Last night I got a good glimpse into how government works at the local level and was pleasantly surprised. Henderson Park has acquired some extra land adjacent to the current park and last night was the second meeting with the community to go over options for how to use the new land. There were several representatives from the County, a couple of police officers and a dozen or so local citizens and everyone had a chance to voice their opinions and be heard. I haven’t seen a forum that open since attending a Quaker meeting.

For over a year a few of us have been trying to get the land approved for a community garden. We were concerned at first because of the need of a “master plan” from the County. But one year later, the master plan not only includes the land for the community garden, it includes some parking, a pavilion, playgrounds, walking trails and more. And these ideas came from citizens and it looks well on the path to breaking ground.

Hopefully the next steps will go as well as these initial ones and we will be tilling the ground in a few weeks.

After a few friendly gatherings, several trips to the proposed space, some donated time by professional landscapers and some good advice from a Dekalb County advocate, we finally turned in the proposal (thanks Susan!) for the Henderson Park Community Garden.

We should know something about the official granting of the park space in the next few weeks but in the meantime we will be planting some seeds and starting to accumulate supplies.

There are some 150+ gardens in the Atlanta area but none are currently in Tucker. So we will be the first. With any luck, we will be able to break ground for a spring planting and start building this community project.

Here is a picture of the proposed site:

Here is a picture of the lake and waterfall that are a part of Henderson Park:

After listening to Elvis play a live version of “Poke Salad Annie” about 10 times after my last post, I thought poke salad it deserved it’s own, special post. At least it deserved a picture or two.

Although it can look a bit like a turnip green, poke salad can get huge. Here are a couple of recent pictures. The first one is a rather small sprout. The bigger one is my dog’s favorite place to hang out – under the giant poke salad canopy. The big problems arise once the berries get ripe and the dogs get in it and look like they’re wearing war paint.

Now, here’s how big and unwieldy the poke salad gets. I quit fighting most of it.

Bruce sporting the Braveheart look with his poke salad war paint.

The year has been one of the lightest years of gardening I have had since planting my first ’solo’ garden in 1993. My raised bed is full of poke weed, although we always referred to it as poke salad, which was also the name of one of my favorite childhood songs, “Poke Salad Annie.” And I’m not even going to lie, Elvis did it best.

At any rate, I did manage to dig a little plot for some potatoes. And I put a few peppers and a single pumpkin in my flower garden. And, aside from a couple of emergency waterings when we were desert dry in Atlanta, I didn’t do anything to the potato plants. And sometimes that’s best.

I was out in the yard with the dogs yesterday and noticed a potato on top of the ground. And then I saw several of them. Apparently they were done. I dug around and grabbed a couple of pounds and cooked them for breakfast. It doesn’t get more fresh than that.

From the looks of it, I’m going to get about 30-40 pounds of potatoes from a small plot no bigger than 10 square feet. My pepper plants are over 3′ tall and have more peppers than I can pick and my lone pumpkin is just starting to thrive. Maybe next year I’ll have more time for a vegetable garden and Molly can help me with the planting.

My broccoli, kale and spinach seeds will be here soon and I look forward to digging up the poke salad and planting my fall garden.

Several years ago I was studying Native American herbalism when I learned about Pennyroyal. As a member of the mint family, Pennyroyal got a bad rap because it has a history of being used to terminate pregnancies, and often had harsh side effects. It has even been known to kill when taken in large doses. But my herbalism teacher told me that Pennyroyal would repel fleas.

So I looked it up. The Latin name for American Pennyroyal is “Hedeoma pulegioides”. Pulegioides looked a lot like the Spanish word for flea – “pulga”. Upon further research I found that first century herbalists wrote of Pennyroyal’s action to repel fleas. They probably knew a little something about how plants worked, so I decided to give it a shot.

Due to its toxicity, I had a difficult time finding pennyroyal for sale. But I was lucky enough to find a patch of pennyroyal growing in a field behind my house (in San Francisco) so I helped myself to a nice-sized cutting.

At the time, I kept my two dogs in a fenced dog run in the back yard while I was at work. So I transplanted my newly discovered Pennyroyal along the edge of the dog’s fence. Within a month, the dogs didn’t seem to need a their regular dose of the chemical flea treatment, so I skipped it. I went another two years without having to give doses of the flea-killing compound.

When I moved to Atlanta, I brought my pennyroyal with me (as well as my echinacea and a few other prized plants). But I was sorely disappointed when I moved into a new house and my fresh pennyroyal plantings didn’t seem to keep away the fleas. I had to start using the chemical stuff again as the dogs were getting attacked. Apparently the plants have to be established and it takes time to drive the fleas away (it doesn’t actually kill the fleas, it just makes them want to leave.)

I made several cuttings last fall that over-wintered well and really took off this spring. Now I have several batches of pennyroyal growing in the yard, most notably in an area where my dogs like to hang out in the shade. There have been no signs of fleas. And I haven’t given my dogs chemical flea treatment in months and my house and yard remain flea-free.

I knew there were smiley faced spiders in Hawaii and other exotic places, but I didn’t know we had them in Georgia. This little guy was about 3 mm wide. Just after I shot this picture he pounced on a flea beetle. I wish I had been shooting video.

At least in Atlanta, the Rose Breasted Grosbeak is a rare visitor that only passes through the area for a couple of weeks each year. I was lucky enough to snap a picture of this handsome bird this weekend.

I had to scramble to find my camera this morning for this one. I don’t know what it is but I have seen this bee-moth thing in TN as well as GA.


This garden spider was really patient and didn’t seem to mind getting photographed at all.


And here’s a frequent visitor to the butterfly bush.

Pasture feeding is a requirement in the organic standards for dairy farmers. The USDA and leading organic dairies seek to remove this requirement.

As reported by www.organicconsumers.org

As Organic Bytes has reported, the most serious threat to U.S. organic standards since 1998 is in the dairy sector. Two rapidly growing and profit-obsessed corporations, Horizon and Aurora Organic, are sourcing much of their milk from intensive confinement dairy feedlots, where the cows have little or no access to pasture. Now, in a secret letter obtained by the Cornucopia Institute, OCA has learned that three other major organic dairies, Stonyfield Farm, Organic Valley, and Humboldt Creamery have joined forces with Horizon and Aurora to lobby the USDA to keep dairy standards vague and unenforceable, by not requiring any specific percentage of the cow’s feed to come from pasture. The National Organic Standards Board and the overwhelming majority of the nation’s dairy farmers have repeatedly stated that at least 30% of an organic cow’s feed during the growing season should be coming from pasture. Scientific studies have shown that milk and meat from pastured animals are qualitatively healthier than milk and meat derived from animals kept in unhealthy and inhumane concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs).

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http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_4549.cfm