Helping Leanne Ely Save Dinner

Wondering how to get your family back to the dinner table?

Perhaps Leanne Ely can help.

She’s the founder and creative force behind the popular Saving Dinner series and web resource savingdinner.com, and ‘The Expert on family cooking’, according to Woman’s Day Magazine. The NY Times bestselling author has also been has been featured in a long list of media outlets, including HGTV, The Wall St. Journal, and Redbook to name just a few.

She’s a seasoned veteran of multi-city book tours and national TV shows, Leanne also authors the Dinner Diva - a weekly column that’s syndicated in over 250 newspapers in the US and Canada.

Leanne’s core web presence – savingdinner.com – is a handy (and popular) resource that offers healthy lifestyle webinars, menus, e-books, weight loss help and more.

Like many chefs, she’s also a gardener, but with a schedule that reads like a Tokyo subway map, it isn’t easy to find time to work in her own kitchen garden, which is set on a hillside in the backyard, just a stones throw from the kitchen.

So she tapped Microfarm for a little help.

We started by filling the four 3’x12’ brick raised beds, which had been previously made by Leanne’s mason, with a blend of pine bark fines, mushroom compost, and PermaTill. We love this organic soilless mix for raised beds because it gives plants the right combination of soil drainage, root aeration and optimum nutrient uptake.

Once the beds were filled up, we worked our Microfarm Mix amendment blend into the soil. It’s a combination of dried blood meal, bone meal, kelp meal, rock phosphate, green sand, and dolomite lime, and gives organic garden soil the right combination of fast, medium and slow release sources of N-P-K, as well as trace minerals like calcium and magnesium.

Because Leanne’s recipes draw on a wide range of ingredients, we planted a variety of leafy green varieties like spinach, Swiss chard, mustard greens, and arugula, as well as root vegetables including carrots, parsnips, beets and turnips. And of course we made room for cool season classics from the Brassica family including collard greens, broccoli, cabbage, kale and cauliflower.

Since the garden is in a wooded area where deer sightings are as predictable as the mailman, the tall plastic deer fence is an essential step on the way to actually enjoying a harvest one day. Drip irrigation was also installed to ensure that the garden receives the right amount of water, regardless of Leanne’s busy schedule.

Is it exciting to think that our handiwork in Leanne’s garden might appear in front of so many people in so many media outlets in the form of her cooking? You bet.

But whether it’s a new kale smoothie promoted on national TV, or a fun beets recipe on savingdinner.com that brings a family together at the dinner table, or a simple mixed greens salad that Leanne harvests to enjoy at home with her own family, we’re just glad to help.

Target Caterpillars With B.t.

It’s an easy decision to buy non-toxic  insect control products for the garden nowadays.  Even big box stores now carry neem oil, pyrethrin, insecticidal soaps, and other plant based  pest control products. While it’s true that these are a much safer choice than synthetic insect killers, these products can suppress such a wide range of insects – both good and bad – that they may not always solve the pest problem in your garden.  Sometimes if natural insect predators are killed alongside the target pests, the target pest can actually resurge and reestablish itself before its enemy can do the same, starting an entirely new pest problem.

The initial pest problem may be resolved but there could be a new one in its place. Bt is a nice option because it targets only pest insects, leaving natural enemies unharmed.

Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) is a natural microbial pesticide that has the ability to target specific insect pests while leaving beneficial insect predators unharmed. The most commonly commercially sold form of b.t. targets primarily caterpillars, including tomato hornworm, cabbage looper, imported cabbageworm, tent caterpillars, and the diamondback moth. 

B.t. pest control products sold in stores are formulations of naturally occurring microbial organisms taken directly from the wild, and have not been genetically altered by humans. 

The Bt microbe contains two parts: an active spore and a thick-walled storage spore that includes a toxic protein crystal. When Bt is ingested by a larval insect, the walls of the storage spore dissolve, which releases the toxic crystal, destroying the gut wall of the insect, and permitting the active spore to pass into the blood stream, where it multiplies, killing the insect from blood poisoning.

Because B.t. is a stomach poison that must be eaten by the target pest, timing of application is critical. For best results, it should be applied between the time the eggs hatch and the full grown caterpillars move off of the leaves to pupation sites.

Because many caterpillar species hatch and feed on the underside of leaves in their initial stages of growth, it’s crucial to apply the B.t. spray solution to the undersides as well as the tops of plant leaves and stems. Larger caterpillars, of course, eat through both sides of the leaf, so it’s not as difficult to ensure they ingest the poison.  As with most organic pest control products, reapplication aver few days will improve results, and remember that it’s impossible to kill every single insect pest in your garden. It’s actually helpful to leave a few pest insects alive in order to help sustain the population of natural enemy insects.

Always follow the product’s directions carefully, and remember that because B.t. is a living organism, it’s best to mix the solution using purified water or harvested rainwater. Chlorinated and/or hard water can harm the microbes, severely hindering the effectiveness of the product if not rendering it totally useless.

Spring 2013 Garden Segments from the Charlotte Today Show

Are you a gardener with a short attention span? Check out these three short segments that aired spring 2013 on WCNC-TV's Charlotte Today Show. Topics include rain harvesting, insect/critter control, and drip irrigation.

Charlotte Today Spring 2013 from Microfarm Organic Gardens on Vimeo.

How Useful Really is Foliar Feeding?

Research at Michigan State University in the 1950’s concluded that like roots, plant leaves are also highly efficient in absorbing nutrients. Soon after this discovery, agricultural companies began producing products designed to deliver nutrients to plants through foliar application, and heavily promoting the method. Today a wide range of foliar feeding products – both organic and synthetic - are on the market.

But just how effective is foliar feeding?

While the 1950’s research at Michigan State was useful in illustrating how nutrients move within plant tissues, and how efficiently plant leaves can absorb nutrients, many of the subsequent advertising claims from foliar fertilizer makers – especially those that suggest that foliar fertilizers have the ability to deliver more nutrients to a plant than soil fertilizers - are exaggerated. Often wildly.

The reason is that while plant leaves are remarkably effective at absorbing nutrients, they still cannot absorb nearly enough nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium to supply all of the plant’s needs. While it is true that materials applied directly to a leaf are more likely to enter a leaf in larger quantities than the same material applied to the soil, materials applied to the leaf do not necessarily travel throughout the entire plant as effectively as they do through root uptake. They often remain in the same or adjoining tissues but travel no further.

More recent studies have indicated that micronutrients – primarily iron, manganese,  zinc, copper, magnesium, molybdenum, boron, and calcium – are the only minerals that are effectively absorbed by plants during foliar feeding, and that micronutrients applied in excess of a plant’s needs can actually injure or kill the plant.

So while foliar feeding is an effective way to quickly deliver important micronutrients to plants, it should never be seen as a shortcut around the much more important, long term issue of building and maintain soil fertility.

Thinking about a supplemental foliar feeding regimen in your garden? Remember to :

-choose a low analysis organic seaweed or fish emulsion product, or make your own compost tea, which will have little risk of burning plant leaves as the solution evaporates. 

-remember that in order for the foliar spray to stick to the leaves long enough for the nutrients to be absorbed, a wetting agent must be added to the solution. A couple squirts of dish soap can even be used as a wetting agent.

-it’s best to apply foliar sprays in the morning or evening (never in direct sunlight) to avoid the possibility of leaf burn that can occur when spraying plants at hotter times of the day.

-spray the entire plant including the tops and undersides of leaves as well.

Bobbie Mabe's Garden Coop

Like most new chicken owners, Bobbie Mabe thought it best to start out with a small, simple coop that came boxed as a kit.  Makes sense….you wouldn’t buy a fender Stratocaster if you just started taking guitar lessons, right?

But as often happens with the smaller, pre-manufactured chicken coop kits, the Mabe family’s hens quickly outgrew the tiny enclosure. The lack of adequate coop space was hard enough, but it took the tragedy of losing one of the family’s five hens to a raccoon one night, that prompted Bobbie to find a coop design that could give her hens much more space, as well as sturdy protection from predators and the elements.

The Garden Coop design has all of the above plus a really clean, modern look to top it off. The much larger floor plan gives each bird over ten square feet of space, which means that the hens can comfortably stay in the coop for days at a time when the family is away on vacation.

The coop is framed with Western Red Cedar and elevated on concrete piers to minimize damage from ground moisture. The entire floor plan is covered by tinted polycarbonate roof panels which will keep the birds dry in freezing winter rains, and offer protection from searing summer sun.

The Garden Coop frame is wrapped with ½” galvanized hardware cloth, which is buried about a foot deep around the entire perimeter of the coop. This will ensure that the hens will always be safe from even the most persistent nocturnal, digging predators.

The design also features a hardware cloth ceiling which both improves ventilation and allows plenty of sunlight into the coop.

The human entry door makes it easy for the family to access the coop for cleaning & feeding, and the slide bolt ensures it stays securely closed at night.

The hens really appreciate the live branches for the perches and ladder, and they also give the coop an earthy, natural touch.

Interested in having a Garden Coop built for your backyard flock? click here to learn more.