plant a vegetable garden

Backyard gardens and chickens are an interesting mix. My box of sixteen beautiful broccoli plants have been living side by side with the chickens, completely untouched, for about two months. Yesterday, however, while I was at work the chickens decided it was the perfect day to belly up to the broccoli buffet. They didn’t eat the broccoli bud part, but they ate everything else. Almost every leaf of the plants they could reach was nipped down to the rib, and they had just started in on the next box of cabbage plants. I covered the sad remnants with bird cloth to keep them off, but am doubtful that many of the plants will survive. It’s a sad gardening day. Lesson learned, I guess. They’re not called fowl for nothing.

Lots of plants have been planted and they’re growing like crazy. Flowers all over the place. But . . . no vegetables again. I guess we have a serious shortage of bees and butterflies in our yard, because it seems like absolutely nothing is being pollinated. What to do, what to do? Non-pollination-dependent lettuces are fine, but it would be great if all this work produced more than that. I’m very concerned.

A few more tomatoes, cauliflower and cabbage went in over the weekend to fill box #4. I had to replace the squash seedlings, as they got, well, squashed by overly-ambitious acorn-burying squirrels. Everything else is growing nicely and starting to flower. We have our first eggplant blossom already! I guess we need to figure out netting for the boxes ASAP, since a raccoon has found our backyard (and tried to eat our chickens, but that’s another story).

While our front yard is a disaster of unparalleled proportions, our back yard is now home to six 4’x 4’ square foot gardening boxes, in addition to the 3’x 8’ box we had originally. Due to Florida’s backward growing seasons, we are just now starting to plant. Put in peppers, tomatoes, broccoli, cucumbers, zucchini, eggplant and squash yesterday, plus assorted herbs, and have so far not even filled three of our seven boxes. These were all seedlings from the store, but we’ll be trying seeds for the rest of our boxes to see what happens. Exciting!

And our blueberry plants, while still small, haven’t died yet. There’s hope, even in the heat!

Yes, they’re not vegetables, but still. We cleared a bunch of scraggly ornamentals and put in eight raised boxes for our new “Sunshine Blue” blueberry plants. They’re small, but we’re hopeful. And if they don’t work in our climate, well, we have eight great boxes just itching for something else to be grown in them. Can’t lose.

Next stop is finishing uprooting a bunch of concrete tiles and clearing the space where our large garden boxes will go. In the meantime, I’m harvesting tomatoes, peppers and a lone eggplant from our existing box. Everything is an experiment right now, and it’s all fascinating!

My husband and I have been having a lot of conversations about self-sufficiency, urban homesteading and how it all relates to the potential shape of things to come on both a local and global scale. Even better, we’re not just talking—we’re doing! We’ve decided to start the long process of turning our tedious, mostly dead yard into an edible, urban homestead. Our backyard fence is being repaired so we can install a few chickens safely (lots of critters in the ‘hood that would love some chicken for dinner, unfortunately). We’re clearing out a bunch of ugly “ornamental” plants and prepping that area for blueberry bushes. And, most importantly, we’re clearing a big area in the back for a square-foot-gardening area of raised bed boxes. We have the summer to get those installed before Florida’s growing season restarts in September, so we’ll definitely be ready to take on gardening in a much bigger way. Hurrah!

Our front yard has a great deal of shade, so we’re still scratching our heads about what to do, but herbs and medicinal flowers might be an option. Or shade-grown coffee—what the heck!

My cold-weather veggies (cauliflower, cabbage and broccoli) were put in too late, apparently, because they’re growing but not making anything edible. Maybe I’m doing it wrong? However, my lettuce is growing like crazy! By reading “Square Foot Gardening,” I discovered that you don’t have to pick the entire lettuce plant; you can just keep harvesting the outermost leaves, and the plants will keep throwing out more. Amazing! I have 11 lettuce plants, including two that popped up of their own accord, and we’ve harvested enough salad lettuce for four people about 6 times so far, with no sign of them tiring out. I’m really curious to see how long they can keep going.

I’m also curious as to why my CSA cuts the entire head when it’s just gotten to maturity now that I know you don’t have to. It seems wasteful, but maybe people are so used to thinking of lettuce in heads that they won’t accept anything else.

Anyway, I’m thrilled that I have actually produced something edible that’s both delicious and healthy. Next stop, tomatoes and eggplant, which are both growing well.

Cabbages, cauliflower, broccoli, peppers, two different tomato plants and an eggplant, just for yucks. The latter three are maybes depending on the weather here in Florida, but I thought it would be worth a try to get them started. I’m usually planting things a month or two too late, so I’m going against my tendencies this time to see if I can get it right. I also reviewed my herb pots and decided that half of them could be saved if I put a little care into them. Hurrah!

I’m about halfway through clearing all the roots out of my garden box and hope to have it ready to re-plant by the end of this weekend. Everything in Round 1 was eaten by bugs or died, but I’m hoping that Round 2 will be more successful. We also recently had to remove a tree from our yard. Lo and behold, my entire deck is now sunny all day long, so I’m putting containers of herbs and lettuces up there to see what happens. Wish me luck!

Well, I built a nice raised bed box, filled it with organic soil and compost, grew seedlings, planted them and watered them with care. Everything flourished for a time, flowered profusely and then…nothing (except for a meager handful of string beans). Everything else either never fruited at all after flowering, had a few small sprouts and then died, or the entire plant was devoured by bugs in the course of a day or two. In the meantime, my herb pots are going great guns. I have no idea why my vegetables failed so dramatically, but I’m determined to try again. Wish me luck—I really want this to happen!