In case you haven’t seen this method of starting sweet potato slips: You can also start with slips, then take further cuttings from those slips to expand your beds. I should have some already started sweet potato slips at Plantapalooza this Saturday. Including from these giant white ones: It’s time to get planting. You can plant sweet potatoes all the way up until about June 1st in zones 8/9, but I wouldn’t go later than that. The post This is how we start sweet potatoes in abundance appeared first on The Survival Gardener ..read more

We had a very nice time at the Spring Gardening Masterclass on Saturday – thanks to all of you that made the trek. If you missed it, we’ll be having SCRUBFEST III at the same location on October 19th. I also hope to release the talks we did at this spring event, via a super secret platform we’ve been working on. Right now in the gardens, our daikon radish landrace project is producing a ton of seeds again. This will be the third generation, and if previous results hold, we’ll end up with more more purple and white roots and less pure red and pure white ones. This is an update from December. Th ..read more

I received a comment today on my popular Terra Preta video: Did you catch that? Ashes and charcoal, chicken manure and fish guts. That’s some highly fertile material. Incidentally, all those amendments are free. We managed to hit over a ton of food from a garden of less than 1/3 acre, feeding with ashes and cow manure. If we planted two acres, we’d be in trouble. You don’t need fancy amendments to grow food. The post Grandpa Knew What He Was Doing appeared first on The Survival Gardener ..read more

I posted a video invitation yesterday – my Spring Gardening Superclass is this Saturday! It’s an intense, three-talk event, with time for plant shopping as well – and the Scrubland Farmz Nursery is LIT! So many great plants. I hope to see you there. Details here. The post Last Chance for the Spring Gardening Superclass appeared first on The Survival Gardener ..read more

And I’ve finally got mulberries to harvest again, thanks to the multiple trees in the Grocery Row Gardens, along with the wild red mulberry out in the cow pasture. These came from the Grocery Row Garden yesterday afternoon: Rachel made a mulberry pie the other night from black mulberries that was absolutely delicious. I think we have about eight varieties in the yard now, though I’m not sure what most of their names are, since we moved rather abruptly and dug them up and replanted them without any labelling system. The “Ivory” mulberry (from Burnt Ridge Nursery) in the Grocery Row Gardens mak ..read more

Last year our drought kept us from doing much work on the food forest. It hit hard, starting at the end of June and continuing right through until our first frost. There was plenty we wanted to get done but couldn’t, yet the initial trees and shrubs came through it alive (thanks to some dragging the hose around) so we hope to continue our plans for phase two this year. We’ve already added in a lot of Tithonia diversifolia plants, along with filling in the shrub layer with more plants. We’ve also put a few piles of compost out there and planted our mixed-up Seminole “compost pile” pumpkins on t ..read more

Yesterday we found a coral honeysuckle vine (Lonicera sempervirens) growing up a tree on an abandoned property. It was covered in blooms, and looked beautiful amidst a backdrop of charred trash, broken glass, masonry and the obligatory rotten mattress. I took a few cuttings that we’ll try to propagate after I finish writing this post. Back in my North Florida food forest, I had a coral honeysuckle growing up a tree to bring in pollinators and hummingbirds. I didn’t know much about the plant until I got one from my friend Connie Bonbrest, who used to run a little nursery booth called “The Potte ..read more

The internet was behaving, so we had a livestream last night: I can’t tell you how excited I am about this gardening year. The food forest is entering its second year, and the Grocery Row Gardens are looking great. We’re a bit short on time since the nursery has been taking it up, but we started hundreds of transplants to sell and all the extras are getting planted out. I’m also working on an in-depth food forest course that is going to be exclusive to our supporters, and in doing that, we are putting in work on our food forest and filming it so you can see how we make things happen. The pict ..read more

Are you anywhere near Dothan, Alabama? If so, come on over to Keepers of the Old Ways! They’ll have classes on butchering, grafting, fermenting, blacksmithing, gardening, soapmaking, mushroom cultivation, breadmaking and more. And it’s very family-friendly, with an entire track of classes for kids. Also, I’ll be giving two talks, plus we’ll have our plant nursery booth set up with all kinds of rare and wonderful food forest plants, including: Black cherry Cassava Oxalis Edible air potatoes Sugarcane Goji berry Potato mint Lemongrass Purple sweet potato slips Everglades tomatoes Eggplant Oca Ch ..read more

Just because you have a sandy Florida yard, it doesn’t mean you can’t grow food. Last week at the Palafox Market, a couple told me they were struggling to garden in their “terrible sand” near the ocean. It can be tough, for sure, as it eats compost and drains quickly, becoming hot, and dry, and Sahara-like just days after a rain. Yet you can garden quite well in Florida sand. Jim Hawkins writes: When I lived in Niceville FL, mid 1980s. I went to the local fisherman’s Co-Op and sometimes to Destin harbor to meet the returning boats, got plenty of fish bones and guts for my garden. I  took ..read more