You might not have noticed, but the pine trees seem to have been in overdrive the last few years, throwing out pollen like they’re dishing out revenge for every one of their brethren that’s been cut down. Ever.

We all know pollen season is coming when the loblolly pines (Pinus taeda) turn vibrantly green, standing out like the Jolly Green Giant outlined against a cerulean sky. Then they get the yellow candles on the ends of their branches, which some people say look like crosses. Personally, I think they look more like a vampire-warding motion.

“Back! Back,” I say! “Get thee gone, thou foul spawn of Satan!”

One day, you’ll be standing at your kitchen window, washing dishes and minding your own business, enjoying seeing things beginning to green up. Maybe a few early flowers have popped here and there, the cheery yellow of daffodils, or the pinks and purples and blues of hyacinths. A splash of purple where some grape hyacinths are poking their stack of miniature-cannonball-looking, pyramidal heads out. A bit of fragrant jasmine draped over the myrkle bushes.

Then comes the squint and head tilt. “Wow. It’s really hazy out today!” Haze isn’t that unusual around here. Maybe it’s a fog bank moving in off the ocean. Again, not that unusual.

Another squint, and a head tilt in the other direction. A grimace.

“Maybe my windows are just really, really dirty.”

Again, nothing unusual. The way the never-ending wind blows around here, dust is almost as much a factor as during the Dust Bowl. Add in some heavy dews and a fuzz of mildew … and how does that stuff stick to something as slick and impenetrable as glass?

A gust of wind, another cloud of sulfur yellow, and you realize … it’s not haze. It’s not dust. It’s not even merely windows severely in need of some Windex and elbow grease. Nope, this year’s Pollen-palooza has descended.

Like marauding army ants — those in the jungle that swarm over everything in their path, leaving nothing but destruction and desolation in their wake — the pollen drifts and blows.

Your newly applied windshield tint wouldn’t pass inspection, not even if you slipped the mechanic a hefty tip and paid the fine. Activating the windshield-washer fluid and the windshield wipers results in yellow sludge drooling down the sides of your windshield like somebody christened your car with a bottle of Karo syrup.

Whatever color vehicle you have, it’s either become snot green or looks like the primer gray and rust have been awaiting paint so long they’ve faded to a noncolor.

Congratulations on your spring decorating skills! Your porch, sidewalk, and steps have been painted yellow. Walking across the yard means your shoes and the cuffs of your jeans match the trim on your porch rail. Dust puffs with every step, like videos of men walking on the moon. The airborne menace sticks to your face worse than pancake makeup on a rodeo clown.

Better hope you have stock in Kleenex and Benadryl, because you’re fixing to need copious quantities of both! Sniffles and sneezes and wheezes, oh my! And Visine. Can’t forget the red, itchy eyes.

Pollen is necessary. We all know that. Without it, things can’t get pollenated. Although do we really need any more pine trees? Flowers and vegetables get pollenated without all the over-the-top, absolutely outrageous hoopla associated with pines. We’ve all seen cute little bee’s knees all decked out in puffy orange pantaloons as they visit various flowers. The bees and the flowers both seem well satisfied, so what gives?

Why do pines go crazy? Other trees need to be pollenated as well! It’s discrimination, I tell ya! Pine pollen particles are larger than those of hardwoods and theoretically don’t affect allergy sufferers as much as hardwoods. More visibility means pines get blamed. Yeah, right! Sure!

Pine trees are pollenated by the wind, as if we humans weren’t already aware. All you have to do is watch the dense clouds of pollen blowing across fields and roads, obscuring the sky like a haboob of epic proportions. Because they are wind pollenated instead of being pollenated by insects, pines rely on quantity and chance. Less pollen means fewer pines, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, unless you’re a pine tree.

Short winters and warmer weather earlier in the spring make pollen season worse, as does less rainfall. So we’ve had a short winter and an early spring combined with very little rain this year, therefore … pollen-palooza.

But wait! Maybe we should be bottling this stuff instead of battling it.

Pine pollen is supposedly a super food, nutrient-dense and high in vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. Used in China for thousands of years for whole-body wellness and to boost energy levels (among many other things) pine pollen can be consumed in several different forms, powders, capsules and tinctures.

Pass. Hard pass.

If pine pollen was really that good for humans then everyone in eastern North Carolina should be able to cancel their health insurance straightaway. Maybe China has different pines than we do. Who knows?

Native to the Southeastern coastal plains and once the dominant species of pine, longleaf pines (Pinus palustris) made many North Carolina naval suppliers wealthy. Consisting of exports like whole tree trunks for masts and various other much-needed products for wooden ships such as pitch, rosin, turpentine and lumber for shipbuilding, harvesting the slow-growing, fire-resistant trees was a booming operation. Because of this, it’s not unusual to find the remains of tar kilns, or tarkle beds, throughout eastern North Carolina.

The pine is also the state tree, and the Order of the Longleaf Pine is the highest awarded civilian honor. Some famous recipients include Maya Angelou, Billy Graham, Charlie Daniels, and Dale Earnhardt.

Meanwhile, for those of us affected by pollen-palooza , it seems there’s little we can do except grin and bear it. Wash our cars. Spray the porch and the steps off.

Rinse and repeat.

Cheer up! Pollen season can’t last forever.

People like plants.

People love plants.

As long as there have been people and plants, plant lovers have been sharing seeds and snips and starts, probably a holdover from our Garden of Eden days when humans were the Head Gardeners in Charge.

People love beauty, and what could be more beautiful than sharing our love of plants with other people?

Sharing new species of plants is how figs got to the United States, via settlers bringing starts.

It’s how corn and squash and lima beans got to Europe from the New World.

People love to try new foods and new recipes, and you can’t cook a new favorite dish unless you have the proper ingredients.

With new ingredients comes a lot of reward as people expand their palates. It can also come with some risk, as people who have cooked with a certain vegetable for a long time know all the ins and outs.

For example, I said something to an older friend of mine one Fourth of July about eating corn on the cob and how much Americans love it and asked if he and his wife were going to enjoy any while it was fresh and available. His wife was from England. His reply? “Oh no, no, no. The Brit doesn’t eat corn. That’s what you feed to hogs.”

Upon questioning him, he had no idea why, only that it’s the way things were done across the pond.

So, my little over-curious squirrel brain went into action. Researching it, I discovered that when corn was first brought back to Europe, people loved it. Loved it so much in fact, they tried to use it the way we do potatoes. For everything.

What the Europeans didn’t know, and the natives of South America had figured out over a long period of growing and eating corn was that — it’s a bit more involved than I’m making it out to be — but corn, eaten solely by itself, causes horrendous multigenerational birth defects.

Eaten in conjunction with squash and lima beans … Voila! No problem! The other vegetables fill in the missing nutrients, which the Europeans had no idea about, and why would they have?

Plant diversity is awesome. When humans depend on a single source of nutrition — think potatoes and the Irish potato famine — it can be devastating when that plant fails.

Diversity is part of why seed saving is so important, and I went more in-depth on that subject in one of my past articles.

Before there were cameras, thankfully there were explorers and plant junkies who drew scarily accurate renditions of plants they found or saw — intricate renderings of bark, leaves, flowers, and seeds. Thanks also to them for nabbing starts, seeds and seedlings, taking them back to their own countries, and nurturing their finds.

Plant names can often give you an idea of their origins. For instance, japonica means that plant originated in Japan. Chinensis, China. Think camellia japonica, or lorapetalum chinense. Otherwise known as camellias and fringe flowers.

We all know and love azaleas, but did you know that, while most of us are familiar with the gorgeous azaleas featured at Orton and Airlie and Wilmington in general, as well as in our yards, they are not natives. Go figure. North Carolina does have around 15 native varieties.

Many of the plants we know and love have been imported and planted to the point we think they’re indigenous. Some of them are beloved, and some of them, despite people’s best intentions — think kudzu, Pueraria montana — have become insanely invasive.

Kudzu, a native of Asia, was introduced to the U.S. in 1876, via the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. At its introduction to our country, it was initially praised for its fragrant flowers and ease of care. In the 1930s and ’40s, it was touted — subsidized even, by the government — for its uses in erosion control and as livestock feed. Farmers were encouraged to plant kudzu by the acre, and the Civilian Conservation Corps was enlisted to plant it. We all know how well that worked out.

An overabundance of the same type of plants in one place creates the perfect environment for insects and diseases that prey on said plants to thrive. Lantana is super popular here, not only because it’s beautiful and attracts butterflies by the score, but because it likes heat and tolerates drought. During the last few years, because of the excessive availability of their food source, lantana lace bugs (Teleonemia scrupulosa) have become a huge problem on this once carefree plant.

Same with diseases. The disease that’s currently wiping out most of Florida’s citrus trees? Citrus greening, huanglongbing — say that fast five times — is a bacterial infection. Spread by the Asian citrus psyllid, again, the overabundance of the insect’s food source only makes the problem worse.

So, what’s our take on mass plantings of the same nonnative plants? The results speak for themselves.

Not good.

Nonnatives that become invasive, i.e. Chinese privet, (Ligustrum sinense), which was imported as a hedgerow plant in the mid-1800s, while fast-growing and good for delineating fencelines and yard boundaries, yields berries that are attractive to birds, and thus easily spread.  Its rapid growth and dispersal rates make it one of the most invasive plants in the South. Often taking over and crowding out natives, privet is extremely hard to kill. Privet often forms dense thickets, impenetrable to wildlife.

Sharing plants can be a great, inexpensive way to expand our gardens, and plant people love to help other gardeners. Sharing is caring, right?

Am I advocating being selfish? Absolutely not! I am, however, urging a bit of caution. Do your research. We have so much information available to us, information that our ancestors didn’t have when they thought they were doing the right thing by introducing new plants. There are tons of gorgeous natives, and more and more nurseries specialize in native species.

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but sometimes it truly is only skin deep.

How many of you make New Year’s resolutions?

How many resolutions do you actually keep longer than the time it took to make them?

The urge to do better, to start a new year with good intentions, is deeply ingrained in the human consciousness.

Want to know the most common gardening resolution?

“That’s it! I’m done fighting the heat and the humidity. I’m done battling the weeds and the weather. I’ve had it with the critters! I am not going to have a garden this year!”

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like the rest of those wayward New Year’s resolutions — this year, I’m going to eat healthy. I’m going to the gym. The determination to not garden will also fall by the wayside like a bowling pin taken out by an expert split-shot from the league champ.

As soon as the dirt warms up and starts smelling right …

… petrichor.

That’s the official name for how dirt smells, especially after a rainfall.

Once the scent of petrichor hits your snoot, all your good intentions and resolutions will be blowin’ in the wind like a poof of dust.

Geosmin, a substance produced by soil bacteria called actinomycetes, along with other microbes, is what creates the scent. Being extremely sensitive to petrichor and able to detect it at very low concentrations is what allows us wild humans to find fresh water and fertile land.

The scent of petrichor also triggers the urge to get out there and play in the dirt. Despite our best intentions, it laughingly short circuits our brains and insists we dig, dig, dig!

Not only that, but the days are slowly getting longer, coaxing and enticing us to spend more time outside.

Our mailboxes are full of seed catalogs, with their drool-worthy descriptions and their state-fair-winning, museum-worthy photos of all the goodies you can grow.

New varieties! Heirloom crops! Bigger! Better! This is the year! You can do it!

Unfortunately, the contents of those catalogs and the actual state of your garden, not to mention the success of your bounty, resemble nothing so much as … the difference between the honeymoon and the marriage.

One’s wearing rose-colored blinders, all full of hope and excitement for new beginnings. The other can be a long slog of hard work, hopefully culminating in something worthwhile.

Gardening kind of fulfills your New Year’s resolutions to eat healthier and get more exercise. If you can get your garden to grow and produce, you can certainly eat healthier — tastier, too. And getting all that produce from A to Z requires a lot of effort. Preparing the ground, planting, hoeing, weeding, picking and toting, cleaning and preserving all require a tremendous amount of energy.

Cussing, too. It takes a lot of lung capacity to adequately berate the turtles hollowing out your cantaloupes. Or the deer mowing down your green beans. Or the rabbits mowing down everything. The squirrels digging up everything you plant almost before you get it planted. The crows noshing on your corn before it even has a chance to sprout. The voles, tunneling down the middle of your rows and eating seeds and small plants. The hornworms decimating your maters. Birds pecking all your strawberries.

None of that takes into account the weeds and insects. There’s a reason the saying “growing like a weed” still resonates. After all your painstaking seed selecting and diligent plant pampering, nothing grows as fast as a weed. One tiny shower of rain and voila, Jack’s beanstalk is racing toward the sky, leaving you puling ’maters and cukes withering in the dust.

And the insects! Planting is all about the honeymoon phase. Planning and implementing and patting yourself on the back ’cause “this is so easy!”

Just about the time you start thinking, “No problem, I got this. I don’t know why anyone thinks this is hard,”the new starts wearing off and the gnats show up. The no-see-ums, aka minuscule velociraptors with jagged needle teeth. Mosquitoes. Yellow flies. Things with no names, like some huge alien creature from Jumanji, all fangs and stingers.

Then, just to add a little more fun to the challenge, the humidity chimes in like a sauna on steroids. This happens usually about the same time the rain disappears like a mirage in the desert and you have to start dragging hoses around — and hopefully remembering to turn them off — before you drown what you were trying to give a drink to.

Along about now is about when the “I’m not doing this next year” part of the equation starts looking better and better. It keeps poking you with all the chutzpah of a pesky little brother in church, reminding you what you said like a toddler on repeat spouting a cuss word in front of your in-laws.

Since you broke your resolution — or maybe it broke you — might as well go ahead and plant a garden. You know you’re going to anyway.

Mid-January is just a tad early, but it’s almost time for potatoes, and cabbage, and onions — any of the cool-weather crops, or cole crops. You might even be still harvesting some of your fall garden.

Go ahead and thumb through those seed catalogs like a kid with the Sears Roebuck, circling everything you want. Go ahead and order or buy those seeds, like the kid who traded his family’s cow for the magic beans. Hopefully you will just grow a regular garden, minus the giant.

Whether you stick to your resolution or not, enjoy the smell of dirt. If you’re strong enough to resist the pull, kudos to you. Whether you garden, or simply go to the farmer’s market and enjoy the fruits of someone else’s labors, you can still delight in the taste of fresh produce. If you can or freeze produce, you’ll extend the time you can savor the veggies.

As you’re working out and doing your breathing exercises, keep repeating to yourself, “I am not going to garden next year!”

Maybe if you repeat it enough times, you’ll actually believe it.

Some winter weeds are wonderful.

Wait. Weed is wonderful?

Not that kind of weed!

W-E-E-D-S.

Everyone has a different idea of what constitutes a weed and what doesn’t. The definition of a weed is simply a plant growing where it’s not wanted. By that definition, a volunteer tomato popping up in your flowerbed is a weed. Not to me, but you get the idea.

There are people who love dandelions and clover — both winter weeds — and people who loathe them.

Weeds don’t care whether you like them or not. They happily go about their business, doing what weeds are designed to do. Their seeds blow or otherwise hitchhike about until they find the perfect patch of dirt.

Clover is a nitrogen fixative, so clover seeds travel around until they find a bare spot in need of nitrogen.

Using a symbiotic partnership with Rhizobium bacteria living in root nodules on the clover roots, the bacteria convert atmospheric nitrogen into forms usable by plants. When the clover fizzles in the heat of summer, the nitrogen becomes available to the grass and other surrounding plants.

Dandelions are one of the best plants on the planet for humans. My personal theory: The harder a weed is to kill, the more beneficial it is. In our quest for tidy, golf-course-perfect yards, we’ve forgotten what our ancestors knew. Can you believe people used to intentionally plant dandelion yards?

Besides being beloved by kids and bees, every part of the dandelion is edible and beneficial. One of the first plants to pop up in late winter-early spring, they are often one of the first sources of pollen for bees. Oftentimes, in our area, they bloom all winter.

Nowadays, with processed vitamins a dime a dozen, sourcing vitamins naturally isn’t as important as it used to be. Dandelions contain vitamins A, C, and K. They are also chock full of minerals like potassium, iron, and calcium. In addition, dandelions also contain potent antioxidants, not to mention beta-carotene and polyphenols.

It’s easy to see why our ancestors valued dandelions. After a long winter with little to no fresh produce available, their bodies were depleted of vitamins and minerals. Dandelions were free and easily sourced, their bright yellow blooms outing their location like flags.

While there are always weeds around, winter weeds differ from summer weeds. Not just because of the season they thrive in, but because while the summer weeds are fading, the winter weeds are growing and taking over, and vice versa.

Some of the weeds you will notice more this time of year are Florida betony (Stachys floridana), clover (Trifolium), annual bluegrass (Poa annua), blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium), salt or large-leaf pennywort (hydrocotyle bonariensis), and spurweed, or burr clover (Soliva sessilis).

Most of these are beneficial, or at least pretty to look at or good for the soil or for bees.

The roots of Florida betony — those round, segmented pods that look like white root-beer barrel candy — are edible. Think water chestnuts in Chinese food. It’s also where Florida betony gets one of its other nicknames, rattlesnake weed. Those roots are part of what makes Florida betony so hard to eradicate. Unless you grub out every single one …  like Arnold Schwarzenegger in “The Terminator,” it will be back. A member of the mint family, its distinctively aromatic leaves and seeds are also edible, usually consumed in teas.

Despite how despised it is, pennywort is like dandelions, extremely beneficial. And it’s edible. In places like Asia, pennywort is used in salads or as condiments, and is well known for its medicinal properties, similar to dandelions.

The only one of the above weeds that truly needs to be eradicated is spurweed, aka burr clover. Stickers. If you’ve been to any boat ramp or ballfield in coastal counties, you’ve probably gotten to know them, and maybe these nasty devils are in your yard.

Looking all cute and innocent, like flat dog fennels, these terrors are bright green right now. About the time you start going barefoot in the yard, their evil stickers abound. Looking like the ball-shaped business end of a miniature ancient flail weapon, the nasty stickers are the seeds.

Every time you move the boat, or mow the yard, or the dog runs around … every time those stickers get transferred to another spot because they were imbedded in a tire or the bottom of someone’s foot or shoe or paw, you’re seeding a new plant. Grrrr.

If you only notice a few, a fork works great for popping them out of the ground. Then you can put them in the burn pile and dance gleefully around their crisping bodies …

Oops. Got a bit carried away there. So, you can properly dispose of them. Otherwise, and I hate to recommend this, SPRAY! Do it NOW!

If you don’t dig them up or spray them, your whole yard will soon become a solid mat of these utterly obnoxious freeloaders. By the time you’re hopping and cussing as you’re picking stickers out of your foot, it’s too late. You will have inadvertently shared them with all your friends and neighbors.

While winter weeds, and weeds in general, give most of us a headache, they can be very beneficial. Besides being something green in a brown world, winter weeds help hold the soil in place. They feed critters such as rabbits and deer, and chickens if you have them. Even guinea pigs love fresh weeds.

If you possess the knowledge to utilize them, winter weeds are an inexpensive way to stretch your grocery budget, and to eat healthier. Not saying they always taste the greatest but bitter is better than nothing. Dandelion roots were often dried and roasted, along with chicory —which is becoming really hard to find around here — as a coffee substitute. Yaupon (Ilex vomitoria) contains caffeine and has been used for centuries as a tea and for medicinal purposes such as fever and digestive issues, although too much will make it live up to the vomitoria part of its name.

Just make sure your plant ID skills are up to par and that the weeds you’re getting ready to nosh on haven’t been sprayed.

Dirt.

Such an innocuous word for such an important item.

Dirt is all around us. Under our feet. What we live on. What we build our houses and roads on. Dirt is just … there, something we don’t pay much attention to unless we’re cleaning up a mess somebody tracked in, or planting.

Topsoil, the thin top layer of soil that makes life on Earth possible, comes in many different forms. Clay, like up around Raleigh. Silt, which is what Newport River is full of. Sand, pretty self-explanatory. Loam is the good stuff you find in the woods where leaves and rotting tree trunks are left alone to enrich the soil as they return to it. Peat, which around here usually indicates acidic, swampy conditions.

Topsoil takes a long time to accumulate because it involves the breaking down of bigger particles into smaller particles. Think boulders in the mountains, with pieces continually breaking or wearing off. Smaller rocks get washed downstream, becoming smaller the farther they travel until at some point they end up as sand on the beach.

Like Jules Vern’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” there’s a whole nother world right beneath our feet.

This time of year when the grass goes dormant, you’re more prone to notice something tunneling in your yard. Various sorts of critters tunnel, some you can see and some you can’t. All kinds of things make up the critters in the soil. Microbes, too tiny to ever see with the naked eye. Funguses and bacterias and mycelium and … You get the picture.

Ant tunnels are like a path through the woods. Then the earthworm tunnels, looking like a one-lane dirt track. Mole crickets, a wider dirt road. Moles and voles are a two lane, while gophers are more of a four lane.

Ever seen that metal sculpture of a fire ant nest? The one where they poured liquid metal into the ant nest and then scraped all the dirt off once the metal cooled? Pretty neat, huh?

Earthworms’ tunneling is vital to soil health. By consuming a third of their bodyweight in dirt and organic material every day, they move nutrients and minerals from below the surface to the surface, via their waste. Poo. Worm castings.

Their feasting and tunneling also allows water and air to move up and down in the soil.

Earthworms (Oligochaeata) have five hearts, and as kids we were told if you accidentally broke a worm in half, voila: You’d get two worms.

This is not necessarily true, although some earthworms are like our little green lizards, or chameleons (Anolis carolinesis) in that their tail is easily detachable in order to enable them to escape easier.

Mole crickets, especially tawny mole crickets (Scapteriscus vicinus), have become a serious pest in recent years. In their voracious quest for food, consisting mainly of grass roots and shoots, their tunneling severs grass roots and results in large patches of spongy soil and dead grass. The weather staying warm longer in the fall encourages a longer breeding season with multiple hatches. Also, pole lights and streetlights attract mole crickets. While it’s fun for kids to poke a piece of pine straw or a stick into a hole and catch them, mole crickets are the No. 1 enemy of lawns and golf courses.

Moles and voles rate a whole other level of destruction. Eastern moles (Scalopus aquaticus) are dark gray, velvety soft, blind, have webbed feet, and no tail. They eat crickets and grubs, which is a great thing. Unfortunately, they mess up your yard with their tunnels. Crickets are annoying (can you imagine keeping one as a pet, as Japanese people do?) and grubs are beetle (think Japanese beetle) larva.

Southern pine voles, (Microtus pinetorum), on the other hand, look like hamsters. Golden brown, they have a short tail, are not blind, and do not have webbed feet. Unlike moles, voles will come above ground to scrounge for seeds and berries, and farther to the west of our state, can decimate orchards. They like to ring fruit trees and chew the bark off right at ground level.

Both moles and voles tunnel, oftentimes sharing the same tunnels. Both are nocturnal. So how do you tell which one is destroying your yard? Other than catching one, or being gifted one by your dog or cat, it’s hard to differentiate. Sometimes, if there is a dirt mound in your yard with an opening, it’s a vole. Southern pine voles tend to live around pine trees or pine stumps. While you can put out poisons to kill the crickets and grubs so the moles will move elsewhere, eradicating voles is another story.

Moles do good things, voles are a pain, and getting rid of both is hard. Can you imagine having gophers? Or armadillos?

Did you know armadillos have made it into North Carolina? Wonder how they’d be as a pet …

Humans don’t much enjoy the critters burrowing in our yards, but everything has to eat something. Earthworms eat dirt, birds and moles eat earthworms and insects, bigger predators nosh on birds and moles.

Some of us love to go barefoot and feel the textures beneath our feet, connecting us to the Earth and to our past. I can’t imagine it, but some people hate being barefoot. Going barefoot has a deeper purpose than tactile comfort. Humans may be able to absorb minute amounts of minerals and other vital nutrients through the soles of our feet.

Humans like to pretend that the ground is permanently fixed in place, even as much of the world’s topsoil is being lost to erosion because of building, mining or weather. Not “lost,” per se, just ending up somewhere else, because soil is a living entity, constantly evolving.

Coastal Review will not publish Jan. 1 in observance of New Year’s Day.

Fall, now in its final week, is such an explosion of colors, the sky is an immense azure bowl, the sun a brilliant yellow ball. Leaves attain shades and hues to gladden the heart and make artists salivate.

The low angle of the sun makes it seem to shine blindingly in your eyes no matter which way you’re facing. That same angle makes for some killer photo opportunities.

The opalescent quality of light in the fall, perhaps because of the short days and long nights, appears vastly different than it does during other seasons. Longer shadows accompanied by longer nights, while the sun seems to cling to the edge of the world and changes perspectives, alters our perceptions. It stays low enough here — it’s hard to imagine living somewhere the sun merely rolls along the horizon like a guttered bowling ball before sinking back out of sight — or doesn’t show at all. Bleh!

Late sunrises and early sunsets seem to be more spectacular, perhaps because the short days ensure we see more of them, and again, light. Maybe we just appreciate them more because they’re framed in such stark darkness. It’s crazy to me how much deeper and darker nights appear to be this time of year, when it seems like darkness should be the same dark year-round.

The immense forest fires and multiple volcanoes in various parts of the world this year have contributed to some glorious morning and evening colors due to lots of particulate matter in the air. This might mean we’re in for a colder-than-usual winter. If you’ve never read about it, check out “The Year Without a Summer.”

In our modern hustle-and-hurry world, fall is not the slowing-down time it used to be. That it’s meant to be. That our bodies and spirits crave.

Fall is designed to be … a good supper, sitting by the fireplace with a full belly and no pressing chores, perhaps with a good book or handiwork of some sort or other.

The arrival of fall is like the hour before bedtime: Things should be gradually winding down and everyone — and everything — should be relaxing and preparing to rest.

In times past, crops would have been harvested and stored, wood chopped and stacked, homes and animals secured, even if you lived somewhere without harsh winters.

Other than daily chores, or maybe a hog killing or oyster roast, the hard work of spring and summer was as much a memory as the backbreaking toil that got you to this point of well-deserved rest.

The advent of electricity — wonderful thing that it is  — has played a huge part in our not-slowing-down world. We’ve gotten so busy we’ve forgotten to listen to our bodies, to the seasons, and we bull on through instead of giving ourselves a break. Taking a breath, so to speak, before we launch into another spring and summer.

Heat and air conditioning — don’t get me wrong, I love them both — further our distance from the seasons. Climate control means we stay inside where it’s warm when it’s cold out and cool when it’s hot, protecting ourselves from weather. Nothing wrong with that, but humans are meant to be outside, to be in tune with the natural world around us. Many of us spend way too much of our time indoors, whether it’s at work, or taking care of our homes or whatever.

There is much joy to be discovered outside this time of year: Zero humidity and reasonable temps encourage us to get out more, despite the lessening of daylight hours.

Who doesn’t love crunching and scuffling through leaves? Miracles in themselves, leaves grow and store nutrients, then fall and blow around, providing overwintering resorts for insects and small critters. In their blowing around, they break down into smaller and smaller pieces, redistributing nutrients and enriching the soil, before they once more become soil, and eventually leaves again in a never-ending cycle celebrating life.

The rustling of the leaves in the trees or skittering across the ground adds to the delight. Ever seen a conglomeration of leaves en pointe swirling across the yard or down the road like a herd of indecisive lemmings? Seems like they deliberately stop and drop right in front of your steps, or better yet, your door like they’re just waiting for someone to open the door so they can scurry inside and spread the love.

The scent of woodsmoke in the air, the sound of migrating birds, the sight of migrating birds winging south across the sky all betoken a definite change. The Egypt birds (white ibis) strolling across lawns and pecking for grubs and such, are here and then gone. Insects, while never entirely absent, have vastly diminished in numbers. Little brown bats, so prevalent during summer twilights, with less food available, have gone wherever they go. Dragonflies, too.

Dogwoods and hollies and pyracantha are loaded with berries, some delights for us and some food for our feathered or furred friends. Various seeds drift or blow around, seeking a spot to hunker down until it’s time to sprout.

Fatter and sassier than ever, squirrels dash about in high gear, scurrying every which way toting pecans, acorns, hickory nuts and digging holes in every available patch of dirt they can find. Such a nuisance, but the cute little aggravating tree rats are doing what they’re supposed to. Not merely storing food for winter, but also planting future trees, because there’s no way they’ll remember even half the places they stashed their bounty.

Fallen leaves blanket the ground like a soft afghan draped across your favorite chair, or the way your favorite comforter cocoons you in your bed. Leaves serve pretty much the same purpose; keeping things warm and cozy.

The radiant colors will gradually fade to browns and tans, soon giving way to the grays of winter.

All the seasons have their reasons, and no matter which one is your favorite or why, rejoice in the changes and embrace the season you’re in right now.

Most of us know that bees and wasps are pollinators, but what else pollinates flowers and various plants? Sadly, no honey is involved, but no sting, either.

It’s butterflies!

Who doesn’t love butterflies?

Delicate looking as they flutter by, ephemeral, like catching a glimpse of fairies out of the corner of your eye.

Butterflies come in all shapes and sizes and colors. The colors are mostly due to pigments in their scales.

What? No, fish have scales.

Not that kind of scales.

Lepidoptera, the scientific name for butterflies and moths, means scaly wings. Scales on butterfly wings are microscopic and laid down like shingles on a roof. There can be upward of 600 scales per square millimeter. The shape of the scales varies, everything from teardrops and rectangles to more ribbon-like shapes. Scales on different parts of the wing can even be different shapes, such as hair-like or even duck-footed.

If you’ve ever touched a butterfly’s wing — hopefully not a live one — you know that the scales shed off like glittery pixie dust, which is why we’ve been told since we were little children not to touch a butterfly’s wings.

While losing scales impedes a butterfly’s ability to fly and shortens its lifespan, it can be a lifesaver should a butterfly get caught in a spider’s web. The scales will stick to the web, allowing the butterfly to escape, the way a toddler can peel out of your hold on their jacket and scamper off.

Scales aren’t just colorful to make us happy, although they certainly do for many. Butterfly scales serve numerous purposes.

They aid in flight, affecting airflow and reducing drag. Scales can help camouflage a butterfly in order to better hide from predators. The color pattern of the scales can help butterflies communicate or find mates. Some butterfly wing patterns even mimic poisonous kin, the better to fool predators into leaving them alone.

For instance, monarchs, Danaus plexippus, the famous orange-and-black butterflies, are brightly colored to warn predators of their toxicity, or aposematism. In other words, they taste awful. Monarchs can also be toxic to invertebrates.

In a ploy called Müllerian mimicry, viceroys, Limenitis archippus, mimic the coloring of monarchs in a bid to avoid being eaten. Bright colors such as reds and oranges often signal danger, and mimicking the color pattern of something known to be poisonous gives both species a better survival rate.

Some butterflies have spots that look like giant eyes to warn predators, and some use camouflage to better blend in with their surroundings.

Made of chitin, like an insect’s or a crustacean’s carapace, the tough yet flexible scales have ridges and pockets that contribute to aerodynamics. Once lost, scales will not regrow and cannot be replaced. Each scale — actually a modified hair — is attached via a stalk, or pedicel, that fits into a small socket.

Butterflies are cold-blooded, so the color of their scales can also help them regulate body temperature. For instance, the dark bands or whorls on some butterflies can help warm them up by absorbing more sunlight.

They don’t collect pollen in the way bees do, so butterflies are not as efficient as pollinators, but some wildflowers can’t survive without them.

So what kind of plants do butterflies like? Butterflies are drawn to bright colors such as pinks, oranges, reds and yellows. Zinnias are always a favorite, as is butterfly bush, coneflowers, black-eyed Susans, bee balm, asters, and coreopsis.

Zinnias are the workhorse of the garden. They’re easy to care for, will grow just about anywhere, like heat and drought, make great cut flowers for bouquets, and they come in a range of vivid colors. Alas, they are annuals, so they have to be planted every spring.

Butterfly bush, Buddleia, is known for its sweet scent and being a butterfly magnet. If you’re worried about it being invasive, as it can be in some areas, native alternatives — summersweet (Clethra alnifolia), Virginia sweetspire (Itea virginica), and buttonbush (Cephalanthis occidentalis) — can be planted instead.

Purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) is an old staple, and it’s perennial. Same with black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia hirta) and bee balm (Monarda). Asters and coreopsis, both of which have many native varieties.

Keep in mind, annuals have a longer bloom time but have to be planted every year — annually.

Perennials — longer word equals longer lifespan — come back every year but have a limited bloom time. Plant a good mix of both in order to keep your flowerbeds, yourself and your pollinators happy.

Watch the roadsides and any weedy lots to see what most attracts butterflies. That will give you a better idea what you need to plant in your garden, and it also depends on what kind of butterfly you’re hoping to attract.

As much as we love butterflies, many of us are not so happy with their offspring. Those nasty little cabbage loopers that destroy our collards and broccoli, for instance.

Butterflies need nectar plants, but they also need host plants for their caterpillars. Monarchs are all about milkweed (Asclepias). Several varieties grow naturally here. Dill, parsley, and fennel are great for eastern black swallowtails (Papilio polyxenes). In fact, if you don’t watch carefully, swallowtails will strip your dill and parsley practically overnight. They love anything in the carrot family, so Queen Anne’s lace (Daucus carota), which grows wild here, is also on their menu.

Gulf fritillaries love passion vine (Passiflora incarnata). Make sure you get the native one and not one of the hybrids, the take-over-your-world kind. Gulf caterpillars look like something from a Halloween nightmare, virulent red with black stripes and black spikes – and totally harmless.

Caterpillars may freak out some of you, and they can be destructive and yucky but birds eat caterpillars, and birds and wasps feed them to their young.

Long story, short: It’s impossible to have beautiful butterflies — and moths — without first having destructive caterpillars.

Everything has to eat something.

So, if you’d love to see more butterflies, plant pollinator gardens and leave natural areas unmowed.

Remember that set of canisters and accouterments your mom or grandma cherished? The one that looked like a gnome mushroom village exploded all over the kitchen?

People love — or hate — toadstools with a passion.

Toadstools are found pretty much worldwide, and they are important parts of any ecosystem. Mushrooms and toadstools are both fungal fruiting bodies, and there is technically no scientific difference between them. People tend to refer to safely edible varieties as mushrooms, while the ones that can send you on a trip to the hospital — or on a trip to meet your maker — as toadstools.

The distinction is purely in how the fungi are perceived.

How do you tell which is which? Best advice: Unless you are with an expert who knows for sure, or you have an imminently painful death wish, don’t try any wild ones — mushrooms or toadstools.

Most of us are somewhat familiar with toadstools. They pop up, seemingly overnight, here, there and everywhere. But why? Mostly because fungi don’t reproduce by seeds. They reproduce by spores.

Once a toadstool has reached maturity, it releases tiny — often microscopic — spores, and the wind carries them to a new spot. There, spores wait patiently, sometimes for years, until the right conditions occur for them to sprout. This is why we often see them after a rainy spell, or after a warming period.

Those spores, in turn, send out microscopically fine threads, root-like filaments, which then form clumps called mycelia.

Mycelia break down and decompose organic matter such as leaves, branches, logs or other natural substances in order to return nutrients to the soil. Instead of hating on those toadstools in your yard, think about how beneficial they are. Rather than being a blight, toadstools are actually an indicator of a thriving ecosystem.

Of course, there are often pets and kids to consider, and some fungi dissolve into slimy, stinky messes. Ever smelled a stinkhorn? Think rotting meat, Pepe Le Pew chasing his cat girlfriend, or raw sewage. Why, you ask?

Stinkhorns, while inarguably the stinkiest of stinky toadstools, attract flies by means of a foul-smelling slime. The flies then disperse the sticky, stinky, stinkhorn spores. Pretty clever, huh? If you’ve ever walked the trail at Fort Macon, you’ve likely come across these, whether you realized what it was or just figured some critter had crawled off into the scrub and died.

Related to earthstars and puffballs, stinkhorns usually start out as a white, egg-like toadstools before some of them morph into a salmon- or orange-colored Halloween decoration. Stinkhorns can be found in a range of sizes, shapes and colors, and they have the most interesting names.

Part of the scientifically called Phallaceae family — and yes, that’s exactly what some of them look like — this could be where people get the ideas for monsters and aliens. Devil’s fingers, or Clathrus archeri, look like black-tipped orange fingers erupting from the ground. Veiled lady, or Phallus indusiatus, looks like a ghostly bride. It’s no wonder toadstools get a bad rap.

Have you ever seen a fairy ring? People used to think if you stepped inside one, the fairies would take you. Or they’d make you dance until you dropped dead. Or they’d transport you to Faerie, and you’d never get back home.

Sadly, the real reason for fairy rings is much less interesting, although still magical in its own way. The rings form because of high concentrations of nitrogen, or from decaying tree roots or other organic material. Growth begins in the center, such as around a rotted tree stump, or even where a tree used to be, and spreads outward, giving rise to the familiar circle.

Toadstools are an important food source for a variety of critters. Snails, slugs, squirrels, deer, rodents, turtles, and insects. Some critters even develop a tolerance for poisons present in the toadstools, poisons that would kill humans.

Toadstools have been used for thousands of years medicinally, as dyes, as poisons. For instance, fly agaric, or Amanita muscaria, with its iconic red cap and white polka dots, one of the most easily recognizable toadstools worldwide, has been used for centuries to kill flies. Not sure of the exact process, but basically people would sprinkle fly agaric in milk. Living on a farm with its attendant livestock and ensuing manure, or in a town with less-than-desirable trash and sewage practices, one can see where fly agaric would be highly valued.

Mushrooms have been adding culinary joy — for those who like them — to meals for probably those same thousands of years. While some people don’t like the taste or texture, mushrooms have countless uses in addition to food. Medicines, tinctures, flavoring, even mycoremediation, a fancy word for removing or degrading contaminants from or in the environment.

Toadstool names are as intriguing as the actual toadstools: ink caps, fly agaric, Indian pipes. Same is true for mushrooms: morels, bolete, lion’s mane.

While some mushrooms, morels or lion’s mane or chicken of the woods can be foraged naturally, above all, use caution and know what you’re doing. Interesting side note: when the American chestnuts were dying out, morels, or Morchella esculenta, could be picked up by the wagonloads. Think buckboard, not RadioFlyer. Sensing the tree’s imminent demise, the morels would produce mushrooms in abundance to produce spores to ensure the species’ survival.

Different mushrooms grow best around different trees and can often be located by finding the right trees or habitats.

Look up, not down! Morels like moist woodlands and can often be found around decaying elm, ash sycamore, or even old apple trees. Lion’s mane, or Hericium erinaceus, grows on hardwoods, such as oak and maple. Chicken of the woods, or Laetiporus sulphureus, grows on hardwoods, both living and dead.

If you like to eat mushrooms, and prefer to use trusted sources other than stores — or death-defying guesstimating — shoutout to Jamie’s Mushroom Farm in Havelock.

Jamie grows amazing mushrooms, and it’s an infinitely interesting process. You can get them fresh or dehydrated, and they are scrumptious!

Gardening isn’t just about seeing things others miss, it’s also the scents. Isn’t it amazing how much our tastes change with the advent of fall?

Instead of the salads and light desserts we enjoy during hotter weather, our souls crave hearty soups and stews, carb-rich foods like breads, and the fruits of our summer labors.

Many people won’t notice the changes, or think much about them, and just go on with their normal lives. Gardeners and farmers, more attuned to the seasons, relish the ancient rhythms. Things are slowing down, preparing to catch their breath in order to gear up for next year.

Colors are switching from shades of green to browns and purples and oranges, yellows and burnt umber. Again, most people won’t pay much attention, but even the colors or our clothing reflect the changing of the seasons.

Our wind, from the south most of the summer, switches to north or northwest, bringing cooler temps and lessening humidity. Or occasionally northeast, bringing storms and setting schools of fish to running, hopefully insuring a bountiful catch for our commercial fishermen.

Fall scents, such as wood smoke or burning leaves, or applesauce or pear butter simmering fill the air. Ever notice how easily you can distinguish leaf smoke from any other smoke scent? Maybe it’s because the leaves have stored up a summer’s worth of sunshine and blue skies and they’re releasing it back into the air.

Grasshoppers are giving it their best effort, filling their bellies and in turn, feeding birds and lizards. Butterflies are slurping nectar from any available source like insects possessed, some preparing to over-winter here and some to migrate.

One of my fondest childhood memories is experiencing the Monarchs on their way to Mexico. We had a huge oak tree in our yard. I went out to play one day and the tree looked odd. Upon closer inspection, it was absolutely enveloped in Monarchs. Flexing their wings like they’d become tree leaves being stirred by the lightest of zephyrs, they were resting. Next day, they were gone. How crazy is it to think something as fragile as a butterfly can fly thousands of miles?

The heady scent of cinnamon and spices, of casseroles baking, of winter squash and collards and sweet potatoes, sets our bellies to rumbling. Winter squashes, such as butternuts, with their hard shells, don’t grow in the winter, they merely ripen closer to cool weather and will keep most of the winter.

Summer squash grow in the summer but their softer skins turn to moldy mush quickly. Winter squash, which include pumpkins and cushaws and spaghetti squash as well as butternuts have traditionally been grown as winter keepers, designed to stave off starvation when other, more fragile vegetables are nothing but a memory.

Like late apples and Kieffer pears, also utilized as winter keepers, winter squash provided vitamins and nutrition when little else, other than greens or onions and other root crops, was available from the garden.

Some enjoy the flies-on-the-screen-door scents of collards and cabbage cooking, others can’t stand them. Hopefully you’ve gotten your winter garden planted and off to a good start so your cabbage and collards will be ready to eat for Thanksgiving. Blessed with multiple growing seasons in a year, eastern North Carolina provides ample opportunity to space out our gardening.

Veggies like broccoli and greens love the cooler fall weather. Lettuces and spinach and brussels sprouts thrive this time of year, while trying them in the spring, depending on how quickly the weather turns hot, is often an iffy proposition. Turnips and rutabagas and even radishes do well now. All of these, even uncooked, have distinct smells.

Wonder if that’s how moths and butterflies, the ones that lay the eggs that turn into nasty little green caterpillars who like to eat our cole crops, locate their choice egg laying spots? Can insects smell? How do they locate suitable plants? Inquiring minds want to know!

Ever noticed how even some seeds smell like the vegetables they will become? Carrots, for instance, with one whiff, there’s no doubt what they are. Some herb seeds are the same, dill being a favorite, and thyme. Queen Anne’s lace (Daucus carota), the wild ancestor of modern carrots, along with having gorgeous blooms, carries the distinct carrot aroma.

Mums are blooming, their scent as characteristic as that of marigolds or geraniums. The scent of freshly mown grass takes on more of a hay-like quality as the grasses go into winter mode.

If you have a suitable window, fresh herbs such as basil and dill will do fine inside for the winter. More cold hardy herbs, like parsley and rosemary, will be fine outside. Whether they’re fresh or dried, herbs smell wonderful. There’s nothing like a fresh baked loaf of rosemary-parmesan sourdough just out of the oven, and a big fat slice slathered in butter! Or fresh made applejacks/handpies/fruit pies.

Scents seem … more … during cooler weather, the way the stars are clearer and closer during the winter.

Scent is said to be the strongest of our senses, as far as memories go. Scent-triggered memories, the longest lasting and most particularly powerful of what our brains can conjure, can take us back to our childhoods or to any special memories with just one whiff. Cotton candy, anyone? Tobacco drying in a barn? Clothes hanging on the line? Rotten eggs? Grandpa’s pipe? Fresh-sawn lumber? A live Christmas tree? Pancakes and bacon, coffee and hot cocoa? A new box of crayons? Hay in a barn? Milk cows in a parlor?

How many memories just exploded from merely mentioning those scents?

Given the Scottish-Cherokee-Scots-Irish roots prevalent in our area, offering food is a time-honored gift. Differing circumstances led to all those ancestors of ours knowing firsthand about starvation. It’s often why the first thing that greets you — after the aroma of a home-cooked meal on the stove tantalizes your senses and sets your tummy to growling like a hungry dragon — is, “D’jeet yet? Come on in and set a spell.”

Vision can be as simple as the act of seeing. Or it can be mystical, as in a dream. It can be using the imagination to plan something that doesn’t exist yet, such as imagining what your yard or garden would look like if you did … such and such.

One of Webster’s definitions of vision is thus: The special sense by which qualities of an object (such as color, luminosity, shape, and size) constituting its appearance are perceived through a process in which light rays entering the eye are transformed by the retina into electrical signals that are transmitted to the brain via the optic nerve.

Most of us take vision for granted, but what does any of the above have to do with gardening? Other than planning and enjoying your flower and vegetable gardens, is it relevant?

In our way-too-gray world of concrete and reflective glass, many of us don’t pay attention to plants. They’re just … there, or not.

Some of us see every flower, no matter how tiny. Differing leaf shapes. Textures. Colors.

The basic concept of seeing is pretty much the same for most people, unless they have a problem with their vision. Your eyes take in things, and your brain translates it into identifiable colors and shapes.

Ever wonder how artists, painters, for instance, create such wonderfully detailed renderings? While we see the same things, we don’t necessarily perceive or process them in the same way.

Like looking at the ocean, and then looking at the ocean through polarized sunglasses, gradients and colors that we didn’t realize were there pop as soon as we put the sunglasses on.

Vision can be farsighted or nearsighted. One would think Monet’s famous impressionist paintings were mostly because he was myopic, or nearsighted. Actually, he had cataracts which impacted how he saw things as well as how he saw colors. The same way artists see things others don’t, or at least until our eyes are aided by polarized glasses.

So, really, what difference does any of that make, especially to gardening?

Like artists picking out details others can’t always see, gardeners pick up on things others miss — an invaluable skill in times past, when grocery stores were few and far between, much less fresh produce — when knowledge about plants could literally mean the difference between making it through the winter or starving to death.

Blooms

Gorgeous in and of themselves, flowers can indicate many things. Future berries, or tubers, or herbs. What time a certain plant will be ready to harvest, and when to let it grow longer. Potatoes usually are ready to harvest shortly after they bloom, your broccoli boasting pretty little yellow flowers means it’s too late.

Leaves

While flowers stand out a bit more, knowing which leaves are which can be just as informative. Besides maple, do you know what the most beautiful red leaves in the fall often are?

Poison ivy!

Its shiny green, three-lobed leaves stand out to those who know to steer clear. Poison ivy’s red fall raiment says “pick me, pick me,” while at the same time the bright scarlet fairly screams “danger.”

Flowers and leaves come in a vast array of colors and shapes, both of which aid in identifying and locating different plants, whether helpful or harmful.

Like opening a brand new 64-count box of Crayola crayons, flowers of every shade known to mankind and a few we may have never noticed before often catch our eye because they stand out from greenery. Just like kids, and some adults, pollinators are attracted to colors.

Knowing what willow leaves look like — long and thin — serves multiple purposes. First, willows grow in wet conditions, so their presence means water is close by. The branches make amazing baskets, and the inner bark can be boiled to make salicylic acid, otherwise known as an aspirin-like pain reliever.

Nut-bearing trees such as pecans, hickories and walnuts have distinctive leaves as well. Paw paws, mulberries, and sassafras, all useful as food or medicine sources, stand out against pines and maples and oaks.

Some plants, such as saltbush, or Baccharis halimifolia, aid humans in knowing when seasonal events are occurring in the animal world. Usually when the saltbush starts blooming, the fall migration of many varieties of fish is taking place. For centuries, fishermen have paid attention to this particular plant’s blooming in order to know when fishing would be the most lucrative. Strange, isn’t it, to think the bloom time of a plant can clue us in to what’s going on under the water?

Men and women perceive colors differently, much like artists and nonartists. This is partly because women have two X chromosomes and men only have one, so women tend to be able to perceive infinitely more shades of colors than men. Men are also more prone to red-green colorblindness.

That makes sense, given that men would traditionally have been the hunters, so they wouldn’t necessarily have needed to distinguish all the colors women see. Women have traditionally done more gathering, so they would have needed to be able to spot berries and herbs and nuts, not to mention any poisonous snakes and spiders hiding amongst them.

Probably this explains why most men can clearly see a deer or other prey animal in the woods or across a field but can’t find a bottle of ketchup in the fridge. It also gives the guys an out at the paint store. Most men truly can’t distinguish between eggshell and ivory, red and scarlet, teal and turquoise.

No matter your level of visual acuity, sight is a precious gift. Colors and shapes enhance our world in myriad ways, whether you’re a gardener or not. Vision allows us to see the beauty in ordinary things as well as enabling us to envision how to better enhance them.

Whether you’re a cottage garden aficionado and love the organized chaos growing with willy-nilly abandon, or you’re more of a formal garden person favoring grander size and a far more structured layout, enjoy!

Sauerkraut is the only form of fermented vegetable a great many of us are familiar with.

While sauerkraut is a love-it-or-hate-it proposition to most people, fermentation is an ancient and invaluable form of preserving food. Fermentation not only keeps vegetables edible for longer than their growing season, the process of fermenting vegetables, which uses raw instead of cooked veggies, is super healthy for you.

Fermentation relies on the process of lacto-fermentation where beneficial bacteria, primarily Lactobacillus, convert natural sugars in the vegetables into lactic acid.

Lactobacillus, one of the key players in fermentation, are naturally occurring bacteria present on the surface of most vegetables. By consuming the sugars in the veggies and converting them to lactic acid, carbon dioxide and other flavorful compounds, these beneficial bacteria not only preserve veggies but also give them their unique flavor.

A natural preservative, lactic acid works by lowering the pH, which in turn inhibits growth of harmful bacteria.

Since the veggies are fermented raw and in their natural state, more nutrients remain in the finished product. Bonus: Fermenting produces powerful probiotics.

In order to ferment vegetables, you only need a few simple ingredients and containers of some sort. Think … your grandma’s crocks, the light-colored ones with the blue band just under the top rim or the tan-bottomed ones with the brown uppers. Little brown jug, anyone?

Salt.

Water.

Time.

So, if fermenting is easy to do and so good for us, why don’t more people utilize the benefits? It’s possibly because modern people tend to equate “fermented” with “rotten.”

You can ferment practically any veggie. Some, like cabbage, need to be shredded first. Others, like cauliflower, can simply be cut into bite-size pieces.

While crocks are not necessary unless you’re fermenting huge amounts, canning jars will work just fine.

For salt, sea salt is recommended. Not only does it have more minerals, sea salt generally does not contain the anti-caking agents that table salt includes. Table salt can sometimes inhibit the Lactobacillus from thriving. The quantity of salt is especially important. Besides salting to your taste, using too little salt can lead to spoilage from the growth of harmful bacteria. Too much can prevent the formation of beneficial bacteria and lead to no fermentation at all. The salt-to-water ratio is probably the most important aspect of the whole process, and it varies according to the vegetables being preserved.

Brine, or water with salt mixed in it, should be poured over the veggies once they are in your clean crock or jar. Or you can dry-salt juicier veggies and let the salt draw out the juices from within, adding water if needed. Another important part of the fermenting process is making sure all the contents of your crock or jar are submerged. You can purchase glass weights designed for this exact purpose, or you can use any glass or bowl that will keep all the contents submerged while leaving space around the edges for venting. You can even use glass rocks or simply a zippered storage bag filled with brine.

Time is the most consuming part of this. It takes a good deal of time to soften the veggies and get them to the right tanginess. Depending on which veggies you choose, the temperature in your home, and how you want them to taste, fermenting can take a couple days or up to several months.

Speaking of time, salt has been an invaluable currency and trading item for, well, forever.

Modern people don’t pay plain old salt much attention. Everyone has at least one salt shaker in their kitchen, on the table, near the stove, or in the pantry. Some of us get chastised for eating too much salt.

Anyone can go to any grocery store and buy as much salt as they want.

We use salt from everything as glorious as cooking to as lowly as melting ice on roadways.

Once upon a time, although essential for life and preserving foods, salt was scarce unless you lived near a body of saltwater or a naturally occurring salt pan.

Salt provides key elements to keep us healthy, especially if you live in a hot, humid environment and sweat a lot.

Trade routes were developed between salt-producing areas to areas without salt. Using either pack animals or wagons was the main way to transport salt, and that led to the construction of better roads.

Not only did the caravans on the Salt Roads bring salt to people who needed it, they greatly facilitated the spread of knowledge and cultural exchanges.

As early as 1776, saltworks were created around Beaufort and Morehead City. Robert Williams set up a saltworks near Gallant’s Channel. Richard Blackledge set up one on the north side of the Newport River near the mouth of Core Creek. That piece of coastline is still known to locals as “Salt Works.”

These local salt-processing plants relied on our abundance of naturally salty water and worked by either boiling it or simply pouring it into shallow evaporation pans in the sunshine. These Carteret County saltworks played an important part in local history as did others like them up and down the North Carolina coast and beyond.

Many of the old-timers still remember when salted fish was the norm. A wooden barrel was layered with fish and salt until filled — one of the only ways people here had to preserve their fresh catch.

Salt was also invaluable in tanning hides and making leather for shoes and tack and various and sundry other items.

Here in the county, the local saltworks tradition is being carried on by the Atlantic Beach Sea Salt Co. The proprietors, Bill and Kristi Langston, go far offshore and pipe the salty water from 17 fathoms deep — around 102 feet for any landlubbers out there — into their boat tanks.

Once they return to Bogue Banks they use a small-batch method to produce amazing salt that’s chock full of nutrients.

As with baking sourdough — which is also a form of fermentation — fermenting vegetables is once again coming back into favor, and it’s being recognized for its health benefits.

The vegetables have been planted, grown and harvested. Now what?

Well, for starters, take advantage of all the fresh produce and eat yourself silly. And then … if you want to enjoy the summer’s bounty later, you have options.

Some fruits and veggies, like potatoes and onions, will keep, at least for a while on their own, given the right conditions. The ones that won’t keep can be canned, frozen, dried or preserved in other ways.

Canning is probably the most labor-intensive method, but oh, so worth the time and effort!

You will need canning jars, lids and rings, and a pressure canner. Canning is time-consuming because of the prep and because it takes a while to heat the jars and contents to the right temperature, and then you have to leave the filled jars in the canner for the prescribed length of time, then they have to cool.

If you’re going to do a lot of canning, more than one canner is advisable, since you can only put so many jars in at one time. Also, the cooldown before you can safely remove the lid takes a good while.

Knowing how much time all this takes, I asked my Daddy how his Mom, my Grandma, managed to put enough up to feed their large family, with Daddy being the seventh of 10 children. I couldn’t imagine her doing a few jars at a time, especially on a woodstove in a small cabin or later, a larger farmhouse.

His answer: Grandma didn’t worry about using a pressure canner inside. Instead, she built a fire outside and situated a large galvanized washtub on rocks so it was balanced over the fire. She then put her jars and enough water to cover them in the tub.

This method, called water-bath canning, has been frowned upon and has fallen out of favor — especially for certain foods — because of the chance of botulism. Grandma would keep the fire going and take out jars or put more in as needed. None of my aunts or uncles starved to death or died of food poisoning, so Grandma must’ve done something right.

The reason pressure canning works better and is safer for nonacidic foods is that, while water-bath canning will seal the jars, it can’t kill botulism or other deadly organisms that may be present. Pressure canning heats the contents of the jars hotter than boiling alone, hot enough to kill all the odorless, tasteless, invisible nasties that might be waiting to cause severe illness.

Despite the work, there’s nothing more satisfying than listening to jar lids “ping” as the jars seal while resting.

Chill out

Preserving your produce in the freezer also takes a bit of prep. For instance, corn can be frozen whole, on the cob, but this takes up a ton of room in your freezer. A better way is to cut the corn off the cob, cook it, cool it, and then bag it before moving it to the freezer.

A very smart person, probably more than one, figured out you can put the whole shucked and silked cobs in a pot of boiling water for about two minutes — outside, using a gas burner works great — throw them in cold water, and then cut the corn off. This way, it can be bagged and go straight into the freezer – A huge time saver.

When the whole cob method is so much quicker and easier, why do we do it the old cut-cook-cool way? Because that’s the way we were taught, and that’s the way our moms and grandmas were taught. Humans tend to get stuck in a rut about some things — in a rut with blinders on.

Fresh blueberries can be frozen as-is. Simply pick them, put them in a container, and freeze.

So how come some things can go straight in the freezer and others have to be blanched, or thrown into boiling water for a couple minutes? Blanching stops the natural ripening process and keeps the veggies at their peak of taste and freshness. It also kills any insects you might have missed while picking and preparing.

Some veggies and fruits are better canned, some better frozen. Much of it comes down to personal preference. And there are other considerations as well.

If there’s a hurricane or other reason for a prolonged power outage, canned items will be just fine, whereas frozen food could thaw and be ruined.

Other methods

Another method of preserving harvests is drying. Natural drying is tough to do around here, simply because of the humidity. There are tons of dehydrators and canners out there in all sorts of sizes and price ranges if you want to go that route.

Yet another method of food preservation that’s become popular is vacuum-sealing. Vacuum-sealing removes all the oxygen from the package, so freezer burn and bacteria can’t spoil your food. This method will keep food tasting fresh for a long time.

You have to decide whether it’s worth it to you to purchase canning or dehydrating or other equipment you might only use a couple times a year. Of course, if you actually use the items, quite a bit of money can be saved. You can grow your own and put it up, go to a farmer’s market and buy produce to put up, or just keep what you already purchased from spoiling as quickly. Look for units that can do double duty, such as a dehydrator that you can also use to make yogurt.

With your own produce, you can always know what was sprayed on it, how it was picked and transported, or where it came from. Our farmers and truckers do an amazing job growing and getting food to us, but germs happen.

There are lots and lots of ways to enjoy fresh-tasting produce for longer than the short harvest season, also including pickling and fermentation. So, eat a bellyful, and when you can’t stand the thought of one more zucchini or cucumber or tomato, put some up for later.

You’ll be more than glad you did.

In previous columns we’ve touched on seeds, soil, plants, insects, temperature, phases of the moon, fertilizer and pH. All of that is well and good, but once you’ve planted your garden, and fertilized, and watered, and protected it from pests to the best of your ability, how do you know when it’s ready to harvest?

Some things are obvious. Tomatoes turn red, zucchini grows into a brickbat overnight, cucumbers tantalize with the perfect length. Peas and beans fill out their pods, yellow squash flashes its bright gold amongst green leaves.

Sometimes you can keep track of when you planted and judge your harvest time by counting the days. If you know that said vegetable needs around 120 days to mature, then you can somewhat base your harvest time on that. Of course, days to maturity also depends on temperature and rainfall.

A lot of harvesting is personal preference, such as picking something at the size you like best. Some of it is necessary before the produce becomes too large or too old, or before the insects devour it. Sometimes not-quite-ripe produce needs to be gathered before the birds and squirrels decide to feast, the way you pick not quite red enough tomatoes and let them finish ripening on the windowsill.

But how do you tell when something is ripe when you can’t see the vegetable — a crop like … potatoes, for instance? Nothing wrong with grabbling out a few little red taters now and then to mix in a pot of new peas or fresh green beans long before you dig the entire harvest.

Keeping an eye on the potato plants themselves is your best indicator. First off, they will bloom. Anywhere from a week to a couple weeks later, weather dependent, the plants will begin to yellow and start dying. Potatoes don’t like heat, so the sooner summer arrives, the faster the plants will fizzle.

Once the plants begin yellowing, try to pick a dry time to dig your potatoes. The yellowing plants will absorb less water, so if we have a lot of rain, more water will remain in the potatoes. The dryer it is when you dig, the longer the potatoes will last once they’re dug.

Or what about corn? The ears are wrapped all snug in their husks like a bug in a rug. Corn only has a few days between the not-filled-out-all-the-way stage and the oops-the-sugar-has-turned-to-starch stage and you might as well feed it to the chickens and hogs.

Again, the hotter the weather, the faster the corn will turn.

So, how can you tell without wasting innumerable ears by peeling back the shucks?

With corn, the color of the silk is one of the best indicators. The silk, looking like Rapunzel’s hair trailing down the tower wall, comes on golden white. By the time the corn is ready, the silk will become brown and brittle, and some of it may have fallen off. The tassels, like feathery looking topknots growing on top of the stalks, should have changed from green to straw colored.

The ear should feel solid and filled out. Peeling back the shucks a bit and pricking a kernel with a fingernail should produce a milky juice, or sap. If the juice is still clear, the corn is not quite ready.

What about cantaloupes? Or watermelons?

With cantaloupes, the netting should be tan instead of green and you should be able to smell cantaloupe aroma, enough to make you lick your lips in anticipation. Usually if you check them and decide to wait one more day, the turtles and fire ants will beat you to it, because if you can smell the delicious scent of cantaloupe, hungry critters can smell it a hundred times better. The turtles will gnaw a hole in the backside and scoop it out better than a melon baller. Fire ants love to drill a hole and infest the whole thing.

Also, cantaloupes are like Snickers bars for coyotes. They don’t bother picking individual melons, they just use the vine to drag the whole plant with its attendant delicacies away.

Watermelons are a bit trickier. With homegrown, day count is pretty much essential. With store-bought, who knows when they were planted. Thumping, while advocated by many people, isn’t always a foolproof way to judge ripeness.

A much better way is to look at the field spot, or the place where the watermelon rested on the ground while it was growing. The field spot should be yellowish or creamy tan in color.

The stem should be brownish, and the pigtail, the little curly tendril that runs out to the side from the main stem, should be brown.

While we can’t call yellow sweet onions Vidalias anymore, because the only onions that can legally be called Vidalias are the ones grown in Vidalia, Georgia, we can still grow them. We just have to call them yellow granex. You’ll know they’re ready to harvest when the tops start browning on the tip ends. You should be able to see the onion bulbs anyway, because sweet onions won’t make a big bulb unless they’re at least half out of the ground.

Have you ever seen the gorgeous onions grown in Beaufort and Hyde counties? Mattamuskeet sweet onions are a type of sweet Spanish onion. They thrive in the black soil around Lake Mattamuskeet and are usually available around the middle of June.

Every time I read an article about Mattamuskeet onions, it makes me think about a book called “Holes,” a young adult novel written by Louis Sachar. Onions figure prominently in the story, as well as a dried-up lakebed and a lost treasure. If you haven’t read it, give it a try.

It often seems like things take forever to ripen, and then all of sudden, they’re all coming off at the same time.

While it’s hard to wait until crops are ripe, and disappointing when we miss the window, the waiting is well worth it. Nothing tastes like fresh fruits and veggies when ripened to perfection!

Coastal Review will not publish Friday in observance of Independence Day.

As with any interest or hobby, gardening has its own vernacular.

Plants have unique names, sometimes specific to localities, such as the shrub we around this part of the coast call “myrkle,” otherwise known as Southern wax myrtle.

That’s where the scientific names for plants come in handy. Whether you call it “tallow shrub,” “bayberry,” “candleberry” or “myrkle bush,” the scientific name is Morella cerifera.

Plants can be named for where they originated, i.e. Chinensis means China, while Japonica indicates Japan. Some plants are named for the person who found them and made them garden staples. Some plants are named for their distinguishing characteristics.

For instance, our own beloved blanketflower, or Gaillardia, is named for a famous French botanist, Maître Gaillard de Charentonneau. Visitors to the Cape Lookout National Seashore may have seen it blanketing the sand around the lighthouse.

There are numerous different varieties of this flower, but most of them have a vibrant orange or red center with a bright yellow ring around the outer edge. Very attractive to pollinators, these tough plants are drought-hardy, salt-tolerant, deer-resistant and they thrive in sandy soil, making them ideal for coastal gardens. Gaillardias can be annuals or perennials, depending on the variety.

Wait, what? That’s a whole lot of gardening gibberish!

Gaillardia pulchella is the scientific name for the blanketflower most common around here.

“Attractive to pollinators” is self-explanatory — big words for nectar-rich flowers that attract bees and butterflies and sometimes moths or beetles.

“Drought-hardy” means these plants can survive with minimal rainfall or water.

“Salt-tolerant,” well, that’s another one that’s self-explanatory.

“Deer-resistant”… one can only hope blanketflower tastes horrible and eating it gives them a severe bellyache. Deer seem to devour everything else quite happily and with no qualms, and it seems like the more expensive the landscaping is, the better they like the human-provided buffet.

“Tolerant” and “resistant” are somewhat iffy descriptions. Neither means immune. “Salt-tolerant” means a plant can take more salt, either spray or windblown or around its roots, than more delicate plants that salt can burn. “Resistant” means less likely to be eaten but it’s not a guarantee. “Resistant” can also mean that even if the deer eat all the leaves off the plant, it has a better chance of rebounding.

“Annual” means the plant has to be planted every year, or annually.

“Perennial” — longer word = longer life span — means the plants come back on their own year after year.

Annuals tend to bloom over a longer period, while perennials usually only bloom for a short while. A good mix of both will insure a longer season of bloom time.

Just like flowers, vegetables have differing terms. Annual vegetables like tomatoes have to be planted every year, while perennials like asparagus only have to be planted once and then a well-tended bed can last and be enjoyed for decades.

Some descriptors for tomatoes are “determinate” and “indeterminate.” “Determinate” means a big flush of tomatoes and then the plant is pretty much done. Determinate tomatoes, while perfectly acceptable for eating, are especially great for canning or freezing.

Indeterminate — again, the longer word is a great memory jog — bear fewer tomatoes at a time but over a longer season than determinate varities.

Determinate tomato plants tend to stay relatively smaller, while indeterminate get sprawly-crawly, since they bear fruit on new growth.

Green beans can be bush or pole varieties. What difference does that make, other than one you don’t have to cut poles for and for one you do?

Bush beans, like determinate tomatoes, bear a big crop all at once. They’ll have a few more, maybe even another crop, depending on the weather.

Pole beans, on the other hand, need something to climb. While they don’t bear as many beans at one time as bush beans, they bear over a much longer season.

Another interesting gardening tidbit: Maybe you’ve heard the older folks talk about planting by the moon. What difference could the moon make? We’re not planting on the moon!

Within our insular homes, cocooned by year-round heat and air conditioning as well as electric lights, many humans barely notice the night sky, much less what stage the moon is in.

You have to figure that anything capable of moving all the water on the planet four times a day must also have an effect on everything else, so …

… while it may sound silly to let the moon tell you when to plant or harvest, it actually makes sense.

Phrases like “by the dark of the moon” or “on a growing moon” were once commonplace and people back then innately understood the references.

Savvy farmers would only plant on certain dates, knowing that planting at the right time resulted in better yields with less insect damage. Usually reserving days with a waxing, or growing, moon for above-ground crops, while a waning, or shrinking, moon was deemed better for root crops. Time between the new moon and the full moon is considered to be waxing, while between the full moon and the new moon is waning.

Not only that, but harmful insects often hatch out in greater numbers around the time of a full moon, so dusting or spraying your crops beginning a few days before the full moon and keeping them dusted or sprayed until a few days after the full moon can significantly dent the insect population.

Oftentimes, if there’s going to be cold or inclement weather, it’s also usually around a full moon.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac, which is getting harder and harder to find in print form, has long been a staple for information about moon phases and cycles. Benjamin Franklin, considered the father of the modern almanac, published his lunar calendar in order to help farmers.

In earlier times, some people would only set eggs to hatch, or get a haircut, or even start building or dig a hole on the right moon. While some moon-tales reek of hoodoo, a great deal of moon lore is spot-on.

While many of us plant whatever whenever the ground is ready and we have a minute, or a day off, paying attention to the kind of plant you’re installing and where the moon is in its cycle at that time can help you reap unexpected benefits.

With the advent of spring, the insects have sprung!

Just about the time the pollen is letting up and the weather gets nice enough to enjoy being outside — right before the heat and humidity settle in for the long haul — the insect hordes swarm in full force.

Ever notice how there are two kinds of bugs?

Two? Are you crazy? There are actually billions of kinds of multi-legged, winged or not-winged creepy crawlies out there. And most of them reside in eastern North Carolina, just in case you haven’t noticed.

I say two kinds as in the ones we love and the ones we loathe.

Everybody loves ladybugs (Coccinellidae), lightning bugs (Lampyridae), honeybees (Apis mellifera), dragonflies (Anisoptera), and butterflies (Lepidoptera).

On the flip side, pretty much everyone loathes wasps (Vespidae), carpenter bees (Xylocopa), mosquitoes (Anopheles), our ever-popular clouds of gnats, also known as no-see-ums (Culicoides), yellow flies (Diachlorus ferrugatus), and greenheads (Tabanus nigrovittatus).

Why can’t there just be good bugs?

Well, the answer to that is kind of like vegetables, flowers, plants and weeds. Every plant is a weed somewhere. The definition of a weed is literally a plant that is growing where it isn’t wanted.

Same with insects. Like vegetables and flowers, we spend a lot of time and money planting and nurturing versus the free, flourishing weeds we spray, hoe, dig, mow and cuss. Everything has a place. Doesn’t mean we always like that place.

If you spray weed killer in your flowerbeds or vegetable garden, the coveted plants you planted will die right alongside the aggravating volunteer weeds because the “weed killer” doesn’t make any distinction between weeds you want and weeds you don’t.

Same with insects. Whether we like them or not, insects definitely have their place. While we tend to like the cute ones and dislike the bitey ones, we don’t get much choice in which ones we get to have.

If you pay attention, insects can tell you a lot. Many of them are indicators, and by noticing their presence or absence, you can figure out what you need to do.

We might not necessarily enjoy mosquitoes and biting flies, but birds and bats and spiders and lizards and toads love noshing on them. Humans love swallows and dragonflies and such, but as much as we don’t like some bugs, the critters have to have something to eat.

Wasps, for instance. Nasty things with a nasty sting! What good are they?

Lots, as it stands, er, flies.

Bullies that they are, if you notice wasps hovering around your shrubs, pay attention. While wasps can nest in shrubs, oftentimes seeing wasps indicates your shrubs have a pest problem. Wasps feed on the sticky sap aphids and scales produce, called honeydew.

Same with your garden. If you see wasps buzzing around your cabbage or field peas, they’re hunting caterpillars and moths. Sometimes wasps eat the moths or caterpillars, sometimes they sting and stun the caterpillars. Flying the stunned worm back to their nest, the wasp can either chop it in little pieces to feed to its young or … The wasp can shove the caterpillar into a cell and lay an egg on the caterpillar so when the baby wasp hatches, it has a readymade buffet all lined up.

Kind of makes you feel sorry for the moths and caterpillars.

We don’t often think about moths as pollinators, but they can be. They can also be destructive pests.

Just like spotting wasps around your shrubs can indicate potential issues, any sign of what we typically and erroneously call miller moths (Acronicta leporina) but are in reality pantry moths (Plodia interpunctella) in your kitchen or pantry means you need to check all your perishable staples: flour, cornmeal, rice, pastas, cereals, and nuts. 

Pantry moths, sometimes called Indianmeal moths, can chew through cardboard and plastic to lay their eggs, which hatch into tiny caterpillars. You may notice web-looking growths inside boxes or in your pantry. Clean well with soapy water or vinegar and dispose of questionable items.

On the other hand, Luna moths (Actias luna) are absolutely gorgeous and don’t hurt anything. Only found in North America and one of the largest moths we have, these shy, nocturnal beauties are often attracted to outside lights. You’ll know them by their seafoam green color and 4- to 7-inch wingspan.

If you see aphids, ladybugs won’t be far behind. One ladybug can eat up to 5,000 insects in its lifespan, which is usually about a year, if it doesn’t get eaten by something else.

Dragonflies feast on mosquitoes — Yay! — butterflies, moths, bees, midges and even other dragonflies. Dragonflies live somewhere around six months and can eat their weight in insects every day.

Dragonfly larvae, called nymphs and looking like premier denizens of the Black Lagoon, do their part to lower the number of mosquito larvae, or wrigglers. They also eat other aquatic invertebrates, leeches, small fish and tadpoles.

Where the insects are, there also will be birds of every description. Some birds will eat any insect, while others are choosier. Long beloved for their insect eating capabilities as well as their aerial acrobatics, purple martins (Progne subis), seem to enjoy being around people.

In a mutually beneficial partnership, humans have learned to put up gourds or martin houses to encourage these insect exterminators to nest close by. The swallows, in what is called a synanthropic relationship, have adapted to live near and benefit from the proximity of humans.

Those little bats you see flittering and chittering around your yard at dusk — probably evening bats (Nycticeius humeralis) or eastern red bats (Lasiurus borealis) — are worth their weight in gold. North Carolina has 17 species of bats. A single big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus) can devour between 3,000 and 7,000 mosquitoes a night!

While it’s instinctive for humans to want to destroy wasp nests, or stomp spiders, or spray insecticide on everything in sight, as long as the creepy crawlies stay outside and aren’t directly bothering us or damaging our food sources, sometimes we’re better off leaving them alone and letting nature take its course.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could plant gardens all at one time and be done with it?

Sadly, neither plants nor humans are geared to do that.

It’s a good thing gardening is a labor of love. Kind of like raising a child, it’s a never-ending, ongoing process.

Sure, getting the garden planted all at once would be amazing. But there’s a reason it doesn’t work that way. Lots of reasons, actually.

Cold crops — cabbage, collards, onions, potatoes, peas, lettuces, radishes, and many others — thrive in cooler weather. Heat kills them, just as heat increases the number of insects that love to nosh on cold crops.

Warm-season crops — tomatoes, peppers, squashes, green beans and a host of others — can’t take cold, but again, heat increases the number of insects and diseases.

While gardening would definitely be easier and humans might prefer a one-and-done, the disparity insures we have food year-round.

Before there were grocery stores with year-round produce sourced from all over the world, people ate what was local and in season. And hopefully, they canned or dried or otherwise stored enough to last them until the next time that particular crop ripened again.

If we listen to our bodies, we’ll notice cravings for certain things, leading us to search out that particular food. Usually a craving means you are deficient in some vitamin or mineral, and ancient wisdom, wisdom we’ve come to ignore in favor of chemical laden salty/sugary snacks, directs us to what we need.

Nearly unheard of nowadays, scurvy, a disease caused by a severe lack of vitamin C and easily corrected by eating citrus fruits, is ridiculously avoidable now. What would people do with no access to citrus?

Rose hips, the part that stays on the bush if the flowers aren’t picked and they’re allowed to go to seed, is chock full of … You guessed it! Vitamin C! Rose hips are most noticeable in the fall, and sometimes will stay on the plant all winter. Voila! Vitamin C with no citrus!

What’s one of the first plants to appear in the spring? Dandelions. Dandelion greens are full of A, C, K, and some B vitamins.

Think about this: Nomadic peoples followed the herds, moving along with the seasons. The animals, whether domestic or wild, constantly stayed on the move. This ensured a fresh supply of food and water unsullied by the byproducts of large animals scarfing immense quantities of grasses and shrubby plants. Not only that, it kept internal parasites to a minimum because most parasites are expelled in feces and then remain in the soil, ready to infect the next hapless victim. Constant movement ensured longer periods between grazing, thus giving the parasites less of a chance to survive.

Humans, used to following the movements of their mobile food sources, took advantage of the ever-changing variety of foods as well. Berries, fish, game, nuts — whatever was in season, just like the critters they followed.

Is that an easy life? No.

Remaining stationary is much easier than staying on the move all the time, even though nomadic peoples have breaking down and setting up camp down to a science. Staying in one place gives humans a chance to grow crops instead of depending solely on foraging.

Both lifestyles are all about timing.

Nomadic peoples have to be at the right place at the right time: when a certain fruit is ripe, when fish are spawning and easy prey, when edible and medicinal plants are at their peak.

Staying in one place and growing a garden — while still foraging locally —  means a steadier supply of food, provided you’re a good gardener and the weather cooperates. If there’s a drought, or floods, or unseasonably hot or cold weather, it doesn’t matter how good a gardener you are, which is where knowing how to forage or hunt becomes critical.

But staying in one place means you still have to follow growing cycles. When cole crops are phasing out, warm-season crops should be just getting started.

So how do you know when to plant? In our area, we’re blessed with two growing seasons every year. While we can plant cold crops in late winter or early spring, we can get another crop in about the middle of September.

Same with warm-season crops. We can do an early spring crop, and do one later in the summer that usually lasts until frost.

Timing is critical in spring crops. We need to be past the danger of frost, while still getting the crops to set blossoms and mature before the summer heat sets in.

There are endless old sayings about when to plant, with Easter being the most used. Never on a set date, Easter is always the first Sunday after the last full moon after the 21st of March. Partly because there’s always more extreme weather around a full moon, and partly because you want to get your warm-season stuff out as close to the full moon in April as you can. That way it has a month to grow and get stronger before the next full moon hits. While they’re always about, insects hatch out in greater numbers around a full moon.

Among the many sayings about when to safely plant so you can avoid frost, these are some favorites: When the dogwoods bloom. When pecan leaves are the size of a mouse’s ear. When the oaks leaf out. When you hear a whippoorwill. When grapevines leaf out. When the bats come out.

While these are never a failsafe, the older folks noticed patterns and judged planting times accordingly.

Leading to many catchy tried and true sayings, the older people heeded weather, and migratory patterns of birds and animals. What phase the moon was in. Where the sun was in its yearly back and forth between solstices.

Like the old adage “red sky at night, sailor’s delight; red in the morning, sailors take warning,” paying heed to hard-learned words of wisdom is a wise thing to do.

Sierra Club North Carolina‘s Croatan Group has several outreach events planned for this spring.

The environmental organization is to host an Earth Day celebration this week at Carteret Community College, as well as two hikes to see carnivorous plants on nationally protected lands, and a talk on native plants in early May.

Earth Day Learn and Play is scheduled for 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday in the Bryant Student Center on the Morehead City campus. There will be hands-on activities and information booths, a time to “talk trash,” review native plants, and view the living shoreline.

Talks are scheduled on the hour during the Earth Day program, starting with “Wind Energy in NC” at 11 a.m., “Rooftop Solar 101” at noon, “Solar Users’ Experiences” at 1 p.m. and “Training the Workforce of Tomorrow” will close out the day at 2 p.m. Visit the Sierra Club’s website for a full schedule. The college’s Energy and Conservation Committee is partnering with the Croatan Sierra Club on the event.

The nonprofit group is offering the first of two walks to see carnivorous plants in the Croatan National Forest from 9 a.m. to noon Saturday, April 26. The second walk is from 9 a.m. to noon Saturday, May 24, both starting off N.C. Highway 24 in the Newport area.

“This area is dominated by pocosin bogs and large tracts of well maintained longleaf pine forests and savannas, an ecosystem that once covered millions of acres of the Southeast but has now nearly disappeared because development, logging and fire suppression,” organizers said.

The trip will consist of short, easy walks from various parking sites.

Attendees will be able to see at least 13 species of carnivorous plants, including the Venus flytrap, a variety heaths, orchids and other rare wildflowers, “We are holding two such excursions a month apart, as we expect to find different suites of wildflowers in bloom each time,” such as pitcher plants, organizers continued.

There is no cost to participate but participants must sign a waiver. Participants should wear long pants and substantial footwear. Nonmembers are welcome to join the walks. To register, contact Ralph Tramontano at rrtramon@gmail.com. Specific instructions on how to get to the first site will be given to participants when they sign up.

Gardeners wanting to incorporate native plants will have a chance to learn how from a master gardener starting at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 6, at the Unitarian Universalist Church at 2900 Bridges St. in Morehead City.

During “The Power of Native Plants,” Carol Peoples is to talk about how to create a more welcoming habitat for birds, butterflies and bees. in addition to being a master gardener in Carteret County, Peoples is a co-leader of the Central Coastal Plain Chapter of the North Carolina Native Plant Society and serves with the Coastal Landscapes Initiative, a public-private collaboration led by North Carolina Sea Grant.

Tryon Palace in downtown New Bern will bloom with potential for green thumbs Friday through Sunday during its annual spring heritage plant sale and Spring Garden Lovers’ Weekend.

Part of its celebration of National Gardening Month, the plant sale is set for 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. both Friday and Saturday on the Daves House Lawn just inside the palace’s main gate.

Organizers said that there will be a selection of plants grown locally and in the historic site’s nursery yard, as well as a wide variety of annuals, heirloom vegetables, perennials, herbs and other spring favorites.

Admission to the gardens is being waved as part of Spring Garden Lovers Weekend from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday and Saturday and from noon to 6 p.m. Sunday.

Also on Saturday, the Craven Consort woodwind group are scheduled to perform under the palace colonnades. The five-piece woodwind group performs pieces from the 17th and 18th centuries on period instruments.

Plein air artists will be painting in the gardens on both Saturday and Sunday, as well.

Tryon Palace was built in 1770 and served as the first permanent capitol of North Carolina and was home to Gov. William Tryon and his family. The Georgian-style structure was the site of the first sessions of the General Assembly after the American Revolution and housed state governors until 1794. In 1798, fire destroyed the original building. The palace was rebuilt in the 1950s, opening in 1959, according to the historic site’s website.

Often mistaken for moss, lichens are actually quite different.

Like mosses, lichens are found all over the world, with somewhere between 12-18,000 known varieties. The number is probably way more, as new specimens are being discovered every year. America has 3,600 different named lichens, while North Carolina has 1,500 all on its own.

Often, lichens grow on trees or rocks or on the ground, the same way mosses do. Lichens provide many of the same functions as mosses. Birds and animals utilize lichens and mosses for food or shelter. Some lichens are invaluable to humans as natural antibiotics, antivirals, antioxidants, antifungals and even dyes.

Different lichens produce different chemicals, which aids scientists in correctly identifying the lichens, and are often responsible for the variety of colors. Lichens can be green, gray, yellow, orange, purple, blue, red … pretty much any color you can imagine.

Unlike mosses, lichens are not plants. A complex entity that consists of several organisms living in a symbiotic relationship, lichen can grow anywhere from Antarctica to the most desert of deserts.

The most outstanding part you see when you look at a lichen is the fungus that makes up the main structure. Smaller and harder to see, there’s usually green algae of some type, which can sometimes be responsible for the color as well, and often cyanobacteria, or blue algae.

The lichen, algae, and cyanobacteria are photobionts. That’s a fancy word for fungus living in symbiosis with one or more partners.

Lichens grow in one of three main types: foliose, fruticose, and crustose. Foliose has a top and a bottom, like a regular leaf. Fruticose often looks like tiny cupped trumpets, although it can also look like hair or tiny, twiggy shrubs. Crustose is just that: a crust.

If you’ve ever tried to scrape lichen off of something — your car, your house, your favorite shrub — you know it can be as tenacious as Superglue on your fingers … or that bumper sticker one of your kids slapped on your car and you didn’t notice until it had become at one with the paint job. While lichen technically has no roots, it can tag down via rhizines, fungal filaments that attach the lichen to its chosen surface. Others hang on by means of a holdfast, like an umbilical cord.

Lichens aren’t just pretty gewgaws. A great indicator of environmental health, lichens also remove heavy metals and pollutants from the air, trapping them in their fungus.

One of the first species to appear in an area, lichen often pave the way for other organisms. Growing in three stages, or succession, the crustose lichen appears first, followed by foliose, and finally by fruticose.

The crustose is completely flat and appears spray painted on a surface. Foliose then grows on top of the crustose, followed by the cherry-on-top fruticose. If you’ve ever been walking in the woods and noticed non-bark-colored patches on trees or rocks, some looking like alien life forms, you’ve probably been looking at lichen.

Extremely slow growing, at sometimes less than 1 millimeter a year, lichens take a long while to establish themselves. For untold years, the prevailing theory was that lichens were parasitic and harmful to fruit trees and such. That view is changing — almost as slowly as lichen grows.

Sure, lichen grows on dead trees, helping them decompose back into soil. Lichen is powerful enough to turn stone back into soil, albeit at a slower pace than we’ll ever notice. But does lichen really hurt live trees? Scientists are slowly coming around to a “no” answer.

Much like painting a tree trunk white as people used to do, lichen can help protect tree trunks from harsh weather, whether it’s sunburn or cold or biting winds. Lichen gives insects and lizards and things we don’t even know about places to hide, to shelter, to find food and moisture.

As epiphytes, meaning they get their nutrients from air and rain, lichens cause no damage to their living host. They might look harmful with their creepy appendages and scary monster skin and troll hairdo, but the benefits far outweigh the negatives. Due to their algae’s ability to photosynthesize, or turn sunlight into carbohydrates, lichens can, in turn, absorb those same carbohydrates from their alga. In return, the lichen protects its alga.

Lichen can reproduce asexually by shedding bits of themselves and letting the wind or critters spread them about.

This is where falling limbs and hurricanes come into play. Some lichens are capable of reproducing by spores. The spores can only germinate if they land near suitable alga, so this is a less surefire method.

Many birds, such as hummingbirds, use lichens for nest making. Squirrels and voles eat lichens and use them for nesting material. Snails and slugs eat lichens, which don’t digest in their stomachs, thus spreading bits of lichen to new locations, pre-fertilized.

Reindeer moss, or Cladonia rangiferina, which isn’t a moss at all, grows on the ground. Around here, it’s patchy at best, taking root in sunny spaces dominated by pine heaths. Other places, like the Arctic and Canada and Scandinavian countries, it grows prolifically and is the main food source for caribou, also known as reindeer.

Reindeer moss is fascinating, not only because it’s fun to play with, but also because it can withstand the harshest climates. Thriving on nutrient-poor, acidic soils, it can tolerate temperature extremes. Reindeer moss fixes nitrogen in the soil, and due to its low growth habit and bristly texture, catches bits of leaves and debris, which, in turn, enriches the soil.

If you’ve ever noticed, most pictures of lichen contain some moss. That’s because lichens need moisture to prolong their growth cycle, and mosses holds moisture.

While some countries have a long history of eating lichens in various forms, even to making flour out of it, not all lichens are edible. Some are poisonous to humans and animals.

Utilized for a variety of purposes that include deodorants, perfumes, antibiotics, toothpastes, and salves, lichen are a bigger part of our lives than we realize.

For as long as there have been humans, our species has gone through long periods of great knowledge about ourselves and the world we live in, an understanding that we, being humans, periodically and promptly forget and have to painstakingly relearn.

Knowledge can be lost for a variety of reasons: War with its accompanying disruptions, population-decimating diseases, or the climate becoming inhospitable to humans and animals alike. Centuries-long droughts, or excessive flooding, earthquakes, volcanoes, heat and cold have been the downfall of many a civilization.

Losing and regaining knowledge is cyclical.

Partially because of the Industrial Revolution, we’ve been in a long forgetting stage with centuries of hard-won knowledge pushed aside for the sake of convenience.

For untold centuries, skills were passed down from one family member to another, from master craftsmen to eager apprentices.

The Industrial Revolution, along with various wars and famines and pestilences, has changed many present-day civilizations from nomadic herders and more settled farmers to city dwellers.

There’s nothing wrong with living in a city, but herders and farmers need more land in order to produce food — not only land, but also the intimate knowledge of such.

Family farms, although dwindling in number, still produce vast quantities of our food. Other than farmers and herdsmen, too many people have no understanding or knowledge of the skill and effort involved, and sadly, even more think food comes out of the back room at the grocery store.

In reality, our food, whether it’s animal or vegetable, has to be raised. Whether it’s calves, or chickens, or vegetables, there’s a tremendous amount of time involved — and care. Animals have to be fed and cared for. Vegetables have to be planted and harvested. All of this has to be processed and shipped.

All of it is a labor of love.

Farmers have a deep and abiding passion for their land and what their land produces. They have to, for their job is no 9-to-5, heated and air-conditioned, cushy, paper-pushing profession. Farming is 24-7-365 and intensive.

Where am I going with all this?

Circles. Circles and cycles.

Hopefully we’re coming to the end of the forgetting cycle!

While many are willfully oblivious, many more are coming back around to respecting and revering the land that feeds them.

People are relearning how to care for the soil, how to plant and grow their own food, how to pay attention to the weather and the seasons to maximize their land’s potential. They are recognizing that most weeds have a purpose, whether as medicinal or as food, or even just a measure of the health of your soil.

All of those are seemingly simple things that our grandparents took for granted. After two world wars, and having been exposed to other cultures and other ways of life, people eagerly left their agrarian roots and flocked to concrete jungles. That’s because farming was, and is, such unrelenting hard work. After our guys — and gals — came back from overseas, many had no interest in staying on the family farm and working themselves to death, opting instead for city life, and an easier life.

But with that ease comes a cost, one many are unwilling to bear any more.

Sure, it’s easier to go to the store and buy a bag of potatoes, or apples, but those who grow their own know nothing tastes like fresh, in-season produce.

We’ve become accustomed to having produce available year-round. Most folks have no idea when a particular vegetable or fruit is in season and at its peak of flavor, much less how to get it to that stage.

Does growing your own mean only eating what’s grown locally? Not necessarily. What if a certain type of fruit won’t grow in your area? Should you do without? Cherries, for instance. They will only grow well in areas that have cold winters.

While most people nowadays have no desire to spend 12 to 18 backbreaking hours a day taking care of never-ending chores such as chopping cotton and suckering tobacco and hoeing gardens and milking cows, many are opting for a simpler lifestyle that includes learning more about sustainable farming in a small area, or even in containers, and keeping a few chickens in their backyard.

Also, people are again learning how to keep and use a sourdough starter. Some are even getting involved in sourdough to the extent of buying countertop mills to grind their own wheat berries into flour. Far more nutritious — just like homegrown vegetables — fresh-milled flour contains all the nutrition lacking in store-bought flour, due to its over processing and shelf-life-extending preservatives.

While during the past few decades, we had excelled in forgetting how to do things like permaculture, we are now seeing a resurgence in relearning what our grandparents knew.

They wouldn’t have recognized the word permaculture, but they lived it. Everything had a purpose. Nothing went to waste. Cleaning out the barn stalls or the chicken coop served the dual purpose of removing manure in order to keep the animals’ pens clean, and then using that manure as fertilizer. Whatever wasn’t eaten or preserved out of the garden was fed to the chickens and hogs, which then fed the humans.

Life has a rhythm, and our grandparents’ knowledge of where their food came from and how it had been raised was a great part of that rhythm. Those same core values are making a comeback, and we’re better off for it.

In search of easier and faster, we’ve lost that rhythm, that oneness with the land. We’ve lost nutrition and substituted chemicals. We’ve traded honest physical work for working out at the gym, or vegging in front of the TV.

It’s past time for us to get back to the learning stage. Here’s hoping my next few articles will help you, inspire you, and possibly guide you a bit in making your way back to being closer to the land, to understanding more about gardening, and being more self-sufficient, to living a healthier life, and maybe making your soil a little healthier and more productive as well.

The North Carolina Botanical Garden is offering a virtual option for its daylong symposium on the “African American Legacy in Gardening and Horticulture” set for the last Saturday of March in Durham.

The event being held at no charge from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. March 29, in the Hayti Heritage Center on Fayetteville Street will be livestreamed. Registration is required to attend in person or virtually.

The symposium “explores the unsung historical legacy of African American plantspeople, horticulturalists, residential gardeners, and gardening clubs. These personal narratives and generational gardening practices have all too often been ignored, overlooked, or not fully appreciated within the framework of American landscape history, global ethno-botanical viewpoints, and contemporary environmental writing,” organizers said.

The schedule includes panel discussions on urban forestry and Black land ownership in the subaltern south, ethnobotanical and horticultural influence of Africans, African Americans and immigrants on the American landscape, and centering African American narrative stories in contemporary environmental literature and media.

“This one-day symposium brings together a cadre of horticulturalists, historians, beautification advocates, and plantspeople to celebrate the contributions made by these gardening innovators and modern-day practitioners, while further educating and enlightening the public and future generations of plant lovers,” organizers added.

The mission of the university-affiliated botanical garden in Chapel Hill is to cultivate connections between plants, people, and place through science, engagement, and conservation.

Like lush emerald — or sometimes even citron — throw rugs or afghans, moss covers fallen trees and the forest floor in vibrant patches. It drapes over stream-bound boulders like a velvet cloak and fills cracks in sidewalks better than any man-made caulk. It makes excellent terrarium filler. It feels amazing under bare feet.

But what is moss?

Having been around for millions of years, despite its appearance, moss is neither lichen nor fungus. It is, instead, a bryophyte. Nonflowering, in order to reproduce, bryophytes produce spores. Bryophytes have stems and leaves of a sort, but no true roots.

Hair-like structures called rhizoids, while they don’t penetrate down into the soil the way roots do, attach the moss to various surfaces such as soil, bark or rock. Rhizoids also help mosses conduct and retain water as well as nutrients.

As children, we love the magic of moss. It offers all the sensory input even the most imaginative child craves: vibrant colors, velvety texture, lush carpet and pillows.

Say the word “moss,” and everyone knows exactly what plant you’re talking about. Mosses live on every continent, even Antarctica. It can take extremes of conditions, from snowy mountaintops to deserts. Moss can be found growing on trees, on walls, and it’s the perfect plant for green roofs. Because it can subsist on much less soil and nutrients than most other plants, weight isn’t as much of a concern when using moss for “green” roofs.

Moss can tolerate temps from subzero to extremely hot. Mosses produce their own antifreeze so they actually thrive in cold conditions. Too much heat and they just dry out, hunker down, and wait for enough moisture to revive them.

There are more than 12,000 species of moss, each one uniquely adapted to its living conditions. Because it grows pretty much everywhere, humans have utilized mosses for untold centuries for a variety of reasons.

Green roofs, generally consisting of a waterproof layer covered in soil and plants, are not new, just an old idea that’s come back around. Pretty much waterproof itself, once moss tags down, it makes a great roof covering. It’s also a form of insulation.

Dried moss can be used as diapers, or feminine hygiene products. It makes great tinder. Moss can be used to soften bedding areas, or to line boots.

Able to absorb 20 times its weight in water, moss also has antibacterial properties and has long been used for bandages or wound dressings.

Moss, mixed with mud or clay, is useful as chinking between logs in cabins or stone buildings.

Part of moss’ contribution to ecosystems includes helping with erosion and retaining moisture. Green roofs can prevent up to 65% of stormwater runoff.

Moss is a food source, as well as a habitat or spawning ground for many types of amphibians. Birds use moss to “feather their nests.”

Mosses recycle nutrients and provide seed beds for seedlings. By absorbing excess moisture, they create a better environment for the plants and trees around them.

A closeup look at moss is like looking at a miniature rain forest. In a manner similar to rain forests, moss is a bio-indicator of the health of the environment, going so far as to change shape and density or disappear entirely if conditions get too bad.

Among the first plants to reestablish an ecosystem after a disaster such as a wildfire or volcanic eruption, mosses help stabilize the soil. The way they hold moisture and retain nutrients encourages and enables other plant species to come back as well. The act of holding moisture allows mosses to also control humidity, and sometimes temperature as well.

Moss can keep the ground cooler in shady forests, or it can have the reverse effect. Sphagnum moss reflects sunlight, so it keeps the tundra cooler and helps prevent the permafrost from melting.

Moss tends to grow in shady areas with moist, slightly acidic soil. While many people loathe moss, lumping it in the same category as dandelions, it’s a great choice for a damp, shady area of your lawn. And it doesn’t need mowing!

Nearly impossible to eradicate, moss can be deterred by tilling and liming the soil. But, if moss is growing in a certain part of your yard, then conditions are exactly right for it to thrive, which means most sun-loving grasses likely won’t survive in that area anyway.

If you love moss, and want to encourage it to grow, there are several ways it can be accomplished. Moss is a creeper, not a leaper, so keep in mind it’s kind of slow growing. Optimal conditions will encourage faster growth, so keep it moist.

Moss often grows in clumps or in a sheet-like manner, so you can carefully lift the edges and peel some up — make sure it’s on your property or if not, get permission — and transfer your gleanings to the area where you’re trying to establish it.

Another way to encourage moss to grow, especially if you’re trying to get it to grow on rocks or brickwork — an anathema to moss haters — you can make a slurry and pour or paint the mixture on. In a blender, mix about 1 to 1.5 cups of chopped moss and 2 cups of buttermilk or plain yogurt, something to encourage the growth of spores. Let the mixture sit a couple days, and then spread that moss — literally!

Moss on a living tree usually won’t do the tree any harm. Maybe you’ve noticed moss growing up the trunk of a live oak or on thick live oak branches, covered with feathery tufts of resurrection fern (Pleopeltis polypodioides) like hair on a troll doll. By retaining moisture, moss helps fallen trees decay faster and become nurse logs, home to endless fungi and insects, which in turn feed larger critters. Upon returning completely to the soil, these logs may eventually only be marked by a bed of moss. Moss that gives new seedlings a perfect nursery in which to grow and thrive, perpetuating a new generation of forest.

Snow is beautiful while it’s falling, and the way it drapes a soft white blanket over everything like a down comforter.

In an area that doesn’t get much of the white stuff on a regular basis, around here usually a flake or two is enough to cancel school and cause mass panic at the grocery store.

Snow is the only thing you can use to make snow cream, and pretty much everyone has their own favorite recipe. Ours is a can of condensed milk, a splash of vanilla, a couple of fresh eggs, maybe a little sugar. Add some clean snow and you’re set for an amazing treat.

A great deal of the time, if we even get snow, it’s barely enough to make snow cream. Too bad you can’t freeze some for later and make snow cream at leisure, but it won’t work. We’ve tried.

A recent taste of the cold weather Northerners take for granted gave us an opportunity to build snowmen and have snowball fights and stomp wet, muddy trails in and out the door. Drink hot cocoa with extra marshmallows and sprinkles. Devour bowls of steaming homemade soup or slow-cooked roast. Ride the four-wheelers and drag sleds improvised from clam tubs or other improbable items, whooping and hollering kids making indelible memories.

We were blessed this time with a gracious plenty and then some.

With most of the Southeast shut down as if the main transformer had blown, and with good reason, since we have neither the machinery nor the capability to handle this kind of weather, looking at the snow and playing in it are about all we can do.

Many of us had a blast making snow angels, or identifying various tracks and paw prints in the snow. The 3-year-old grandson, while we were out tromping around and enjoying his own personal version of Disney’s “Frozen,” informed me he saw Olaf’s footprints!

All of this is nice, and kind of interesting, but what does any of the above have to do with gardening?

Snow is great for gardens! What?

The old timers often called snow “poor man’s fertilizer.”

Sure, it’s wet and falls from the sky but how does that equate to fertilizer?

The same way rain makes crops grow far better than watering with a hose or sprinklers. As rain falls, it picks up nitrogen and trace elements from the air. Rain is also naturally soft water. It has no chemicals.

Did you know that lightning provides intense energy that breaks apart nitrogen molecules in the atmosphere? A process called atmospheric nitrogen fixation allows the nitrogen molecules to combine with oxygen. This in turn forms nitrogen oxides, which then dissolve in rainwater and are carried to the ground as nitrates, essentially becoming fertilizer.

Snow does the same thing, just without the lightning. While rain and lightning carry more nitrogen, snow is actually the best form of natural nitrogen because, as snow melts, it absorbs into the ground much more slowly. Snow and rain both pick up additional elements, such as sulfur, on their journey from the sky to the earth.

While rain is a quicker form of precipitation, snow blankets the earth. Snow provides insulation to bacteria and other beneficial microorganisms, not to mention plants and animals.

Petrichor, or what the scents of both rain and snow are called, is generally described as an earthy, fresh scent. Since snow is just technically frozen water, it shouldn’t have a scent. But it does.

Kind of hard to describe, one of those “you’ll know it when you know it” things, snow can smell like chlorine, or tin, or electrical stuff like bumper cars, or just plain clean and fresh, like clothes hanging on the line in cold weather. Falling snow can also pick up scents from the area where you live, so pine trees or scent molecules in the air from the earth around you can influence the scent. The experts will tell you that you can “smell snow” because it’s cold and there aren’t many other things, like flowers, around to smell right now.

That’s probably part of being able to smell snow, but the ability to discern when snowfall is imminent most likely comes to us courtesy of our ancestors — the ones who survived. Being able to smell snow coming could absolutely have made the difference between finding shelter in time or freezing to death.

Snow acts as a natural air purifier, latching onto natural and manmade pollutants, removing them from the air, contributing to the fresh, clean scent.

Again, fascinating, but what does any of this have to do with gardening?

Although ours never stays around long, snow adds moisture to the soil — somewhere around a foot of snow equals an inch of rain — while providing a form of insulating mulch. It adds nitrogen and trace elements back to the soil. Not enough that you won’t still need to fertilize your garden, but every little bit helps. Natural is better than chemical, the way real sugar is better than the little pink or yellow packets.

Some plants, like tulips and various types of fruit trees, need a good dose of cold. While the little bit we had won’t likely be enough for tulips or hard crunchy apples to actually thrive here, it will help many plants. Some seeds need a blast of cold, called stratification, in order to initiate germination.

Hopefully the snow blanketed our more fragile outdoor plants, palms and such, enough to keep the cold and the bitter wind from killing them. While we won’t know for sure for a few months yet, plants are tougher than you’d think. Most plants can afford the loss of a few branches or leaves, especially if they have a good root system.

While the snow discommoded many of us, making us miss work or other planned events, most of us didn’t lose power. We had heat and lights and water, and hopefully made some memories.

Despite appreciating the benefits, after our most recent “Snowmageddon,” we’ve all seen enough snow for a while!

Green thumbs can start planning now to attend the 2025 Currituck Home, Flower and Garden Show taking place this spring.

Organized by the Currituck County Extension Master Gardener volunteers, the indoor and outdoor show is scheduled for 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, April 12, at the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Currituck Center, 120 Community Way, Barco.

There will be vendors, educational short courses and gardening demonstrations throughout the day, children’s activities and the Master Gardener plant sale, which will feature vegetables, annuals, hanging baskets, native plants, sustainable trees, shrubs, herbs, perennials, camellias and more, according to the extension.

The Master Gardener program is under the N.C. Cooperative Extension, which has an office in every county. Volunteers are trained by North Carolina State University faculty and staff to offer research-based information about gardening and environmental stewardship to their community.

For more information or additional accommodations contact Currituck County Agriculture Technician Chris Blaha at 252-232-2261, or email ctblaha@ncsu.edu at least 10 days before the show.

Prerequisites?

What? Like … classes?

No. No need to take classes and get certified or anything so drastic. Although classes on any subject are always helpful, permaculture doesn’t require classes so much as knowledge of your subject.

Well, shouldn’t you take classes to gain more knowledge?

Not so fast. Don’t feel like you have to rush right out and sign up.

Knowledge about permaculture is more about observation and utilizing nature. Know your land. Go with the flow instead of swimming upstream. Enhance preexisting land contours and natural elements to create more bounty with less work.

Merriam-Webster defines permaculture as “an agricultural system or method that seeks to integrate human activity with natural surroundings so as to create highly efficient self-sustaining ecosystems.”

An easier definition might be simply “no waste.” Everything in nature is a closed-loop system, meaning everything gets used by something, creating zero waste.

By paying attention to nature and the ways nature uses every scrap, we can strive to recreate the same type of closed-loop system, or permaculture.

In other words, instead of cutting the forest down and plowing natural contours into flat fields, think of permaculture more as living in harmony with your surroundings. It’s observing things and asking yourself questions like:

• At what angles does the sun hit your piece of land at different times of the year?
• What are the times of year when you get more sun, more shade?
• What is the direction of prevailing winds.
• Are there any natural water courses?
• Which way does the water flow after heavy rains? Does it pond anywhere?
• What kind of trees or weeds are already growing naturally there?

Trees and weeds are designed to grow in optimum conditions. If they’re not planted by humans, their seeds will drift on the wind, be borne along by water, or carried by birds and animals. When they find conditions conducive to their growth, they germinate and take off.

Before things like soil tests were available, savvy farmers and landowners would take advantage of normal growth patterns in order to know what crops would grow best and where.

For instance, sheep’s sorrel (Rumex acetosella) and moss are good indicators of acidic soil.

Low nitrogen? Look for clover (Trifolium repens) and lespedeza (Kummerowia striata).

Moist or poorly drained soil? You may see cattails, chickweed (Stellaria media), violets, nutgrass, Virginia buttonweed (Diodia virginiana).

Weeds can even be indicators of pest infestations. If you have an abundance of prostrate spurge (Euphorbia humistrata) or Florida pusley (R. scabra L.), you might have a nematode infestation.

Stinging nettles, (Urtica dioica), as nasty as they can be, are indicative of nutrient-rich soil.

Unsurprisingly, most of these weeds have medicinal or other uses beneficial to humans.

For uncounted centuries, people have even learned to find mineral or metal deposits by paying attention to what vegetation is abundant or lacking.

It’s the same with trees. If you pay attention to what trees are growing on your land, their presence is a good indicator of pH, available nutrients, how wet or dry your soil is, and many other useful tidbits.

So, in order to practice permaculture, do you need a spread in Texas? At least a good-sized farm? Nope! Whether you have a small backyard or half an acre or even substantial acreage, permaculture is more about good stewardship and living in harmony with your space than how much space you have.

Of course, the more land you have, the more you can do with it.

Permaculture advocates for no-till, focusing on improving the soil instead. This can be done by adding compost or manure, using layers of newspaper or cardboard to keep weeds down. Called sheet mulching, or lasagna composting, this process uses alternating layers of carbon (cardboard or newspaper) and nitrogen (compost or manure) to create rich soil. To be fair, I’m not sure how many layers of cardboard it would take to smother pennywort.

If you’re in the market, finely ground bulk mulch can often be obtained from local landfills for a small fee. Termite larvae, also known as root maggots, like ground-up trees and bark, too, so until your mulch is well composted, it may attract these critters. It’s all a part of the process.

If you’d like to see videos of no-till versus till, a good friend recently turned me on to Charles Dowding. Amazing stuff!

Keep in mind as well, with our nutrient-deficient sandy soil, anytime you improve the soil, everything close by – pine trees, grass, sweet gums – is going to send questing roots and shoots into your prime gardening soil.

Terracing works in some areas, even on small patios, and has been used for centuries. The Aztecs used it to great advantage over an immense area. Yours certainly doesn’t have to be on their scale. They also made floating mats of reeds edged with woven branches. Called chinampas, these man-made islands were anchored to the shores of shallow lakes, often by planting willows at each corner. Soil from the lakebeds and shores was added to the mats and, voila! The Aztecs successfully grew a multitude of crops this way.

Walls or hedges can double as windbreaks or trellises. Brick or stone walls were and often still are used around kitchen gardens to keep the unwanted critters out and also to hold heat. Fruit trees can be espaliered — trained to grow flat — along the walls, adding another dimension to the garden and utilizing otherwise wasted space.

Theoretically, once your space becomes more attuned to permaculture — and because everything is on a perpetual cycle, there’s no end date — the insects and diseases should take care of themselves. Hopefully the beneficial insects and bacteria will offset any losses from the unhelpful ones.

Again, coastal North Carolina is a tough area to garden in. Gardeners here on the coast face a multitude of challenges, often causing people to give up and go back to more conventional, less Earth-friendly methods such as using commercial fertilizers and pesticides.

Here’s wishing you success and hoping fire ants don’t consider your lasagna to be their personal Dubai!

What do hedgerows and permaculture have in common?

Hedgerows are multilayered, permanent habitats for birds, animals, reptiles, insects, and a host of other living things, providing something for each of them: shelter, habitat, easily renewable resources for building nests and burrows, water, hidden highways and resting areas.

Permaculture for humans is much the same thing, only the expanded, geared-for-humans type instead of wildlife version. The ideal permaculture — the word was coined from a combination of “permanent” and “agriculture,” with a side of plain “culture” — is pretty much an enclosed, or loop, system.

The idea is to provide for a variety of needs, with everything that can be, recycled and reused.

By mimicking nature, and the way certain plants grow in conjunction with others, humans have figured out how to make hedgerows, or permaculture, work for the benefit of humans.

Working with, rather than against nature, and utilizing practical and thoughtful observation instead of mindless labor, permaculture aims to use less work to gain better results.

Basically, instead of growing one crop over a large area, such as wheat or corn — both products we need and both somewhat counterproductive to grow in small plots of land — permaculture is the method small family farming used to embody.

Everything had a place, and was utilized to the fullest extent it could be. Starting with a kitchen garden full of herbs and some vegetables located close to the kitchen door and easily accessible, the areas would expand out into more diverse areas such as a bigger garden, pastures for livestock, fruit and berry orchards, and larger specimens such as nut trees and woodlands.

By observing nature, it could be determined what plants would grow best and where. Manure from the animals would be used to enrich the soil. The movement of water would be catalogued, and ditches and wells and ponds placed in the best areas to sustain drainage and containment. If you’ve ever lived on a farm with a shallow, usually hand-dug well, you know the importance of easily accessible water.

Besides how much water humans need on a daily basis, the stock needs to be watered, and trust me, a herd of cows or horses or pigs can drink a lot of water! The garden needs water. Orchards need water.

Left to themselves, plants will only germinate and thrive in the soil, light, and water conditions best suited to their needs. Humans like to plant things where we want them, to suit our needs. The two are not always compatible.

This is where permaculture comes in.

Permaculture should be designed so everything has more than one purpose. Need a fence? Plant a hedgerow so it can double as a windbreak or as a trellis. In colder regions, a living fence will also reflect sunlight and heat onto plants and livestock during winter months.

Let a rain barrel double as a home for aquatic edibles, and even for fish, then use the water for irrigation.

Use a chicken tractor – a small, lightweight and portable enclosure – to not only protect your chickens from predators and your garden from chickens, but also to enrich the soil.

Called “stacking functions,” this kind of setup allows for multiple purposes for each item.

Establishing permaculture can be a slow process of trial and error, taking into consideration the needs of plants and livestock and humans, and finding the best solution for each.

For instance, just because you love black raspberries doesn’t mean they’ll grow here. The biggest patch of wild black raspberries I’ve ever seen is on top of Mount Mitchell. That’s a good indication those particular plants need cold weather to thrive, so our coastal heat and humidity and mild winters are no good for them. Same with fruit trees. Our climate is not conducive to peaches, and forget about cherries. Apples do marginally better.

Blackberries and figs and blueberries, however, do great on the coast.

If permaculture is such a great idea, and it is, why don’t more people use it? For one thing, it takes time and effort, and it an ongoing process, not a one and done.

Permaculture advocates for no till, which means instead of plowing, less invasive methods are used, and that means less fertilizer, more water conservation, and less soil erosion.

We’ve been taught that in order to have a successful planting, we need to till or plow. Maybe we were taught wrong. Tilling or plowing tears up the soil, loosens compacted soil, and helps with weed control, but we’re learning that tilling or plowing also destroys fungal networks and organisms that hold soil together, not to mention beneficial root mass.

When was the last time you dug into soil and found an abundance of earthworms? Or any earthworms, for that matter?

The purpose of permaculture is to create a mutually beneficial living space for humans and the environment. We’ve lost touch with infinite interactions that exist between humans and the environment. They’re forgotten, these interactions we desperately need to rediscover.

Permaculture also has drawbacks. In giving ourselves a better habitat, we encourage wildlife, which in turn love to feast on our plantings. More plants and bushes and trees mean more insects. More birds. More birds mean more wildlife, each compounding the others. Foxes and snakes and ticks and chiggers, oh my!

Permaculture can be difficult, especially in our area, with our already challenging growing conditions. On the other hand, at least we don’t have rocks and clay soil to deal with.

Someway, somehow, in order for permaculture to work, a perfect balance has to be struck, otherwise all our efforts turn into a chaotic, unbalanced mess.

For more information and probably a better explanation than I can provide, check out these sites:

• The Permaculture Institute.
• Permaculture: A Beginner’s Guide.
• Permaculture – Sustainable Farming, Ranching, Living… by Designing Ecosystems That Imitate Nature – SARE.
• North Carolina State University’s Growing Small Farms.
• Wild Abundance school near Asheville teaches permaculture, carpentry, and earth skills, offering a degree in permaculture.

Once a vital part of our ecosystem, hedgerows are mostly considered a nuisance nowadays.

Used for well over a thousand years in Europe to delineate boundaries or roads or fields, they have fallen out of favor, both in Europe and here in the United States.

The ones here are often sprayed or string-trimmed or bushhogged into oblivion in keeping with the idea of perfect golf course yards. After World War II, many of the hedgerows that divided smaller fields in Europe were bulldozed and combined into larger, more crop-productive acreage better suited to then-modern farming methods, and also to meet increased housing demands.

Thankfully, Europe has halted the destruction of their hedgerows and they are now protected.

Just to give you an idea of how impenetrable the European hedges are, despite the World War II-era military higher-ups having tons of aerial footage of the countryside around Normandy, our guys got trapped and slaughtered. For whatever reason, the higher-ups didn’t take the hedgerows into serious consideration.

Perhaps they assumed European hedgerows were like the natural ones here; a scruff of bushes and then somewhat clear inside. The hedgerows in Normandy, however, became deathtraps. Our soldiers couldn’t get around or through them, and they became sitting ducks for the enemy.

Whether it’s a hedge — those made up of mostly one type of plant — or a hedgerow, which consists of a multitude of different plants, both serve a purpose. A hedge can be a screen along a driveway or fence, or the hedge can be a fence.

A hedgerow, on the other hand, while it can be a fence, is more often a habitat, a hide-away, a highway.

It’s thought that the first hedgerows originated from strips of woodland left around cleared fields and spaces. Humans figured out that hedgerows worked pretty well for delineating boundaries and keeping livestock from wandering away. The rest, as is often said, is history.

Ancient hedgerows were often planted in a specific way, and the method of construction can be used to determine the age. One method showcases rocks or dirt banked as a foundation for a row of plants above, usually hawthorn whips or something similar that’s allowed to grow straight up before being slashed near the bottom of the trunk and then bent sideways.

Usually done in the winter, the following spring would see the slashed plants sending up lots of straight branches. Successive rows of various plants would be interspersed alongside this main planting. A few seasons of growth resulted in a nearly impenetrable explosion of plants.

Once the hedgerow was started, other than an occasional trimming, those hedgerows thickened pretty much by themselves. With a lot of help from birds and small mammals and reptiles, they soon became thriving ecosystems, teeming with wildlife and plant species.

As the birds perched and roosted, they spread berries and seeds, which encouraged more types of plants to grow. Same with mammals.

Hedgerows can be planted intentionally, but some of the best ones evolve naturally.

Around here, and specifically, the hedgerow beside the Newport Garden Center, provides endless opportunities for observation and enjoyment for me, but to the guys who keep it trimmed back, not so much!

Here, hedgerows consist of natives, especially along ditch banks, where it starts with a few scrub bushes, followed by a few pines and maybe some sweet gums or maples. A bit more scrub grows up around the base of the trunks, and so very gradually — you hardly notice — the hedgerow expands outward.

Privet appears, seemingly overnight, and soon wild roses begin to wind and cascade. Southern wax myrtle, or myrkle as it’s known locally, is next, then maybe poison ivy, wild grape vines, honeysuckle, jasmine, magnolias, persimmons, dogwoods, blackberries, smilax, Virginia creeper, and around the verge, mosses and ferns, thistles, grassy weeds and just plain weeds.

But how? Magic? Kind of.

Many seeds, magnolia for example, have to be scarified. What is that? It simply means the seed has an extremely hard coating that needs to be filed or scratched in order to germinate. When a bird eats a magnolia seed, as the seed travels through the bird’s crop and intestines, the outer coating is scarified. The bird perches on a branch, does what birds do, and voila!

Eventually, instead of a lone tree with a gauzy skirt of scrub brush, a whole ecosystem develops. The outer edges of the hedgerow present a solid front. The interior is made up of a tangle of countless trunks and branches and vines, twisting every which way. This wall and tangle, while offensive to humankind’s sense of order, is a haven for critters.

The more species of plants that end up thriving in a hedgerow, the more diverse the animal life that takes advantage of the habitat: Birds, of course, but also raccoons, possums, squirrels, foxes, turtles, rabbits, insects, lizards, toads, snakes … the list goes on and on.

Unfortunately, no matter how great your hedgerow becomes, you’ll never attract hedgehogs, not here. Wouldn’t that be neat?

Still, hedgerows not only provide above-ground habitat, they also improve the soil and provide homes for earthworms and grubs and snails. Their extensive root systems help hold the soil in place, slowing erosion. The leaf detritus from the fallen leaves adds nutritious mulch to the earth, and will eventually turn into rich soil, as will the windblown leaves that get caught along the edges.

Established hedgerows provide numerous other benefits, not the least as windbreaks. They provide ample forage and shelter, protected paths for animals to travel from one place to another, blossoms to feed bees and butterflies, seeds and berries for the birds and critters to feast upon.

Europeans have long taken advantage of their hedgerows for wilding, harvesting herbs and mushrooms and rose hips, among many other things from their hedgerows. Some hedgerows are even deliberately underplanted with perennial edibles that are left to grow and spread. There are also hedgerows used as a renewable source of firewood.

Far more than just a useless tangle of brambles and weeds, hedgerows are amazing places. Ever-evolving, what was once hedgerow will eventually become forest. Pushing outward, the cycle continues endlessly.

Most everyone knows what witch hazel toner/cleanser is, or has at least heard of it.

An astringent with both anti-inflammatory and antiviral properties, witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) has been used for centuries. Popular for skin care, witch hazel helps with various skin conditions such as acne, eczema, psoriasis, dandruff, and even hemorrhoids. It can be found in liquid, soaps, pads, salves, and several other easily applicable forms.

But did you know … witch hazel is native to North America?

Well, three species of it are, anyway. There’s also a variety in Japan, and one in China. The three here are Hamamelis virginiana, or common or American witch hazel; H. vernalis, or Ozark witch hazel; and H. ovalis, or big-leaf witch hazel.

Also, it grows here in North Carolina. If you’ve ever been in the woods this time of year and noticed a sweet fragrance but couldn’t pinpoint it, you’re not having olfactory hallucinations. Witch hazel blooms in the fall, usually October and November, sometimes into January or so. The blooms resemble tiny fireworks or crumpled streamers, and our variety and the Ozark variety are yellow, while the ovalis tends to be redder.

A somewhat gangly, large shrub or sometimes a small tree, witch hazel blooms when most other plants are dormant, so it can add interest to your winter landscape. Witch hazel is also deer-resistant, doesn’t have many disease or insect problems, and is fairly easy to care for.

Give it plenty of room, because this plant, which loves to be an understory accessory, can get 12-15 feet wide and 20-30 feet tall.

Witch hazel is also the only tree in North America to have flowers, fruit, and next year’s buds all at the same time. Remaining on the tree for a year, once fruit capsules have matured, dried, and eventually split open, they can catapult seeds as far as 30 to 45 feet. This popping makes a distinctive sound, which is where witch hazel gets another of its common names: snapping hawthorn.

So if witch hazel blooms this late in the year, what in the world pollinates it? It’s an especially fair question since its habitat ranges from Nova Scotia to Florida, and from the Great Lakes to eastern Texas.

Late-ranging bees, beetles, and flies do the work, at least until it gets too cold, and moths — specifically shiver moths. Cool name, huh? In the Noctuidae family, owlet moths, or winter moths, can raise their body temperature by shivering. The ability to raise their body temperature by as much as 50 degrees enables these nocturnal moths to fly and find food on cold nights when most every other pollinator is tucked in and bedded down.

Native Americans used a tea brewed from the leaves and bark of witch hazel for bug bites, skin irritations, poison ivy, and scratches. They also drank the tea for its health benefits against coughs, colds, diarrhea, and other ailments. Having shared their knowledge with the first settlers, the settlers then eagerly began using witch hazel for the same purposes.

Witch hazel seems to have been introduced to Europe by several plant collectors who corresponded with early settlers and merchants. Peter Collinson was one, and Mark Catesby, who received a live specimen sometime around 1743. Evidently Mr. Catesby was not stingy with his witch hazel plant.

While Native Americans and settlers boiled the ground up branches and flowers to make a type of tea, the Europeans figured out how to distill it and combine the witch hazel with alcohol, increasing its potency and thus ensuring it became a staple of every medicine cabinet.

In the mid-1800s, a Connecticut minister opened a distillery in Essex, Connecticut. Now, thanks to the work of a few families who have been harvesting witch hazel for generations, over 300 tons are harvested every year.

Witch hazel regenerates well, ensuring a sustainable harvest. Once cut, witch hazel will regrow enough to harvest again in about seven years, with some clumps having been in rotation since the Native Americans were the only ones using it.

Harvesting witch hazel is beneficial to the forest, since it’s done in winter, opening up the forest floor so other species can benefit from extra light and space.

Connecticut seems to be the epicenter of witch hazel forests, unlike here, where the shrubs are hit and miss.

Witch hazel has numerous fascinating properties, not the least of which is its ability to live under walnuts and hickories. Witch hazel is one of the few plants resistant to juglone, a natural herbicide produced by walnuts and hickories that’s toxic to many species of plants.

So how did this plant get the name witch hazel? It had nothing to do with actual witches, rather it’s thought to derive from the Middle- to Old-English wiche or wice, meaning pliant or bendable.

Another line of thought is that the name derived from the practice of using witch hazel as witching, or dowsing rods, to locate water. A Y-shaped, peeled branch of witch hazel –– the wood of preference for dowsers –– was often used when people needed to know where to dig their well. Holding the two arms of the Y, the dowser would walk around until the straight end pulled toward the ground. “X” marks the spot! In a time when wells were laboriously dug by hand, dowsers were valued persons, but of course, being able to dowse might also get you labeled as a witch, so there’s that.

If you spend any time in the woods, you may have walked right by this hiding-in-plain-sight native. The small, oval leaves are a medium green, turning to brilliant yellow in the fall, about the same color as grape vine leaves, and the two are often intertwined, making the witch hazel even harder to spot. The blooms are often camouflaged by the leaves.

Look sharp, and have fun seeing if you can spot this inconspicuous native!

Ask any kid, and most of them can tell you the three things that plants need to grow and thrive, each in appropriate measure: Sunlight. Water. Soil.

Most soils around here are either an ancient sand dune or an ancient swamp, with not much in between.

The sandier soils, like on the beach, tend to be limier.

The darker, muckier soils tend to be more acidic.

And neither of those tendencies is set in stone.

More important than your soil type is knowing the pH of that soil. What is pH, and why is the second letter capitalized and not the first?

A simple definition of pH is, it’s a measure of how acidic or base a substance is, as determined by the concentration of hydrogen ions. The higher the concentration of hydrogen ions, the more acidic your soil is. The fewer hydrogen ions there are means your soil is more alkaline. On a 14-point scale, battery acid is zero, with water or blood being neutral, and caustic substances like drain cleaner or soda being 14. Thus, 7 would be neutral, anything under 7 is acidic, and anything over 7 is alkaline.

As for why the second letter is capitalized, pH stands for power/potential of Hydrogen. H is capitalized because it stands for Hydrogen, and elements of the periodic table are generally capitalized, which makes for weird sentences.

A plant’s pH is what enables it to absorb nutrients.

Hydrangeas are a great natural litmus test for your soil. If you have hydrangeas, the bluer or more purple the blooms are, the more acidic your soil is. If your hydrangeas are pink, your soil is more alkaline.

If you want, you can put sulfur on one side of your hydrangea and lime on the other. Sulfur will lower the pH, while lime will raise it. The change won’t be instant, because altering your soil pH is not a quick thing, but you’ll end up with blue blooms on one side and pink on the other, shading to a delightful mix in the middle.

Our mostly acidic soil is why, even if you plant a pink hydrangea, it’s probably going to turn into a blue-flowered plant.

Why is pH important?

Some plants like acidic soil, some thrive in more neutral soil, some like more lime.

The easiest way I’ve found to explain pH is this: If you go to a restaurant and order a glass of sweet tea, if that restaurant fixes tea the right way … cooking the tea and mixing the sugar in while the tea is hot, everything is copacetic. If they give you a glass of ice tea and packets of sugar, no matter how much sugar you add or how much you stir, stir, stir … the tea will never absorb the sugar. The sugar will sit in the bottom of the glass, there but useless.

Plants are like that glass of tea. If the pH of your soil isn’t right for the type of plant you’re trying to grow, no matter how much fertilizer you throw at it, like that sugar sitting uselessly in the bottom of your glass of tea, the plant isn’t able to absorb the nutrients.

How do you know what your pH is, and how do you change it?

There are inexpensive kits similar to pool testers. All you need to use those is a bit of your soil, a bit of water, preferably bottled, and one of the capsules included in the test kit. Then you simply match the color of your concoction to the provided chart. Those are a good general indicator, and there are also more precise, probe-type, handheld pH meters, something like a meat thermometer.

Better still, a more accurate way to test your soil is to pick up some soil sample boxes along with an information sheet and send both to the soil testing section of the North Carolina Department of Agriculture. As long as you send in your samples BEFORE Thanksgiving and AFTER April, there is no charge except postage. There is a charge in effect during the winter months because farmers are given priority then. In about three weeks, you’ll have your results!

We try to keep the sample boxes at the Newport Garden Center, or you can swing by your local Ag Extension office. The results will tell you exactly how much of which fertilizer is needed, whether you’re trying for a golf-course-worthy lawn or aiming for the prizewinning giant whatever in your garden.

Fall is the perfect time to send in your samples, because whether you need to add lime or sulfur, both need a while to take effect.

Putting out either without a soil test is like adding salt to something you have yet to taste. You might end up with an okay meal, or you might need to add more, or it might turn out to have so much salt it’s crunchy.

Not only can a pH imbalance inhibit plants from absorbing nutrients, it can also cause toxicity by allowing plants to absorb too much of the wrong thing.

A pH imbalance is why you can’t successfully plant things like blueberries and figs, for example, in the same area. Blueberries demand an acidic soil, and figs thrive on limey soil. Put the two together and it’s like trying to put a penguin and a monkey on an iceberg. One’s going to be extremely happy and the other … well, it isn’t going to live long.

Things that can affect pH are soil type, amount of rainfall, fertilizers, vegetation, temperature, and organic matter.

Most of the time you can correct pH by amending the soil. Sometimes the pH is just too far out of whack to correct it to the degree needed. In that case, it’s better to just give in and grow something else. For instance, centipede grass likes a low pH. If your pH is really high, you might be better off trying to grow something that likes a higher pH. Same with gardens.

Penguins or monkeys? You decide.

Spring tends to light up our imaginations after a long, few months of little color, but fall can just as much.

Besides the red-yellow-orange palette we associate with changing leaf colors as trees trade out their summer greens for autumn glory, fall boasts a host of other shades.

Without the summer haze of humidity, the sky seems bigger, somehow bluer, as it turns into a huge azure bowl. The air becomes crisper, laden with the scents of burning leaves — ever notice how distinctive smoke smells in the fall?

Along with the change in weather, our tastebuds change. All summer we yearn for salads and light meals. Fall makes us crave heavier fare. Chili, soup, beans and cornbread, roasts accompanied by tons of root vegetables alongside hot biscuits slathered in butter, apple pies and apple butter and hot apple cider.

Our modern lives often make us feel disconnected from nature, but even if we don’t think we notice, thousands of years of living on this planet ensure our bodies remember the changing seasons. The distinction is as engrained in humans as it is in plants and animals.

Plants other than trees give us hints of the coming cooler weather. From the light purple of wild ageratum (Conoclinium coelestium) to the silvery dew-spangled spiderwebs that seem to be everywhere this time of year to the bright gold of goldenrod (Solidago) and the luminescent yellows of swamp sunflower (Helianthus angustifolius) to the white of saltbush (Baccharis halimifolia), signs of fall are everywhere.

Interestingly enough, and even though they all look very different, ageratum, goldenrod, swamp sunflower, and saltbush are all in the daisy (Asteraceae) family. Tough native perennials, they can become invasive, to the point many people don’t like them. With few disease or insect problems, these hardy natives are a late season boon to pollinators.

Some leaves turn yellow, some, orange, some red, some brown, and some a glorious combination. Oaks tend to be bronzes and rusts while maples and dogwoods are redder. Keep in mind, one of the most brilliantly gorgeous shades of red belongs to … poison ivy, so if you’re picking specimens for fall bouquets or arrangements … “leaves of three, leave it be.”

But why do trees change color? It’s not simply to make us “ooh” and “ahh.” Some trees don’t change much at all, their leaves just drop. Evergreen trees, hence the name, like pine trees, stay green year-round. Some trees, such as live oaks (Quercus virginiana) and bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) hold onto this year’s leaves until newly emerging leaves in the spring push the old ones out of the way. Although, from what I’ve read, cypress trees are supposed to lose their leaves in the fall. A great many of the ones around here do not, making them look dead, rather than trees that are nothing but bare branches.

Trees lose leaves because it is a vital part of keeping them alive.

Leaves are green in the spring and summer because of chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is the chemical that enables leaves to absorb energy from sunlight, called photosynthesis. Using photosynthesis allows the leaves to convert energy into sugars in order to feed the tree.

When temperatures start to drop and days begin to get shorter, the chlorophyll in the leaves begins to break down. The lack of chlorophyll is what reveals the yellow and orange pigments, or carotenoids, that are present but masked during the summer.

Red pigments are caused by a different chemical change. Sugars that get trapped in the leaves produce pigments called anthocyanins.

What determines the level and brilliance of the colors? Weather conditions, with temperature and moisture being the main influences. Warm, sunny days, with crisp but not freezing nights usually causes the best displays. The amount of rainfall, and thus the moisture of the soil, also has a great bearing on whether or not we get an amazing array of fall colors or merely a blah handoff.

Another reason deciduous trees lose leaves is because their leaves are thin and tender, filled with watery sap that freezes easily. When the days become shorter and start cooling off, trees begin sealing the ends of their leaf stems off — kind of like putting your storm windows in place — and pulling their sap down to their roots.

Evergreens, such as pines and cypress, have a heavy wax coating on their needles and scales, and those contain an antifreeze-like fluid that keeps them from freezing.

So what happens to all the leaves and needles that fall? Other than the ones humans spend incalculable hours raking and disposing of?

They’re not wasted, for sure!

Left to themselves, leaves slowly decompose. The original leaf drop covers the ground around the base of the tree, providing essential mulch. This also creates the spongy layer of the forest that absorbs and holds rainfall and keeps the soil from washing away. As this mulch decomposes, it not only returns vital nutrients to the soil, it provides invaluable food and habitat for earthworms and snails and turtles and toads and toadstools and many, many organisms that make up the forest ecosystem.

While humans remain stumped as to some of the myriad interactions, we are understanding more about these puzzles all the time. Like the existence of mycelium — threads of incredibly tiny fungal organisms composing a “mycelium network” so plants can share nutrients.

The leaves that blow around, looking like herds of lemmings scurrying down the road, or a huge dance troupe staging an on-pointe flash performance, are being returned to, and in the process of, making new soil.

As they dry up and get whisked hither and yon, little pieces of them break off. Like individual grains of sand creating and nourishing a beach, eventually those little pieces will become a part of a new batch of soil, enabling plants to grow and holding the planet in place. Some day one of those plants will become a tree, and the cycle will begin all over again.

The therapeutic power of gardening has been richly studied and solidly proven, so it was no surprise that a class on how to grow Venus flytraps meandered quickly into something more like group counseling.

Cocktails paired with happy small talk confirmed a safe space to confess what really happened in each student’s own little shop of horrors.  

“I fed my Venus flytrap bacon to keep it alive.”

 “Mine didn’t even have to work. I trapped the bugs!”

“I set up grow lights and everything, but it died anyway.”

The instructor, Franchesca Davis, a certified plant professional, rare plants collector and horticulture degree holder with six different specializations, had heard it all before.

“People will go above and beyond to keep their carnivorous plants alive,” she said. “I’ve heard of cat food … regular fish food instead of raw meat because raw meat stinks over time.”

In “The Little Shop of Horrors,” Audrey II ate Seymour in 10 seconds. Venus flytraps savor their prey over 3 to 5 days. That’s one of the interesting facts attendees learn during Davis’ carnivorous plant classes at Carolina Home & Garden, in western Carteret County.

Around Halloween, interest in Venus flytraps takes off as gardeners of all skill levels imagine their own miniature Audrey II, and Davis provides more than surprisingly simple steps for growing them.

Venus flytraps, native only to an area within about a 75-mile radius of Wilmington, have been around 85 million years. Despite their endurance, native Venus flytrap populations are in trouble. Increasing development razes their habitat and poachers illegally snap up survivors to sell.

Davis said she hopes that helping people understand Venus flytraps will grow greater appreciation of North Carolina’s most famous native plant.

“If we can work as a community to bring awareness to these things and care for them and not use them just as a tourist attraction, then we can probably keep them in the state that they’re most iconic for,” Davis said. “I want people to picture them growing wild…I want people to go home and plant them in the ground.”

Growing tips

Here are some of Davis’ tips for success with Venus flytraps.

Nature copycat containers

Wild Venus flytraps thrive in peat-rich pocosin bogs. The plants draw moisture from below. Therefore, choose a shallow container with at least one substantial hole in the bottom. Rest the planter inside another container that always holds enough water to keep the Venus flytrap constantly damp, as it would be in a bog.

Not just any soil

Forget fertilizer-enriched potting mixes. Enhanced organic mixes won’t work either. That’s because Venus flytraps digest nutrients not from the ground but from the insects they capture. Davis recommended straight peat moss — no added nutrients — or sphagnum peat, free of fertilizers, plus a little pine bark to aerate the sphagnum.

Watering secrets

Rainwater is best, Davis said. Tap, well, bottled and distilled waters are usually too alkaline and mineral rich. If you can’t collect rainwater, Davis suggested trying a pH adjuster like those used for freshwater fish tanks. Assess your water’s pH level and then add the adjuster to achieve a pH in the 5.0 to 5.3 range, Davis said. Outside, flytraps like rainwater that drips from pine trees rather than direct rain, she noted.

Location, location, location

You might think of pocosin bogs that Venus flytraps love as dark places, but flytraps live “on the edge, right on the outskirts of the swamp,” Davis noted.

“They can totally take full sun.” That means at least six hours of sunlight a day. Light intensifies the Venus flytrap’s red colors and ensures the plant’s success after its winter dormancy. Indoors, choose a sunny window. Outside, plant flytraps in well-lit places that are constantly wet, “fingertip-deep wet,” Davis said, like ditch banks and low spots that receive dappled sun, preferably under pine trees. Pine needles allow more sunlight to pass through and help keep the ground below acidic.

Overwinter and forget it

Growers in colder climates have reported ice-covered flytraps in pots coming back strong in spring. The plants need that dormant period so that they don’t exhaust their energy and die.

“They’re pretty prehistoric. Their cycle of energy and how they conserve it is what has been keeping them alive for so doggone long,” Davis said. Slightly damp soil and cold temperatures are all Venus flytraps need for three to six months. They don’t even require light.

Learn more

• Carnivorous Plant Class, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Oct. 22, Carolina Home & Garden, 4778 N.C. Highway 24, Newport; carolinahomegarden.com, 252-393-9004.
• N.C. State Fair, native garden featuring Venus flytraps and other carnivorous plants, last two weeks in October, https://www.ncagr.gov/divisions/ncstatefair.
• N.C. Native Plant Society news, education and events. The organization promotes the enjoyment and conservation of North Carolina’s native plants and their habitats. ncwildflower.org.
• Stanley Rehder Carnivorous Plant Garden, 2025 Independence Blvd., Wilmington, 910-341-7852, wilmingtonnc.gov/Parks-Recreation/Parks-Trails/Piney-Ridge-Nature-Preserve-Stanley-Rehder-Carnivorous-Garden.

Whether you’re a fig aficionado or the only contact you’ve ever had with figs is spotting a package of Fig Newtons on the cookie aisle, figs are amazing!

Technically not fruit, figs are actually an inverted flower.

While there are only two figs native to the United States — the strangler fig (Ficus aurea) and shortleaf fig (Ficus citrifolia), both mostly found in Florida — there are literally hundreds of varieties of common figs (Ficus carica). Both plants and figs come in multiple sizes.

Most originally associated with the Mediterranean, as well as western and southern Asia, and having been cultivated since ancient times, figs have since spread throughout the world.

Much easier to grow in our area than say, apples or peaches, figs abound. Because they are uniquely portable and they love our climate, figs do well here.

Brought here across the ocean by the early settlers, uniquely portable in that no live plant is needed, especially on small ships — have you ever seen the replicas of the Nina or the Pinta in Beaufort? They look more like sketchy dinghies you wouldn’t dare go out of Taylors Creek in, much less brave crossing the Atlantic. Especially if, as most passengers were, one was required to remain below decks! Those people were tough and determined to make better lives for themselves in the New World.

Part of that better life included bringing starts from the Old World and hoping they’d take root and thrive here. The only thing needed to get a fig going is a cutting. A stick. One that doesn’t even have to have roots or soil.

So, on our theoretical journey in the hold of a ship that could qualify for ship-in-a-bottle status, there would be no need to waste precious water on keeping a plant alive. Besides, plants have to have sunlight, also in short supply when you’re stuck in the hold.

Once the travelers reached land, all they had to do was pick a place to stob their stick and keep it watered. Planted in the right spot, figs can grow fast, and they can get big.

There are numerous named varieties of figs, such as brown turkey, Celeste, Chicago, black mission. Partly because figs are so easy to propagate, most of the time we are uncertain just which variety we have access to, especially around here, although brown turkey is widespread, as is Celeste.

Confounding the identification, cuttings tend to be named for who or where they came from. Thus we end up with Grandpa Joe’s fig, or Aunt Thelma’s fig, or Davis Island fig, or any of a million other colloquial names. Not that a name matters too much as long as you’re not set on a particular variety and it’s a tasty fig.

Ocracoke seems to have a good handle on fig varieties, as evidenced by their annual Fig Festival the first weekend of August. Some of those varieties have been on the island for hundreds of years. They sell items made with figs — jams, jellies, preserves, cakes — and rooted cuttings.

Figs like limey soil, full sun, and a lot of water. Not standing water, just a lot of water. They do well on the beach because of the shell content, and you may have seen older folks pile oyster shells around the base of their figs. Not only did the shells provide calcium — lime can be made out of burnt oyster shells — the figs derived nutrients from the bits of oyster and seaweed clinging to the shells. Bonus, it kept the weeds down.

Because they come from cuttings, figs are clones of the mother plant. The fig you get from a cutting will be exactly the type of fig the cutting came from. Since the cuttings don’t know they aren’t still part of the mother plant, they often bear the first year. Maybe not much, but a few. Figs can be started from seed, but that’s a whole process and you might not get a plant with an edible fig, depending on how the seed got pollinated.

Some figs are parthenocarpic, which means they don’t need to be pollinated, and it also means you only need one plant to ensure a good crop. Some figs are pollinated by tiny wasps.

Most of us can readily recognize fig plants when we see them. Did you know figs are in the same family (Moraceae) as mulberries? If you look closer, you’ll notice fig leaves aren’t all the same shape. Just like mulberries, fig leaves can be any of several different shapes.

Figs are pretty much done for this year. The leaves will drop soon and the plants will go dormant, but for now the leaves still smell delicious. Some people swear by them for making tea as a panacea for a whole host of ailments. Fig leaves have been used as such for thousands of years.

Cuttings can technically be taken any time of year, but … not only are the leaves prickly and scratchy like okra, leaves and stems produce a sticky, milky white sap full of furocoumarins that can be a skin irritant, especially when exposed to sunlight. In extremely sensitive people, contact can cause severe burns. On the other hand, the sap can also be used in medicines. Crazy, huh?

Wait until about December, when the leaves have dropped and the sap has retreated. Taking a cutting is as simple as … taking a cutting. The ones that seem to do the best are the straight branches, about the size of your index finger or a little larger diameter. You can do tip-end cuttings only, or you can cut a long branch and section it off in about 4-inch pieces. Stick more than you want because only about 85% of them will root. Any sort of good potting soil can be used, and large pots can hold multiple cuttings. Push them into the dirt enough to make them stand up. Pushing them all the way to the bottom will prohibit roots from forming. Keep them watered. Once they leaf out, usually in a couple months, they’ve generally rooted and can be moved to their own pots.

While most people think spring is the best time to plant a garden, we in the South are blessed to have two planting seasons, and the fall planting season is upon us.

The temperature may still be well into the miserable range, but signs of fall are all around.

Resembling tiny brown paper bags tied at the top, egg sacs from Argiope aurantia — the golden orb-weaver spider, aka zipper spider, or writing spider — are tucked here and there. The spiders have already finished their life’s work, leaving no messages behind, only their tattered webs, slowly disintegrating, and hopefully next year’s progeny.

Pieris rapae, those pesky whitish-yellow, zig-zaggy butterflies are everywhere, laying eggs on our cole crops, eggs that then turn into hungry, hungry caterpillars. Unlike the slow, swoopy swallowtails and monarchs we dote on, the sulphurs, or Phoebis sennae, and white cabbage moths seem to avoid being hit by cars like they’re magically allergic to metal.

Muscadines are ripening, filling the air with their heady scent, and sweet autumn clematis is blooming, festooning and perfuming hedgerows with lacy shawls.

Persimmons are filling out and getting ready to change colors, although it rarely gets cold enough here to ripen them before the raccoons and deer and other critters eat them all. Trust me … If you think dark green, unfrosted collards are bitter, they have nothing on unripe persimmons. They will turn your mouth inside-out like wet cardboard soaked in alum.

Gardening here is challenging enough with our sandy soil, deficient in nutrients, although weeds grow like … weeds. On steroids. Add in salt-laden, extremely windy air, excessive heat and humidity, abundant insects and diseases, and it’s a recipe for a first-class ticket on the struggle-bus.

And yet, those of us who can’t help ourselves keep right on trying.

Fall crops tend to do better with a little less work involved. Once we make it past the heat and into cooler weather, there should be fewer insects, less disease. If we’re really lucky, even fewer weeds to compete with what we actually want to grow.

People used to start planting here around the middle of July. Then it started staying hotter longer. So, they backed off to the middle of August. Now, even that’s still too hot for seedlings that need cool weather to survive and thrive.

Most folks have held off even later, until around the first of September. For about the last 15 years or better, somewhere along the second week in September, we’ve either gotten a 10-inch rain, or a hurricane, or both. So, many gardeners have started waiting later still, until about the middle of September to plant their fall crops.

Remember when we used to get a frost — or at least a nor’easter with its attendant cool spell — about the middle of September? October at the latest? Sure, it would warm back up, but we knew it would soon cool off for at least a couple of months. Now we’re lucky to get our first frost by December, and we rarely get more than a day or two of cold here and there.

So, unavoidable weather woes aside … What can you plant now?

As far as actual seedlings, it is time for collards, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and brussels sprouts. Beets and chard are good candidates, too, along with rutabagas and bak choi, lettuce and spinach – although the latter two are even less heat-tolerant, so planting them later won’t hurt anything.

Most fall crops can be planted from seed as well, although if you’re starting from seed, it might be getting a tad late for some of them, such as broccoli and cauliflower. While they need some cool weather, cooler temps also mean the plants don’t grow as fast, so they need to be a certain size before it cools down in order to produce.

Cool-weather crops tend to have smaller seeds, than, say, green beans or cucumbers or other warm-season crops. Because the seeds are so much tinier, it is even more of a struggle to get them to germinate during 90-degree-plus weather. If you haven’t walked barefoot on the beach, you probably don’t realize just how insanely hot sunbaked soil can get! Those tiny seeds contain very little life support, so if they germinate and it’s blisteringly hot, they wither and die, making you assume they never germinated.

Crops that do well from seed include beets, carrots, rutabagas, turnips, and salad greens, such as rape, kale, mustard, spinach and lettuces, even a few late radishes, if you’re so inclined. Maybe even try some snow peas or May peas. If you like spring or green onions, they should be available to plant around mid-September.

If you’re planting winter rye grass, or clover for cover crops or bee forage, plan for mid-September. Most people only think about planting rye when their neighbor’s yard stays green all winter, and clover when they see it blooming in the spring. Rye is a cool-season annual that dies out when it gets too hot. Clover is also a cool-weather crop, needing to germinate in the fall so it can get its roots established before the next summer, when it gets too hot and clover either dies or goes dormant.

As far as diseases and insects, wet weather and dry weather each bring their own challenges.

Too much rain and you get root rot and funguses.

Too much dry weather and you get stunted plants and sometimes spider mites and grasshoppers. Those huge green grasshoppers have been lurking all summer, just waiting for you to provide them with their last meal.

Then there are aphids, those under-leaf pests that are like plant leeches and just love tender new growth; scorch bugs; stink bugs; cabbage loopers.

All of the above are well aware of the fall push and are trying to get the last word so they can return next year and make you miserable again.

On the other hand, all of those are prime fodder for birds, spiders, wasps, lizards and skinks.

Despite all the deterrents, gardening is still a pleasure for many of us, and nothing beats the taste of homegrown produce!

As anybody raised in the South knows — or anyone who’s worked in tobacco, or even driven past a field of it — tobacco blooms are usually pink or white.

Not so much anymore, but once upon a time, tobacco was an invaluable cash crop around here. Tobacco has been an important crop for thousands of years.

Ever wonder what tobacco looked like 2,000 years ago?

Before we delve into that, think about tobacco seeds. More like dust than what we think of as actual seeds. Tobacco seeds are tiny. Tinier even than mustard seeds.

The best way to preserve seeds is to freeze them, because heat and humidity destroy seed viability. Seeds have no idea whether they’ve been frozen for five minutes or 500 years, which is why we have seed vaults like Svalbard, set into the side of a glacial mountain on an archipelago above Norway. Or the Millennium Seed Bank Project in the United Kingdom. There are several in the U.S., as well as others all over the world.

While most of those are climate-controlled fortresses, many individuals also save seeds.

The Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa is the largest nongovernmental seed bank of its kind. The SSE, by growing select varieties of their heirloom and open-pollinated seeds and then saving new seeds, called regenerating, can not only keep the seeds in their bank fresh, they are able to share them with gardeners around the nation. They also send backup seeds to Svalbard.

Why is it important to save seeds, especially when one can just go to the store or online and order more any time one needs them? Right?

Humans have been saving seeds for as long as there have been farming humans. Over countless centuries different regions have developed varieties that thrive in their specific area. Seeds are also easy to carry, so sharing, or transporting them if one has to move, is fairly effortless.

Oftentimes, seeds were passed down from generation to generation, as treasured heirlooms. As long as families had a few seeds, they were pretty much assured food for the coming seasons. One seed usually produces one plant, but that single plant can produce innumerable seeds.

Seeds are expert hitchhikers. Whether windblown, or carried by water, or in the gullet of some critter, or stuck to the paw or pelt of an animal, seeds do what they’re supposed to do … disperse over as wide an area as possible in order to insure the continuation of their species.

Modern man has engineered seeds to come up all at the same time and to be uniform in growth in order to get the most out of crops. Left alone, seeds germinate randomly, with some sprouting and coming up now, some in a bit, and some quite a bit later. In some cases, even years or decades apart, just in case there’s a late frost, or a flood, or a drought, or a plague of insects, or any one of a hundred other reasons why they might not thrive at that particular time.

Estimates say we, as humans, have lost 75% of our seed diversity in recent times. Why is that important? Instead of having X number of types of … wheat, for instance, we’ve become dependent on just a few types to sustain us. Types that yield more, or are easier to grow, or are just plain better looking. That’s all well and good until something happens to eliminate those few types and suddenly, there’s no way to grow … wheat.

Which is why seed banks are invaluable. Not only do they ensure genetic diversity, they are also a safeguard in case of tragedy, war, wildfires, or any other disaster, man-made or natural.

Heirloom, or open-pollinated, means seeds grown from those plants can be saved and used the following year, and from those seeds you will get the exact fruit or vegetable you grew last year.

Hybrid seeds have different parents, and while you can usually save the seeds and grow them, you will get one or the other of the parents instead of whatever you got the seeds from.

Why choose open-pollinated over hybrid?

Often, hybrid seeds were developed to ensure larger crops, more disease resistance, more insect resistance and longer-bearing seasons.

Open-pollinated, as the name implies, are just that. In order to keep the variety you’re striving for, conditions have to be met or the heirlooms will create their own hybrids, which is where new varieties originate. Other crops in the same family need to be far enough away that the bees and wind won’t cross-pollinate them. The crops have to be grown long enough to let the seeds mature, and then they must be harvested and saved.

Circling back around to the original question about 2,000-year-old tobacco, and why saving seeds is important: Around 20 years ago, a longtime customer came into the independent garden center where I work and have worked for decades. He asked me if I would plant some special seeds for him. I said, “Sure.”

This gentleman went on to explain that a friend of his had been caving in Kentucky. The friend found a pottery jar full of tobacco seeds. The pottery jar was dated to …

… Two. Thousand. Years. Old.

Showing me the pinch of seeds he’d been gifted, my friend offered them to me.

More than willing to try, I didn’t think the seeds would be viable after all that time, and I explained to the gentleman about saving seeds and the odds of them being anything more than old dust. We agreed to plant them and see, with no expectations and only the faintest hope our experiment would work.

To our surprise and delight, the seeds sprouted!

We grew it up, and he harvested both leaves and seeds. This gentleman is big in the Cherokee Nation, and since the cave was on Tribal lands, the tobacco belongs to the Cherokee Nation. My friend gifted it back to the Cherokee, and they use it in their ceremonies all up and down the East Coast!

Instead of being the large-leafed, flue-cured variety we’re used to seeing, the ancient tobacco is a burley type, about 18 inches tall. The blooms are chartreuse and look like little bells.

The Cherokee have a long tradition of saving seeds, as evidenced by the seed in that pottery jar. In fact, in 2020, the Cherokee Nation became the first Indigenous group from North America to send seeds to Svalbard — the seeds of nine heirloom food crops that have been grown by the Cherokee since before the Europeans arrived.

Whether you’re a beginning gardener or one who’s been growing beautiful flowers and vegetables for years, one thing is clear: The fastest and easiest way to start a garden is by keeping it small.

“Even on a limited budget it is possible to get a garden going quickly,” Barbara W. Ellis writes in her new book “Container & Small-Space Gardening for the South: How to Grow Flowers & Food No Matter Where You Live.”

The author of two dozen gardening books, Ellis is an expert grower based on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Her latest title is an easy read that covers all of the big questions about container and small-plot gardens in the notoriously hot and humid South: which plants to choose, what pots work best, how much to water, how often to feed, and the right spots for small gardens, container or otherwise.

Ellis also shares gardening advice from her years of real-life experience, including how to be an environmentally friendly gardener. She even digs into seed starting, pest management, garden design and end-of-season tasks.

Best of all, Ellis’ practical instructions, alongside gorgeous photos, move smoothly from chapter to chapter, building confidence and excitement to get out there and grow.

Here are some of Ellis’ top container- and small-space gardening tips.

The easiest way to garden

A container garden is the easiest way to garden, “provided you start with big pots,” Ellis says. Large pots hold water, thereby requiring less watering. “I think beginners start off with small pots, 10 or 12 inches, and they can’t keep up with the watering. One of my first containers, years ago, dried out so quickly that if I watered it in the morning it was nearly dead by the time I got home from work.”

Containers are a smart way to graduate to small-space gardens. “The minute you start planting in the ground, it is more exciting but probably more complicated,” Ellis says. “Large containers make it possible to learn about growing plants, plus how to combine colors and plant forms, plus what kind of care makes them look better and be healthier.”

The dirt on sandy soil

Eastern North Carolina’s dry, acidic, sandy soils present frustrating challenges for growing healthy plants. How can gardeners overcome struggles? “Organic matter, organic matter, organic matter,” Ellis says.

“Sandy soils burn through it more quickly than any other soil type.” Add organic matter every time you dig a hole. Keep soil covered with mulch, even spreading finished compost under mulches like pine needles. Additionally, minimize digging “because that increases the rate at which the organic matter gets used up,” Ellis says.

How water should flow

Whenever you water, “water until water comes out of the bottom of the pot or the top few inches of soil are wet. That encourages roots to go down into the soil and not crowd around the surface, which makes them more susceptible to drought,” Ellis says.

Carefully select locations. “A pot or garden that receives sun in the morning and shade in the afternoon will need watering less often than one that receives shade in the morning and sun in the afternoon.”

Keep an eye on plants to understand their moisture needs. “I have learned to look at the leaves of plants to figure out when they need watering. The shape changes as they begin to wilt, and the color also changes.”

Resisting temptation at the plant store

“Container & Small-Space Gardening for the South” stresses the value of balancing your gardening dreams against location reality, right down to calculating how many plants you need to save time, money and effort.

Useful lists help you select easy plants for sun and shade. Still, how can you control wishful thinking while being color-bombed at the garden store on the perfect spring day?

“I use a hard-and-fast personal gardening rule, ‘Be attractive or die.’ That keeps me from bringing home plants I know won’t do well. If I have killed something three times, that’s it,” Ellis says. “This approach also made me get excited about looking for plants that thrive where I garden.”

Ellis advises visiting local public and private gardens and native plant organizations to learn what plants work best for your area.

What full sun really means down south

Ellis’ book is full of guidance you might not think about, like how to assess sun and shade patterns. Garden stores may label plants as “full sun,” meaning they need six to eight hours of direct sunlight a day, but Ellis notes that they don’t necessarily need that sunlight all at once.

“While most food crops prefer full sun, some — tomatoes, for example — will produce fruit in part shade in southern gardens,” she writes. Always remember that many plants markets might recommend for sunny areas refer to northern gardens, Ellis adds. Those plants will need more shade and often more watering in the south.

Saving money and the environment

Plastic wastes like soil bags and plant containers harm the environment. Ellis composts all potting soil for reuse, being careful not to add diseased plant parts or seed and plant parts from invasive species. “Most years, I also just replace about the top third of the potting medium in a pot.”

She donates surplus soil to fellow gardeners. Ellis uses some of her extra soil to pot plants she divides and then donates to a local garden club’s annual plant sale. She recycles and refurbishes planting containers, too. Even terra cotta pots are repairable, Ellis writes.

The public is welcome to join the Carteret County Master Gardeners 10 a.m. Feb. 12 when they will be “Exploring Native Coastal Plants of the Carolinas” with Paul Hosier, professor emeritus of botany at University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Hosier’s publication, “Seacoast Plants of the Carolinas: A New Guide for Plant Identification and Use in the Coastal Landscape,“ focuses on the beaches, dunes, maritime grasslands, shrub thickets, maritime forests and salt shrub thickets.

The presentation is part of the organization’s annual public education program and will take place at the Crystal Coast Civic Center. The public is invited for refreshments at 9:30 a.m. before the lecture.

In Hosier’s work, he identifies invasive plants, landscaping with native coastal plants, native vegetation and coastal storms. He also addresses climate change and the flora on the coast, provides profiles for a variety of plants and where to view coastal plants and plant communities in the Carolinas, according to information provided by the Master Gardeners.

Hosier has a doctorate from Duke University and is professor emeritus in the Department of biology and marine biology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.  After 41 years of teaching at UNCW he retired in 2013 but remains an adjunct professor there. He has researched the impacts of off-road vehicles on shorelines and hurricanes on the vegetation of barrier islands as well as the ecological processes of barrier islands in the southeast.

Need a little help planning your spring garden?

North Carolina State Extension’s Dare County Master Gardeners is hosting a Library Garden Winter Series at the Dare County Libraries in Kill Devil Hills and Manteo, according to an announcement from Dare County Libraries.

The hourlong programs begin at 11 a.m. Wednesdays and will alternate between the Kill Devil Hills and Manteo libraries. Interested green thumbs can attend one or all of the programs. The free presentations are being provided by the Dare County Master Gardeners Speaker’s Bureau. Reservations are not required.

The master gardeners will kick off the 2020 Garden Series Jan. 15 at the Kill Devil Hills library with Plants that Survive & Thrive on the Outer Banks. The master gardeners will focus on the following seven plants that have done well in the tough conditions of the Outer Banks: ice plant, salvia, coral honeysuckle, American holly, camellia and red bud. This program will also be presented Feb. 19 at the Manteo Library.

Integrated Pest Management is a new program that will be introduced at the Manteo Library Jan. 22 that help gardeners formulate a pest-management plan for weeds and insects in landscapes and gardens.

Another new program, Native Plants for 4 Seasons, will be presented Jan. 29 at the Kill Devil Hills Library. Master gardeners will talk about plants that are well adapted to the climate, weather conditions, soil types and other factors affecting gardening.

A presentation on Herbs is Feb. 12 at Kill Devil Hills Library will provide information on growing and using herbs to enhance your garden and food preparation.

During the Container Gardening program Feb. 26 at Kill Devil Hills, attendees will learn the basics for growing vegetables and flowers in containers, and learn about types of containers, preparing pots and soil mixtures as well as ideas for decorating landscapes with containers.

New to the library series is a presentation March 11 at the Kill Devil Hills Library on Orchids. Learn which orchids are best for the home gardener as well as their care and requirements.

Color without Flowers: Foliage Takes the Stage is March 18 at the Manteo Library and will show how to use foliage plants in landscaping.

The 2020 Garden Series will wrap up with Irrigation for Container Gardening March 25 at the Kill Devil Hills Library to help attendees find ways to spend less time watering.

For more information, call the Dare County Library in Kill Devil Hills at 441-4331, the Manteo Library at 473-2372, or stop by the library to pick up a program brochure.

Learn more about the program and Dare County Master Gardeners on Dare County’s North Carolina State Extension website.