tomato
Annie asked a couple posts back if I employed organic gardening methods. In effort to defend explain myself, I am writing this post in response. Since she is a new reader, I’m sure she hasn’t read about my past gardening woes. My gardening woes are many, but since I think it is a valuable use of time and energy, I press on.

Notice I used the word, “valuable.” I didn’t say it was profitable (in a monetary sense). Yet.

Let me explain. When your husband sits down and looks at the lone strawberry on his plate and asks, “So, this is what a $25 strawberry tastes like?”, the correct response is, “But look how much more character and knowledge we have.” I don’t want to reiterate the extent we went to when beginning our gardening journey; reread the above link for a primer. Shuffle through the archives for more.

The bottom line is that while there is a wealth of knowledge available for gardening successfully, securing the methods to ensure a bountiful garden in Florida is a whole other matter. In some ways, you’d think it’d be easier: no fruit trees—other than citrus—can be grown here. So, there’s a whole area that I don’t have to learn. On the flip side, nobody tells you that raspberries, carnations, peaches, broccoli, and hollyhocks don’t grow here. On the contrary, gardening magazines claim that a certain variety grows in zone 9 (the area I live in), but the fact is, it doesn’t. Perhaps they mean it’s possible if you have an air-conditioned greenhouse, but otherwise, it is false advertising. Even your local garden center will sell starter plants that are unfit to grow here.

Here’s an example. I want to grow strawberries. There are strawberry farms a couple hours from me, so I know it can be done (there, at least). Catalogs ship bare-root plants after the final frost in your area. For us, this is February. After much research, however, I found out that strawberry plants are treated as annuals here and you plant them in October. They are finished by March. Upon calling every nursery within an hour’s drive of here, I find that nobody sells strawberry plants until the spring. So, there is no way to get plants locally or otherwise until the spring. But then it’s too late.

It’s a conspiracy, I say.

Another thing I noticed was that if your neighbor isn’t growing say, tulips, then you shouldn’t try to either. However nobody around here grows anything, but I’m not going to let that stop me. So long as I can remember, I’ve been passionate about flowers and gardening. There is something just “right” about it, and it awakens a calming feeling that is beneficial to the household. I like to pull into my driveway and see impatiens in full bloom under the oak tree. It makes me think, “Yes, this is our home.”

I am not a successful gardener yet, but I know that I have the qualities that will make me one someday: a willingness to learn new things, enough passion to repeatedly email the local extension agents without embarrassment, a good work ethic, a husband with an even better work ethic, and the knowledge that I am pursuing something worthwhile.

I think I got off-track here, because this was supposed to be about my methods. The “dirt” here in Florida is pure sand. Without augmenting the soil, you are guaranteeing your plant’s demise. I use bone meal, peat moss, compost, and/or manure to enrich my soil when I put in a new plant. We used to have a red wiggler worm farm for composting, but as soon as you’d put the worms and compost in the sandy soil, the fire ants would appear without exception and eat up the worms. A handful of fertilizer is much more efficient. I am still interested in soil enhancements, but I’ve yet to find a large-scale answer to that.

I do throw fruit peels and vegetable waste underneath bushes still, even though the raccoons stomp flat the flowers sometimes in effort to claim the scraps. As far as spraying goes, I do spray my flowers because I have not found an effective organic way to control the infestations. Since we don’t eat our flowers, it’s not a health concern. I don’t spray my vegetables after the fruit has set. I usually just over plant so that I can afford to lose a lot to critters, bugs, and disease. One year, I planted about 100 tomato plants and just let them grow wild. I did not tend them (probably due to morning sickness). We had an abundance of tomatoes all spring long. The kids would hunt among the brambles (all the plants were laying down) for the good ones, and toss the rotten ones over the fence so the raccoons wouldn’t have to bother climbing over.

My husband erected an electric fence one year to keep out the raccoons. I had a respectable lot of watermelon growing. I spent a great deal of time babying them. Just when they were ripe, the raccoons jumped over the zapper and chowed down. We have never eaten a homegrown watermelon.

But I’m not discouraged. I’m outraged. So when I set out my squash and tomatoes last night and hung up the shovel, I looked around the garage for the BB gun too. Now, that’s organic.