When starting a garden in raised beds, a question always arises. How do we fill them? That isn’t too difficult when the beds are no more than 8 inches tall because you can fill them with garden mix, compost, or whatever you choose to grow plants in. Taller beds can present a different problem. It takes a lot of compost or garden mix to fill a bed that’s up 30 inches tall.  Most plants only need six to eight inches of soil to grow quite well so other options are available to fill a tall bed. Adopting a method used in Hugelkultur beds as we did when the raised beds at the VegHeadz gar ..read more

Produce from the VegHeadz garden, Yacon tubers on the right When I was a young girl in North Dakota, my grandfather would listen to the news on the radio at noon. The announcer always ended his broadcast by saying, “It’s a beautiful day in Chicago, and I hope it’s even more beautiful wherever you are.“ Well, yesterday was a beautiful day in Tallahassee and many VegHeadz gardeners were out to enjoy it.  We hope you enjoyed it too, wherever you are.   Major amounts of spring weeds were cleared in the forest garden and elsewhere, and more planting and spring cleanup took pl ..read more

  Sweet potatoes, all lined up and ready to grow! Just a reminder, it’s time to start your sweet potato slips.  Search “slips” in the right sidebar to get the scoop on what to do.   Wednesday was a lovely day in the VegHeadz garden with lots of planting going on—tomatoes and peppers, corn  and beans, squash and cucumbers. Potatoes and Sugar snaps are looking good.   Our hoe brigade is a success.  Weeds are being conquered weekly with a few minutes of tidying up.  We still have some patches in the forest garden that must be dealt with, but give us an ..read more

Purple-eyed grass The plants in the new VegHeadz rain garden are beginning to awaken after their short winter sleep. They should begin to fill up the space and anchor the soil as spring rains and warm temperatures provide what they need to grow. So far, these are what we have planted there, all natives and suitable for your rain garden or landscape. Some have even been rescued from the woodsy space behind the grape arbor that has been cleared. Blazing Star or Gayfeather (Liatris spp.) https://gardeningsolutions.ifas.ufl.edu/plants/ornamentals/liatris.html Blue-eyed grass and Purpl ..read more

Loquat It’s spring and time to plant. It’s also time to add some varieties to the VegHeadz edible forest garden, fill in some spaces, add some ground cover. Here are some things we have added over the past months or will be adding within the next couple of weeks: Loquat (Eriobotrya japonica)—Also known as Japanese plum, this medium-size evergreen tree originated in China It bears heavy crops of sweet-tart orange fruit from February to May The fruit can be eaten raw without the peel or used in sauces, jams, and a variety of dishes similar to other plums.   https://edis.ifas ..read more

Photos by Peggy McDonald Peggy McDonald, who we call the Roselle Queen, grows hundreds of Roselle plants for the Master Gardener plant sale held at the Leon Count6 UF/IFAS Extension on Paul Russell Road in Tallahassee each May. (scheduled for May 11 this year—save the date!). They are always a sellout.  It’s time for Peggy to start growing this year’s crop and she’s recruited a dozen of her fellow Master Gardeners to help her. Typically Roselle isn’t planted until very warm weather in late April or May, so in order to have seedlings ready for the plant sale in May, it is necess ..read more

Our bananas looked like this in December The VegHeadz had several good bunches of bananas on their plants last fall, but they did not have time to fill out completely when cold weather hit, stopping their development.   While bananas ripen better off the tree, in order to reach their full potential they should have plump sides before cutting the stalk down. We assumed that because they were not fully developed, they would not be edible if we tried to ripen them. Our ever-curious gardeners decided they weren’t going to abide by that assumption, and several of them took bananas h ..read more

  The VegHeadz are learning about caring for grapes now that we have a grape arbor, and February is the ideal time to prune grapes. Grapes bear fruit on new growth on one year old vines, so it’s important to trim back last year’s growth in early spring to make way for new shoots.  Training vines also keeps the arbor from becoming an unmanageable tangle, with the resulting shade causing grape production to decline. Peter Goren, the master gardener who is heading up the grape project, has decided to use the Munson Method of pruning. T.V. Munson, who lived in Texas, spent many years s ..read more

The easiest and best way to tackle small weeds is with a stirrup hoe.  Raised beds seem to be easier to maintain, but weeds still grow in pathways and vacant beds.   The first line of defense is to keep the soil covered with closely spaced vegetable crops or with a cover crop.  The shade and competition discourage weeds and furnish resources to essential soil microbes.  The soil is continually improved by crops chopped and dropped in place to return nutrients for the next season.  The next best thing is to make a quick weed touch up with your stirrup hoe each week to ..read more

The Seed Library Kickoff for 2024 is scheduled for Saturday, February 9 from 10 a.m. to 12 at the Main Library   See these links for more information.    It’s a great event for adults and children    https://facebook.com/events/s/spring-seed-library-kickoff/1554135135348640/  https://cms.leoncountyfl.gov/Library/Library-Services/Seed-Library ..read more