The April Garden in Central Florida...

A quick update in pictures...

 

As usual, Slick Pik squash is the first of the season. Pum ae is coming along, too. For whatever reason, Slick Pik doesn't tend to produce lots of male flowers but goes straight to females. Much earlier harvest.

 

Green beans... These are Kentucky Wonder. I have some scarlet ones that are blooming heavily already.

So many figs. More than 200. Gosh, I hope these ripen. Last year, they fell off the tree suddenly... But these are almost ripe and show no sign of drop. (Fruit drop is pretty typical for all fruit trees before they reach full maturity.) My persimmon tree is loaded with blooms, too. 

 

One of my Gulf Series plums... I have hundreds of plums this year on three tiny trees. 

 

 

I use metal conduit, rebar wire mesh, and zip ties. Best tomato "cage" ever. the gaps are around four inches, so easy to reach through. As the tomatoes grow, I weave the growth into the spaces. Last year, the tomatoes outgrew the six foot wire, so I used more zip ties to affix bamboo canes to the wire, and that worked out pretty well... Lots of fruit. The Juliettes are nearly ripe... 

Pallet planter

I don't do a lot of reposting, but this idea of using a pallet as a sort of tiered mulitpot is really smart. I like in particular the fact that you could tilt it, overcoming the problem of plants casting shadows on plants below them. Watering would be tough, particularly in late spring and summer. But it would work very well in the winter/spring period if you were willing to hand-water the lower tiers. I imagine chard and small greens (Tuscan kale, say) on top, mixed lettuce greens below that, then herbs and finally nasturtiums and small, mounding flowers flowing out of the bottom rung. Very pretty, and very efficient use of space.

I would definitely use a well-drained mix, in any case. And perhaps lining the back not with cloth but with a thin plastic sheet, with abundant holes in the lower tiers to encourage wicking downward, then upward.

Adding... Thought about this more. Pegboard and penny nails for the back, that's what I'd use. Yeah, the pegboard would only last one or two seasons, but that's what would work best. And it's cheap, readily available, easily cut. More structure, better water retention. 

Broccoli!

Typical spring broccoli. I've been harvesting heads from the same plants for months now, and each time they produce a head, it's a bit smaller than the last. These plants are still healthy and productive, but I'll probably only take one or two more cuttings from them, as the stems are getting woody and the yield is decreasing. That will leave me more room in my main bed for... I dunno. Cukes? Squash? Something...

Geraniums...

One of the geraniums I started from seed in the fall...

Salad Garden

African Basil

Beets...

Spring's arrived...

... and I know it because I saw my first Black Racer and... first Florida grasshoppers...  

Sprinkler solution for Florida garden...

 

Someone in the comments asked for a picture of my DIY sprinkler system. Five minutes, a few dollars, and no tools (except a hacksaw or PVC cutter). The hose-to-PVC adapters can be hard to find in the hardware store. Just ask. The Orbit flush head 360° is attached using a slip-to-thread, which is nice, since Orbitz sells a lot of different risers, allowing you to change the height of the head without redoing the PVC. The sprinkler head is adjustable, allowing you a narrow or broad circumference of your irrigation field. So, in other words, like all good plans, later adjustment is built in. In the lower right picture, you can see that I've split the water flow between the overhead sprinkler (perpendicular) and a Mister-Mister system that waters some corners of another bed that's beyond the reach of the overhead. More than enough water pressure to run both. In fact, my back bed (which is larger, about sixty by thirty) sprinkler system consists of two of these overhead sprinklers hooked into a hose (and ultimately into a timer). Water pressure is more than high enough to run both Orbitz heads at full capacity... Later this spring I'll cut another split into that back-bed system and run some drip heads to water my apple and persimmon trees. 

A quick garden update in pictures...

What's going on in your garden? 

Just before the rain...

I transplanted another dozen tomatoes into the garden, transplanted some nice little cukes (pum ae, southern delight) and squash (pum ae slick-pik)... divided out an overgrown snapdragon and stuck it in the corner of my front bed, fertilized everything... and walked in the house as it started to pour. Well played.

Beans are up! Everything's growing so fast... I love early spring in Florida. No bugs, no disease, and now a nice shower. 

Watering...

Since some people actually read this blog who want to garden better. I'm no expert, but I've learned a lot of lessons about what it takes to garden in Central Florida. All the time people write me and ask why their garden doesn't grow, and more times than not, the root of their problem is proper watering. I wrote a long post about proper watering last year, and it's worthwhile posting again as we move into the very dry and hot and sunny months of April, May and June. Suffice it to say: Ignore what they say about watering up North. Water often, mulch heavily, and additionally hand water seedlings and transplants. Every day. Especially windy, sunny days like our early spring.

Adding... Overhead sprinkling works best. I've tried everything--microsprinklers, soaker hoses, every hose-end attachment made in heaven or hell. Each has some advantage, but their disadvantages outweigh the advantages.

In the end, a super simpler, $3 solution works for me: a tall (four or five feet) standing PVC topped off with a 360-degree sprinkler head, attached to a hose and a timer. The best way I've found to water small gardens like mine. One of these setups will water a space roughly fifteen-by-thirty. I run mine once a day, early morning, for fifteen minutes or so. 

Early spring garden...

Most of my tomatoes are in the ground. Beans in the ground. My squash and cuke seedlings are up, only cotelydons for the moment... maybe another week before they're ready for transplant. I dumped something like twenty-five bags of oak leaves in my main garden beds, improved my irrigation "system," and shoveled half a yard of compost... Been harvesting beets, potatoes, carrots...

Rainy end of February...

Gardening in the rain today... A week or two early, I got some smallish tomato seedlings into the beds. Mostly Juliette (hands-down the best, most prolific, most "usable" tomato I've ever grown), Jetsetter and Magic Mountain. I have forty or fifty more seedlings--at best I'll use a quarter of those. Tomatoes get so large here in Florida.

Noticed that my red onions that I grew from seeds have started to swell. Beets are nearing harvest. Carrots look good. Broccoli is providing a lot of side shoots now that the main crop has been harvested. I have a few more cauliflower out there--as I clear them, I'll replace them with tomato seedlings.

Yesterday I started my cukes and squash for the spring: Slick Pik squash and several kinds of asian long cucumbers. I need to plant my beans now!

Didn't feel much like normal...

Surprised to see that January in Florida wasn't particularly warm... particularly compared to the rest of the contiguous US. (Alaska, with the jet stream stuck fast, is experiencing a record-setting cold winter.)

Our new zone is pretty much our old zone...

Spring flowers... Disjointed thoughts on winter and spring.

A quick note... I've planted my spring flowers, a couple weeks early... Typically I wait until late February to start messing with tender annuals, but I'm going to bet on a continued very mild winter, and hope for no cold spells. (I might have to deal with fungus issues if it's cool and cloudy.)

Anyway, I already had zinnias and snapdragons planted, and so yesterday I added the following (some direct-sown, some in nursery pots): Zinnias, marigold (yellow and red), California poppies, and some new cosmos. (Most of these are from my recent Parks seed order.) I've already got pansy seedlings (still small), geraniums, and tons of calendula in full bloom. (All of those started from seeds back in the fall.) I "over-summered" some snapdragons, and they are in magnificent bloom right now. Oh, and borage--not yet flowering, but getting there.

If we don't have any cold snaps my garden should be in full bloom in six or seven weeks, so mid-March, with lots of flowers coming into bloom through the end of spring (more or less the end of April/early May). The zinnias and marigolds will bloom through June along with the gaura, phlox, and roses; for late summer, the cosmos will reseed and continue to bloom, though the orange and yellow cosmos will crowd out and outlast the other colors.The cosmos will mix it up with milkweed, cannas and alternanthera and see me meagerly through until early fall...

I'm always struck by calendula and pansies. They bloom from November until the end of April, and don't give a hoot about frosts. Tough little plants!

Oh, the vegetables in the front bed are up--I noticed today carrots, mache, cabbage, beets, chard, and potatoes... The back bed is in overproduction mode with broccoli, cauliflower, carrots and cool-weather herbs.

I need to find some space to plant peas...

A quick update in pictures... An early spring in Florida.

What happens when you have more broccoli than the family can eat... Sprouted broccoli tastes fine...

Often cauliflower will "rice" (get mushy) when it gets too old (like this one)... but fortunately mine haven't yet. There's only so much cauliflower four people can eat...

Honeybell tangelo on Flying Dragon rootstock. This six-foot tree bears extremely heavily. Great fruit. I love its size. 

Plum, about a month early. I just pruned the things. Sigh. 

Peach, ditto. 

Why don't more people grow calendula in the States? In England, it's a standard spring/summer flower. So easy to grow from seed, absolutely indifferent to frost, and blooms continually until, say, mid-May, maybe later. 

The bed my daughter and I recently cleared, expanded, enriched, and seeded. Everything's up!

Tomato seedlings for March 1. 

Onions, beets and carrots vie with weeds for preeminence! 

Planting the front bed...

A long time since the last post. I decided to start anew in my front bed, so I dug it deep and then raked in a cubic yard of compost... Let it sit for a week, then today my daughter and I planted... radishes, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, chard, beets and a lot of flowers! I'll get back to blogging soon... In the meantime, enjoy the temperate weather... My plum trees are blooming! (Crazy... and no good!)

a picture for you

I really need to get back to blogging!