I spent most of Saturday exploring the plants at Lukas Nursery with a friend. It was the largest nursery I’d ever been to, so we spent many hours there. I enjoyed the visit on many levels. The employees were gardeners themselves and had a lot of information and advice to convey, unlike the workers at most chain stores. Another thing I appreciated about the nursery is that they were selling varieties suitable for Florida growing. While I wasn’t in the market for them, I noticed that the roses were grown on fortuniana rootstock, a special rootstock developed to thrive in Florida. After experimenting with both regular and fortuniana rootstock roses, the difference can’t be emphasized enough. This is just one example, as there are many peculiarities to growing food and foliage in Florida. Additionally, Lukas Nursery was selling plants appropriate to plant now, unlike the watermelon and summer squash starters I saw at the chain garden centers.

Score one for the local horticulturists.

Among a few other odds and ends, at the end of the day I’d purchased 50 strawberry plants, three blueberry bushes, a muscadine grape vine, and a raspberry bush. I recall reading that the Heritage raspberry bush is somewhat of an imperfect solution for Florida gardeners, but that this is the best they’ve produced as raspberries really need more chilling hours. We’ll see how that goes, but I’ve put my receipt in a safe place.

Whether or not I’ll ever see raspberries in my garden is one question, but the real question that begs to be answered is, “Why am I zealous about gardening in the first place?”

As soon as I began earning babysitting money as a teenager, I began buying watermelon seeds, bareroot strawberries, and flowers. While my learning curve was steep at the time, the weak and feeble rewards of my efforts were enough to keep my interest. I wish that I knew enough to ask why something failed, what went wrong, and what to do to prevent its reoccurrence. I am only now asking those questions and wish that I had this insight earlier.

More often than not, we go through life blaming our lot on “well, nothing much grows in Florida anyway” instead of taking responsibility for choosing the right plants at the right time and providing the right conditions for growing them. Now that I am bringing my fourth child through the much maligned “terrible twos” stage, I know that taking responsibility and providing good growing conditions is a gardening lesson that applies to many things.