Late April in the Central Florida Garden

My tomatoes are still a couple of weeks away from ripening. Plums are almost there--I'll probably pick one tree this week and let them ripen on the countertop. (Well, plums don't get sweeter, but their texture improves after picking so long as they're not mishandled or refrigerated.)

We picked six pounds of peaches and three pounds of blueberries. (Not from my garden! But from local you-picks in Lake County: Valley View Vineyards and Blue Bayou Farm. Both are located near the delightful Yalaha Bakery, itself worthy of a destination drive...) So, sometime today I need to find the time to make a couple pounds of peach preserves. My wife is going to bake my favorite peach pie tonight!

Anyway, very prolific time in the garden. I've been picking vegetables for supper every night. In addition to the crops below, I'm still managing to harvest a decent yield of broccoli, lots of chard, and plenty of Tuscan kale. A few cucumbers, but the season for them is just starting.

All this (and fruit!) from three small garden plots, none of them larger than fifteen by thirty feet.

My fig tree is just packed. I really hope I get a good harvest this year!

I recently planted a few eggplants and peppers... But the garden is full now and I'm going to travel most of the summer again, so I'm not going to do much in the way of a summer garden. Just some crowder peas, eggplants, hot peppers, sweet potatoes and peanuts.

Fresh blueberry pie...

We picked out by the Yalaha bakery today. Peaches from Valley View and berries from Blue Bayou. This is the best pie EVER. A mix of cooked and fresh berries.

More April Garden Pictures... Squash, cucumbers, tomatoes in the Central Florida Garden

 First squash of the season. SlickPik from Johnnys.

 My trellis system for cucumbers and beans and tomatoes...

 Pum ae squash. Very tasty. I don't know where I bought these seeds... 

 One of my Asian Long cukes. I find that "style" of cucumber to do best here in Central Florida. 

 Plums are maybe five days to ripening. So many plums on a five-foot tall tree. 

Lots of fruit, but none of it particularly close to ripening. 

April harvest...

 The large carrots are Navarino, planted at the beginning of November... I pulled about 1/3 of a row. Some large and well-formed... Others, not so much. The smaller carrots (a mix of colors from Johnnys, I think) I planted at the beginning of January. They had gotten completely shaded out by tomatoes. A lot of perfect, finger-long carrots for pickling. The beets should have been picked a month ago. Their foliage was completely devoured and they were suffering from nematodes. Still, they'll be good roasted with the carrots for this week's lunch vegetable...

 Borage. Or bee meth. The leaves are delicious, tasting strongly of celery. The herb (or green--it's quite a vigorous grower) is eaten all over Scandinavia, I'm told. I think I'll make a pie from it when I harvest it in a month. But for now, I'll let the bees enjoy it. Last year, they grew chest-high. Hollow stems, though, so no good for the rainy season. Dead-easy plant to grow.

 The plums should be ready for harvest in the next week or two... Peaches are coming along, too. 

Elderflower cordial...

They're blooming, so, I'm making these classic British refreshers... Cordial and liqueur.

Hot and dry...

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!