Spring chores and the a-mattock-ing man!

It’s been a quick spring coming! While I was working Monday, I saw a flock of butterflies flit around the garden. The weather keeping me thinking I should be planting the cucumbers and the peppers soon. As this rate, we may be able to plant early, but you never know. North Carolina weather is notorious for those late cold snaps.

Anyway, there is no way this wacky weather can hinder my excitement at seeing the blueberry bushes budding out Saturday! I think I did a mile-long circle around them admiring the creamy blossoms. Nothing says “it’s time” like

blueberries. I’ll keep you posted about when they open up!

I spent part of Monday’s work day fertilizing the blueb

erries with 6-4-4 from Happy Frog and adding compost and peat around the bases, just for that extra boost. I also fertilized the blackberries and raspberries with the same fertilizer. Those bushes have come a long way from the little canes they were last year.

N.C. State has a world-renowned blueberry breeding program and they’ve released quite a few new cultivars in the last few years. We are also fortunate in the Triangle to have quite a few blueberry growers east of here. Look out for the blueberry festival in June.

I am pleased to announce that the sweet potato sharing partnership between Drs. Yencho and Pecota and the Duke Lemur Center has begun again. The sweet potato breeding program at N.C. State is the largest in the country and North Carolina itself is the largest sweet potato producer in the country. Majority of the sweet potatoes you find in the grocery came out of N.C. State’s breeding program. The professors harvest tons of potatoes each year to analyze the dry weight, uniformity and color, just to name a few characteristics. They have graciously agree to donate leftover Beauregard and Covington varieties (the two varieties you most often get in the grocery store) to the lemurs. Tune in in a couple of weeks for an interview with the researchers!

It’s still not planting time yet, despite how convincing the weather tries to be, so that means more soil and hole work. I spent Saturday and Monday turning new soil into the new area of the garden and chopping up the cover crops (pictured above) in the old area of the garden. It’s important to incorporate cover crops early so they can decompose and release nitrogen in time for your plantings. Check out this wonderful resource by Debbie Roos, extension agent for Chatham County in North Carolina.

The garden made a lot of headway Saturday thanks to Justin Durango, a fellow N.C. State student in landscape design, rescued from engineering. He came out to turn soil and do some mattock work in the garden. He is much more gentle than this post-mattock-ing photo (check out the photo album on the left), but he'd just finished making more than 30 holes. Sadly, I am not coordinated enough to use a mattock and I am okay with that. I respect the tool and those who can use it, but I am not one of them. Lucky for me, Justin proficiently tore through the hard soil in a new area of the center so we can establish some areas for melons to stretch out their vines. It will be called the Justin Durango Garden henceforth!

Thanks to Diane Mays at the N.C. State greenhouses in Marye Anne Fox Labs, the Duke Lemur Center has bench space to start seeds. On March 2 I spent a couple hours sowing almost 250 seeds of pepper, herbs, melons and squash, just to name a few, for the garden this season. I checked them Monday and they’ve exploded. The cucumbers and squash have their first true leaves coming through. Just one more thing making me want to get out there and plant!

Lucky for us at the garden it’s been warm enough to sow some more lettuce, so we sowed two jam-packed rows of it! We should get our first harvest in six weeks, if the weather stays mild enough. The small lettuce patches planted over the winter have yielded almost 10 pounds after two harvests.

We’ve had a productive year. In the next post I will remember to give the totals of produce we’ve recorded since November. Needless to say it’s been more than 100 lbs.!

Winter Work

It’s still hard to believe it’s February when it feels like March. I keep having to remind myself what time of the year it is.

One of the Lemur Center technicians asked me if I liked winter gardening better than summer gardening today. I had to reply I liked summer better, even if the hot, sticky North Carolina summer days are brutal. Most of the winter is spent building soil and beds, but the summer is the time you get to sit back (when you’re not slaving in the summer heat with a hose) and watch your plants grow and produce.

This week I spent most of my time turning the soil in last year’s beds. We still have a gooey layer of clay, but the more it’s worked and the more organic matter we add to it, the better it will be for the plants. I also started an experiment: I turned four beds, but left two uncovered and covered one with grass clippings and the other with leaves and grass clippings. I am curious to see which will have the better soil…

The Fava beans (Vicia faba) are bouncing back finally. We planted these back in December, but the unusually hot weather almost killed them. All of them have new green growth on them and many have flowers on them. Hopefully the seasonably cold weather will return long enough for these to produce pods.

After a suggestion to grow Malabar spinach (Basella alba) for the lemurs, I started a new bed near one of the enclosures so we could use the fencing as a trellis. The ring-tailed lemur couple will definitely appreciate the shade during the summer months. It will be crucial to build up the area because the soil is full of sand, concrete and white, slick clay. Malabar spinach likes organic matter so I added chicken compost and grass clippings this week to kick things off. Definitely more work to be done though.

The worm populations in our three bins have at least doubled since we started them last fall. Each bin consumes a couple pounds of kitchen leftovers each week and we have three to four inches of worm castings to prove it. I pulled back a corner in each bin and pulled out a handful of healthy worms and worm castings. I can’t wait until April when we separate them and add the castings to the beds. Black gold, as I say. See the video!

Finally, I am spending my weekend counting seeds! Doesn’t sound fun? Oh, but it is! Charlie Welch and I went seed shopping last week, so I need to know how many seeds I have so I can plan the garden layout. All I can say is we’ll have enough cucumbers, squash and peppers to feed an army of lemurs. Thanks to the N.C. State greenhouse managers we have space to start all of our seeds.

Remember, keep checking out the photo album on the right for updated photos of the garden and feel free to email me (amwilkin@ncsu.edu) anytime
.

Duke Garden January Update

I just got done visiting the vegetable garden and I was thinking about how much things have changed. We’ve doubled the size of the garden and the number of compost bins. We’ve been building the soil up with organic materials and amendments, including compost from the kitchen leftovers and cover crops. We have beds of lettuce and carrots growing, despite our odd weather this year. Our season is looking hopeful.

Our main project right now is getting the beds in the new area built up with kitchen compost and chicken compost. We’re trying a new layering strategy to get the mucky clay into a working medium for the plants.

Speaking of which, we are bringing in a host of plants this year to fill the garden. See the list below for the specific plants. Like last year, we are using a companion planting strategy to reduce predation, increase pollination and improve plant growth.

This year we are lucky to have access to greenhouse space at N.C. State University to start our seed so we will have strong, healthy plants to put in the ground mid-April.

We’ve also been lucky with our worm bins this year. It was a bumpy start, but we have three thriving worm bins and their churning through a few pounds of lemur fruit and vegetable leftovers every week. We’ll separate the compost from worms in the beginning of April so we can add it to the soil before we plant. Look for the photos of how to do that soon.

Also, take a look at our photos (click the box of vegetables on the right)!

Click here for a review of the Summer 2011 Season!

Tentative Summer Plant Lists

Vegetables/Fruits: Carrots, Cucumbers, Cowpeas, Lettuce, Malibar Spinach, Sweet Peppers, Squash, Zucchini, Green beans (Spring), Turnip, Watermelon, Cantaloupe, Daikon Radish

Herbs: Basil, Parsley, Marigolds, Borage, Mint, Sage, Nasturtium (Spring)

Other: Yarrow, Rue, Thyme, Artemisia, Tansy, Fennel, Chamomile

Updated Garden Photos

I uploaded new photos to the Duke Lemur Center photo slideshow on the right side of the screen. Click the link and it will take you to a place where you can view the lovely photos from the past year at the garden, including vegetables, flowers, SPACE kids and the N.C. State Horticulture Club (or if you're curious about what's in my hand in the picture to the left). There is also a guide to make your own worm bin! Check it out!

I met Zoboomafoo

Britt Keith, the Primate Technician Supervisor at the Duke Lemur Center, lead me down the hall, excited to show me the new baby Coquerel’s sifaka (Propithecus verrauxi subsp. coquereli), the same species Zoboomafoo was. I was excited because Coquerel's sifakas (pronounced 'shi-fak') was my favorite species. They have beautiful white and dark red fur (you can only tell this if you get up close) and their faces are so sweet.

The new mother jumped into the window from the outside but waited timidly. Britt fetched a peanut to lure her up to the ledge on the enclosure door. Before she would jump, two males jumped up to get the two peanuts. After they jumped away, she jumped up and sat down. A small furry head peeked over her legs and stared sleepily for a moment at us. It was so adorable and so tiny.

In the corners, the males chewed on their peanuts. Britt point to one of them and said, “That’s Zoboomafoo.” It was like meeting a movie star, and he knew it. He jumped up to the ledge next to the door and stared down at us from his perch like he knew he as that cool. “He and his father played Zoboomafoo.” I also learned that some of the shots of the live lemur were shot here, especially the ones of him jumping through the woods. The rest of the show was shot in Canada.

The baby made one more appearance. This time it was more interested in the strangely similar creatures starting back at it. The mother seemed to lose interest in us though and hopped outside.

I’ve been at the Duke Lemur Center for over a year now. While I walk by the enclosures every week and hear the foreign calls echo in the woods around the garden, out of the entire experience I found there is nothing like staring into the eyes of a lemur. It is hard to think we are similar to them. Working so close by them and being so close is almost like a family reunion.