. Our mission for several years now has been to educate people about gardening. We actually started out teaching mostly landscaping and quite simply extended our passion for gardening through education.

Our gardens eventually have evolved from predominantly perennial and fresh cut flower gardening to community supported agriculture and vegetable gardening.

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Posted in
Waxahachie,
Gardening

on

Saturday, January 5, 2013 3:20 pm.

Updated: 3:41 pm.

| Tags:


Compost,

Garden,

Texas,

North Texas,

Fair Park,

Kitchen Garden,

Raised Garden Beds,

Organic Horticulture,

Organic Gardening,

Farmgirls,

Marilyn Simmons,

Donelle Simmons,

Waxahachie Daily Light

North London, UK — (SBWIRE) — 01/03/2013 — For 15 years, Greenfellas is still operating as one of the firms with the best garden services in London has to offer in North London. Few of the services it provides are garden fencing, landscaping, garden shed building, and decking. As the company stated on its website, ‘You name it, we have the expertise to take it on.’

Firms that offer garden services in London are not that hard to find. However, if one does not know Greenfellas, looking for the best firm to do the job right is tough. So, for people who know about the company, they know who to call whenever they want to transform their gardens without the unnecessary fuss.

The biggest edge of Greenfellas against its competitors is its experience. Gardening is a skill that requires tons of practice and time before one can master it. Fortunately, the company has already passed those requirements, and it is now enjoying the reputation of being the master when it comes to gardening.

Customers can easily talk to Greenfellas’ team of garden experts because every one of its members is friendly. Also, when it comes to working speed, they are the fastest. Aside from providing excellent gardening services in London has to offer, every member provides his or her customer with tips and advices on how the customer can improve his garden and lawn.

The company is not fickle with its clients. However, one should remember that the area that this company serves is only around North London. To be specific, it lends its services to people around Barnet, Finchley, Holloway, Crouch End, and Muswell Hill. Nevertheless, even if the customer owns a small garden, Greenfellas will perform his requests as long as he can pay the fee. For you to know more about this company, you can visit its home page at fenceinstallationnorthlondon.co.uk.

About GreenFellas:
We offer Gardening Service, Landscaping Installers Of Garden Fencing in North London.

Solving problems

Southeastern North Carolina is a challenging place to garden. Poor soils, extreme weather and abundant pests work against your efforts to grow vegetables, fruits, lawns and ornamental plants. Gardening problems are often complex and require expert help to diagnose. This help is available from your local cooperative extension office, usually free of charge.

If you have a plant or bug you would like identified or a problem you would like diagnosed, call or stop by the extension office in your county. Be prepared to describe the problem, including when it started, if it is spreading and what the symptoms look like.

For the best diagnosis, bring a sample that includes several leaves attached to the stem, or the whole plant or insect if possible. Samples should be taken from plants that are still living rather than those that have already died.

If you would like to learn about gardening or landscaping in our area, ask your cooperative extension office about upcoming classes and learning opportunities. We are currently determining what type of learning opportunities and resources are most needed in this area for the coming year. You can help us by taking a brief survey to share your educational needs and preferences. The survey is available online at TinyURL.com/czox4gp, or call the Pender County Extension office at 259-1235 to have a copy mailed to you.

Be a master gardener

If you would like to do more than learn about gardening for the benefit of your own yard, you should become an extension master gardener. Master gardeners are volunteers who help the cooperative extension teach youth and adults about gardening by assisting with classes, maintaining demonstration gardens and holding plant information clinics.

To become an extension master gardener you must first complete a volunteer training course designed to teach you the basics of gardening in our area and how to answer common gardening questions.

Training courses begin soon in Pender, New Hanover and Brunswick counties and applications are currently being accepted. More information about the Pender Master Gardener Program and training course is available online at Pender.ces.NCSU.edu.

Grow your own food

Want to grow fruits, vegetables or herbs in 2013? The cooperative extension can help you stay up to date on planting times, recommended varieties, insect and disease problems, and how to sustainably manage pest outbreaks with our weekly FoodGardener email news service.

To sign up for Food Gardener News, send an email to mj2@lists.ncsu.edu. Leave the subject line blank. In the body of the message put: subscribe foodgardener.

A free demonstration and workshop on pruning muscadine grapes will be held Saturday, Jan. 12, from 9 a.m. to noon in Burgaw. Taught by Pender Extension Director Mark Seitz, this hands-on class will provide an opportunity to practice your pruning skills. Participants will need to bring their own pruners. Call the Pender County Extension office at 259-1235 to sign up or for more information.

Lawn, landscape care

Want to receive regular email updates on lawn and landscape care? Sign up for the Pender Gardener News.

Posts in 2013 will include exciting new plants and proven performers for our region; information about controlling lawn and ornamental insect and disease problems; using less pesticides; and ways your yard can help the environment.

To sign up for Pender Gardener News, send an email to mj2@lists.ncsu.edu. Leave the subject line blank. In the body of the message put: subscribe pendergardener.

Most of the news postings sent to Food Gardener and Pender Gardener subscribers are also posted on the Pender Gardener Blog at PenderGardener.blogspot.com, providing another way you can to stay up to date on the latest gardening news for our region.

Learn more

Contact your local extension office for help diagnosing plant problems and to find out about upcoming classes and events. If you live in Pender County, call 259-1235. In New Hanover County, call 798-7660. In Brunswick County, call 253-2610. Or, visit www.ces.NCSU.edu to find your local office and other great gardening resources.

Let’s Grow!
STEVE BOEHME
Enjoy some winter reading for gardeners

Long winter evenings offer some time to relax with a good book. (Illustration by Marjorie Boehme)

By Steve Boehme

Nature’s Guide to Successful Gardening and Landscaping by William Flemer III explains how design should be guided by an understanding of plant habitat, and has sections on the various types of gardens and how to install them.

Another excellent read is Janice Doherty’s “A Calendar Year of Horticultural Therapy – How Tending to Your Garden Can Tend to Your Soul.” Aimed at educators and caregivers, this practical book on “gardening as therapy” includes sixty garden-related projects for children, seniors and the young at heart.

“Last Child in the Woods – Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder,” by Richard Louv. Every parent should read this eye-opening book, full of documented evidence that nature is essential for healthy childhood development. It shows how nature-based education improves grades, test scores, problem-solving, critical thinking and decision making, and directly links childhood obesity, ADD and depression to the lack of nature in children’s lives.

Long winter evenings offer some time to relax with a good book. (Illustration by Marjorie Boehme)

“Dirr’s Hardy Trees and Shrubs – An Illustrated Encyclopedia,” by Michael A Dirr (Timber Press) is a comprehensive reference book on woody plants with listings of over 500 species with more than 1,600 color photos, and includes helpful plant selection charts. This is a gorgeous “cocktail table” book that’s also a serious reference work.

“The Well-Tended Perennial Garden,” by Tracy DiSabato-Aust (Timber Press) is a complete guide to perennial garden design, installation and maintenance, along with a perennial encyclopedia that includes specific maintenance by species. The author lives in Ohio so the book is about plants that grow here.

“The Backyard Orchardist,” by Stella Otto (OttoGraphics) Thorough but non-technical, this easy-to-read and well illustrated handbook covers all aspects of home orchard selection, planting and maintenance. A Benjamin Franklin Award winner, this book is so helpful to beginner orchardists that we sell it at our nursery.

All of the above books are available through the library, independent booksellers or online.

Steve Boehme is the owner of GoodSeed Nursery Landscape, located on Old State Route 32 three miles west of Peebles. To e-mail your landscaping questions click “Contact Us” from their website at www.goodseedfarm.com or call (937) 587-7021.

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Urban agriculture is promoted as a strategy for dealing with food insecurity, stimulating economic development, and combating diet-related health problems in cities. However, up to now, no one has known how much gardening is taking place in urban areas. Researchers at the University of Illinois have developed a methodology that they used to quantify the urban agriculture in Chicago.

John Taylor, a doctoral candidate working with crop sciences researcher Sarah Taylor Lovell, was skeptical about the lists of urban gardens provided to him by local non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

“Various lists were circulating,” he said. “One of them had almost 700 gardens on it.”

On closer inspection, however, many of these “gardens” turned out to be planter boxes or landscaping and were not producing food. On the other hand, Taylor suspected that there were unnoticed gardens in backyards or vacant lots.

“There’s been such a focus on community gardens and urban farms, but not a lot of interest in looking at backyard gardens as an area of research,” Lovell agreed. An accurate map of these sites would be helpful for advocacy groups and community planners.

Taylor uploaded the lists from the NGOs into Google Earth, which automatically geocoded the sites by street address. He used a set of reference images of community gardens, vacant lot gardens, urban farms, school gardens, and home food gardens to determine visual indicators of food gardens.

Using these indicators and Google Earth images, he examined the documented sites. Of the 1,236 “community gardens,” only 160, or 13 percent, were actually producing food.

Taylor then looked at Google Earth images of Chicago to locate food production sites. This work took more than 400 hours over an 8-month period. He identified 4493 possible sites, most of which were residential gardens of 50 square meters or less, and visited a representative sample of gardens on vacant land to confirm that they were really producing food.

All the large sites and a sample of the small sites were digitized as shapefiles (digital vector storage formats for storing geometric location and associated attribute information) in Google Earth. These shapefiles were imported into Arc Map 10, a geographic information system (GIS) mapping tool, to calculate the total area.

The final estimate was 4,648 urban agriculture sites with a production area of 264,181 square meters. Residential gardens and single-plot gardens on vacant lots accounted for almost three-fourths of the total.

To map the gardens onto community areas, the shapefiles were joined with 2010 Census tract shapefiles and shapefiles of 77 community areas and neighborhoods from Chicago’s GIS portal. The tract information was subsequently joined with the Census Bureau’s 2005-2009 American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates of demographic and housing characteristics.

The maps showed that garden concentration varied by neighborhood. “Chinatown, Bridgeport was kind of a hot spot,” Taylor said. Both of these neighborhoods have large Chinese-origin populations. Even outside those areas, many of the larger gardens were associated with households headed by people of Chinese origin. Neighborhoods in the northwest with large numbers of Polish and Eastern and Southern European immigrants also had a high density of backyard gardens.

They were not all growing the same kind of food. “There are distinctions between these cultural groups because the crops they select are sometimes from their home areas in addition to the suite of crops we can all grow in our backyards,” Lovell explained.

As people move across borders, they often bring seeds with them. “In a Mexican neighborhood where we were working, a lot of people grow a tropical corn that is 12 to 16 feet high,” Taylor said. “It’s grown not for the ears of corn but for the leaves, which are used to make tamales.”

He noted that many older African-Americans in Chicago who came north during the Great Migration from the south from the early 1900s to the 1970s remember farming and growing up with gardens. “They are almost reproducing in miniature in their backyards the southern landscape and gardening practices that they associated with their youth,” he said.

Garden type varied by neighborhood as well. Home food gardens are concentrated in the northwest, where people tend to live in detached houses. Vacant lot gardens are concentrated in the economically disadvantaged neighborhoods in the south and west sides, as are the community gardens.

Lovell said that, in some communities, more than half of the lots are vacant, and making use of them could be a huge opportunity. Chicago has a program that allows people living next to a vacant lot to purchase it at a fraction of what it would normally cost.

The results of this study suggest that both backyard gardens and vacant lot gardens contribute substantially to Chicago’s total food production.

“Home gardens actually contribute to food security,” Taylor said. “They’re underappreciated and unsupported.” He noted that people grow not only for themselves but for their neighbors as well, which is particularly important in food deserts where fresh produce is in short supply.

“There is also potential for empowering people because they are using their own space to deal with their own food security concerns,” Lovell added.

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