Ladybug larva having an aphid snack...

All this dry weather, I have a bit of an aphid infestation. I'm away from my garden for a few days, and a friend is looking after it. She tells me that the #$%*(#$^* pickleworm has arrived, but so far the invasion is pretty limited. Dozens of tomatoes every day, peppers, loads of cucumbers... The traditional squash season is over. I might plant some Tromboncino squash when I get back.

A quick update in pictures....

My beans are suffering a bit from some nutrient deficiency... note the cucumber to the left. This is my smallest cuke!

Persimmons.

The hive with its new super.

Answering some questions from the comments

Lisa, gardenias are exceptionally difficult to grow in pots. I can all but guarantee you that your gardenia was suffering from over watering this winter. I recommend either planting it in the ground or planting it in a small pot with a fast draining medium. Try googling "garden web Mel's mix." If you are serious about growing gardenias in Florida, there is one absolutely crucial secret for success: you must get a gardenia grafted on Miami rootstock. Plant it in a mostly sunny spot, ideally somewhere with some afternoon shade. Take good care of it for the first one or two years, and then forget about it.

Farmer Dave my fig trees are in full sun. They are planted in a very thick covering of mulch, which I think is crucial for fig culture here in Florida, with all our nematodes. Contrary to most information I have found about figs, I think please require quite a lot water and they like a rich soil . This year I gave my fig trees a significant feed of phosphorous in early spring. This seems to have done the trick, because my fruit set is large for a relatively small fig tree. (My fig tree has been in the ground for about three years, and is approximately 10 feet tall by 6 feet wide with several trunks.) In any case, I have a good gardening friend with five or six fig trees growing on her property. Each of these big trees produce at lease a bushel of fruit per year. So, fig trees can certainly thrive here given the correct conditions.

Alma fig

Juliette tomatoes

Hmmm... Well, they aren't exactly cherry or grape tomatoes, though they grow in long clusters. The flavor and texture is very reminiscent of Roma tomatoes, as you might expect by their appearance. A little dry, very balanced between sweet and sour, medium skins, not a lot of seeds, all of them in a narrow cleft in the center of the fruit. 

I like cherry tomatoes--great to snack on (my daughter loves them), and a nice addition to a lunch salad. (My favorite: Fresh cucumbers, tomatoes, herbs, and feta, dressed liberally with olive oil and a big pinch of Aleppo pepper...) 

I suppose these are all-purpose tomatoes--good enough for salads and sauce. In any case, they live up to the descriptions when it comes to vigor, productivity and disease-resistance. I've never grown a more vigorous tomato, and the vines are just covered in long clusters of 10-12 one-ounce tomatoes. 

Busy bees

My kids' 4H group has placed these hives all over town in community gardens, local growers, and convenient backyards, like ours. They harvest the honey and sell it at fairs. Not bad money, really...

Between this hive with thirty-thousand bees, and the one living in the south corner of my house (our apiarist estimated fifty-thousand bees)... I don't have a lot of problems with fertilization!

First full-sized tomato of the season

Tomande. A superior tomato. In the past I've grown it as a cool-season tomato. 

Hydretain

I picked up a bunch of this stuff last year, when Lowes was clearancing it. Yes, it really works, and it's organic. I used it last year, and it made a difference, though I don't know if it made a "50%" difference, as advertised on the label. 

I sprayed it in the garden and yard on Sunday, and noticed an immediate improvement in late-afternoon wilt on my cucumber plants and what little St Augustine is in my front yard. It's pricey (it retails for around $25, though I think I paid less than $10), but a quart is enough to treat twice all my beds and the in my yard. And I only spray it once a year, in spring. 

Panoramic of my front-yard bed

Tomatoes, cucumber, squash, plums, persimmon...

Another Photosynth of my main garden beds...

These are so cool...

Gardenia in full bloom

I have a couple of these large gardenia bushes... They are about five years old, six feet tall, six feet wide. It's important to get bushes grafted onto Miami rootstock and give them a bit of shade in the afternoon. One of the bushes gets a lot more sun than the other, and though it blooms a little better, it's not as large as the shadier one. 

A panoramic shot of my backyard gardens

Mostly Tomande tomatoes, which is what I had on hand when sowing my spring crop. Great tomatoes, but I'm worried about the deep ribbing across the tops. When our rains start (and they will start... sometime!) those handsome ridges are like bacterial sponges... ah, well, que sera.

The twine line at the top marks six feet. That's quite a lot of growth from March 1, their transplant date. 

Large tomatoes like Tomande (and there's Jetsetter, some German heirloom, Big Boy, and some other varieties mixed into my three rows in the back) will produce pretty well until the first week of July, when the bugs get so bad that I give up. (They stop setting new fruit earlier, sometime in June, when the nighttime low start to hover in the low 70s.) 

Cherry tomatoes--I have Juliette and some Baker Creek in the front garden--continue to set fruit throughout the summer. They're such rampant growers that they can deal with the diseases and bugs. But even those are done by the end of July. 

Let's see... squash is prolific. Green beans are doing well. Peaches, blueberries and plums continue to ripen. I've gotten enough blueberries in the last three days to make a pie. Hmm... cucumbers are doing what cukes do. First peppers of the season should be ready by the end of the week. Been starting sweet potato slips, transferring them out to the patch. Oh, and I planted a long row of yardlong beans today, too. Anna apples look GREAT. Very excited about a nice harvest this year. Persimmons and pomegranates look good. Melons are setting fruit. 

Guess that's about it... Busy time in the office now, so finding time to zip out to the garden and do chores is tough. 

Oh, finally: Damn irrigation system. 

Re: [Gardening in Central Florida] New comment on First peaches, plums of the season.

Someone in the comments asked about the flavor of the my Earligrande peaches and the Gulf series plums. This is the first year that I have harvested the peaches, and I chose not to thin them given the relatively small crop. The peaches are smallish. Like all early–season peaches (and these are very early season peaches: they ripened before May!), these peaches lack the rich, full, intensely sweet flavor that I associate with Midwestern and Northern peaches. A couple of years ago I was in New Hampshire in August, and we sneaked into a large orchard late one night and gorged ourselves on perfectly ripe, late season New Hampshire peaches. Unspeakably delicious. The peaches one can grow in Florida will never rival their northern cousins in terms of flavor. With that caveat in mind, I would say that these particular peaches are nonetheless very tasty. Though not quite as sweet as I might like, they have excellent texture and a very honest peach flavor. They are Freestone peaches with reasonably thin skins and fair amount of juice. 

The plums, like all southern plums, are on the small side. Because there is a high ratio of skin to flesh, my kids do not particularly care for them. But if you relish a mix of sour and candy-sweet flesh, then you will love these plums. Very juicy, excellent texture, and straightforward plum flavor.

Sunken-bed vegetable gardening in Central Florida

I've posted previously on sunken bed gardening in arid regions. (Ours isn't arid most of the year, but it shares characteristics with arid regions.) I'd like to say that my sunken bed in front is intentional, but it came about when I needed a few cubic feet of fill for a construction project in my backyard. I filled the large (ten-by-ten) trench with a couple cubic feet of topsoil and compost, but apparently not quite enough. After the soil settled, I ended up with a bed sunken maybe five inches. That bed has been incredibly prolific this season (see the photos below), and very easy to keep watered. Much easier, in any case, than my beds in back, which aren't exactly traditional raised beds, but resemble raised beds. (I have spent several years filling in these beds with compost, leaves, mulch, etc. They appear to be level beds, but that's only because I have raised the entire area by several inches. I was digging in a spot yesterday and found an old brick buried under four inches of soil, mulch, leaves--a couple of years ago, it had lain on the surface of the garden, and somehow gotten inadvertently buried under successive seasonal plantings...)

In any case, the one problem I can see in sunken-bed gardening is our heavy rainfalls causing flooding, erosion, root rot, etc. All the problems that people who garden in heavy, silty soils experience. S far, this hasn't been a problem with our arid spring. We did have torrential rains in early April, and I didn't notice any problems after four or five inches of rain. But time will tell.

I know people in Central Florida who have had some good success with raised-bed gardens, but they have some obvious drawbacks here, including increased transpiration/evaporation that makes proper watering difficult, and the fact that they tend to get infested with pests and diseases. My friend Bill, from whom I learned a lot about gardening in Florida, used raised beds for several years, but ended up dismantling them when the diseases and pests got too bad. He blames the raised beds, specifically, for the mounting problems in his garden.

April flowers, tomatoes & the new garden patch

How to water a vegetable garden in Central Florida

A followup to my earlier post on watering: The setup: Six feet of PVC riser with a Rainbird flush-head sprinkler head, all of it connected via a short hose to a bib-end timer. Far and away the best way I have found to irrigate the smallish gardens where I grow. The bed it waters is roughly fifteen-by-fifteen, and the sprinkler provides very even watering over the entire surface. 

My evergreen seeds order for this spring

I meant to post this back in February, when I ordered these seeds... The Pum Ae squash and Southern Delight cucumbers are fantastic... both of them producing heavily in my garden right now. The Pum Ae can get quite large (two pounds) without forming seeds. Its texture is firm, slightly nutty, somewhat reminiscent of a Luffa or Tromboncino, but still clearly a summer squash (and not a gourd). Beautiful, slightly zonal leaves. Seems to be highly resistant to the rusts and fungus we get. 

The Southern Delight are long, sweet, somewhat spiny, with mild skin. I left one to grow to almost two feet, and it still didn't have pronounced seeds and its texture was dense. I have the melons and watermelons growing in the garden, setting fruit. I grew the Asia Sweet watermelon last year... it produced large crops (for the small space), and set fruit twice... with a tragic end... 

I love Evergreen seeds! Cheap, hybrid seeds, mostly specialized in Asian vegetables.

Watermelon, Hybrid Asia    53201         1   2.50
Sweet: Watermelon, Hybrid
Asia Sweet

Korean Squash, Hybrid Pum  65001         1   2.40
Ae: Korean Squash, Hybrid
Pum Ae

Japanese Cucumber, Hybrid  47301         1   2.50
Southern Delight:
Japanese Cucumber, Hybrid
Southern Delight

Oriental Melon, Hybrid     65801         1   3.00
Arko: Oriental Melon,
Hybrid Arko

Pickled turnips...

I made a large (2 gallon) batch of these pickled turnips earlier this season... they were delicious! The Hakurei turnips that I grow are so tender that I didn't bother blanching them. Just tossed them in the pickle juice and waited a week. I used beets and celery from the garden, so it was really local food...

Ingredients

1 large beet
4 small turnips (or 3 medium-size turnips), quartered
1 beet quarter, cooked
2 to 3 slivers garlic clove
2 to 3 sprigs young celery leaves
1/2 cup white vinegar
1/2 cup water
1 tbsp. coarse salt

Cooking Directions

Boil 1 beet in water until tender; peel, cool, quarter and set aside.Drop quartered turnips into boiling water for 2 to 3 minutes. Remove turnips and peel them. They will have a silky texture.Place in hot sterilized 1-pint wide-mouth jar, packing between each turnip: 1 cooked beet quarter, 2 to 3 slivers of garlic clove, and 2 to 3 sprigs young celery leaves. Combine and bring to boil water, vinegar, and salt.

Fill jar with vinegar mixture, seal and store in warm place 10 days. Makes 1 pint.