meet me in the garden

Alex said he hadn’t seen me in a while.

I’m on a first-name basis with all the Publix employees- Alex is the solemn Russian in the produce department. I had to confess to him: I don’t need to come as often because I’m getting my produce somewhere else… My own backyard!

Chris & I have attempted gardening for all 13 years of our marriage. Some years we have bell peppers, others the tomatoes flow in all summer long… but this is the first year my garden has been bountiful enough to save trips to Publix!

I haven’t bought eggplant or collard greens in months, cucumbers are plentiful, the bell peppers and tomatoes are keeping us supplied, and okra is starting to roll in. The green beans and squash were tasty but I didn’t plant enough. Oops.

And my herbs… oh, the herb garden is my favorite!! It’s a little messy but fruitful beyond imagination… kind of how I view our family! {smile}

There is more, but I won’t bore you. Some are ready before I know it (radishes!) and others take their time (onions & garlic). The lemon flaunts it’s fruit but strawberries are nestled among large, deep green leaves like jewels in velvet.

My blueberries were trampled by well-meaning children… I need to find them a safer place for next year. The sticks are only a couple of inches above the ground, but I think they’ll come back. That’s the thing about a garden. With a lot of love and even more work, it’ll yield abundantly. Hmm… sounds a lot like the rest of life…

Gardening

This article was originally published in The Creekline.

    UF knows how to develop more than a solid football team… their Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences contributes to the success of gardeners all over the state!  This is the perfect time of year to begin a family project utilizing their knowledge.  It’s time to put in a family garden!

There is something about a garden that enamors a child.  Perhaps it’s raking their little fingers through the dark earth or watching the seed they’ve planted peek through the dirt and then grow into an edible veggie.  We’ve had a children’s garden for about 9 years… and although we have had little produce to show for it, the knowledge and healthy family fun gained make it worth the effort.  The children’s love for the process motivates me much more than the veggies that make it till harvest time!

Florida’s temperate weather allows family gardeners (and our insect enemies) to work almost year round.  So exactly when do we plant which veggies?  Are the veggies at Ace and Lowe’s suitable for our part of the country?  Which of the 7,500 varieties of tomatoes flourish here?  These choices are what make gardening in Florida both exciting and overwhelming!  Vegetable Gardening in Florida by 36 year University of Florida vegetable specialist James M Stephens keeps me from “throwing in the trowel.”  I have several gardening books and websites that I reference, but this is the most concise and most helpful.  My favorite part of the book is the planting guide in the back, which suggests varieties and planting times for North Florida.

Thanks to this guide, we’ve moved past our old gardening MO of driving to Lowe’s, letting each kiddo choose any herb and a veggie, plant them and wait as they wither in Florida’s scorching sun.  Now we compost, plant carefully chosen veggies, water, weed and harvest!  One thing hasn’t changed; every year we pick enough fat, green worms off the plants to feed a pond full of fish!  And so our gardening education continues.  What are these scary looking worms?

The critter question led us to some more fantastic resources that are tailor made for Floridians.  “Florida’s Fabulous Insects” and “Florida’s Fabulous Butterflies” are two photo-filled identification books in a series that covers plants, animals and even seashells here in the sunshine state.  When an invader is discovered in the garden, our children quickly grab these handbooks to discern whether it’s a beneficial insect or a menacing muncher.  The children identified the tomato hornworm- whose sole purpose in life is to gross out mommies while destroying tomato, eggplant and pepper plants.

Through Internet research and a phone call to our local UF extension office we learned that the best way to eliminate tomato hornworm caterpillars was to handpick them from our plants… eeewww.  What next?  What do you do with a bucket of several-inch-long-juicy-green caterpillars?  Feed them to the fish!  But the fish in our pond refused to eat them… and worse, the slimy terrorists made it back to shore and started crawling back up the bank toward our garden!  Timothy, our three year old knew just what to do.  He and a shovel made quick work of the enemy bugs.  How could anyone think gardening is boring?

We have learned much through gardening as a family.  One of the biggest things is where to go for help!  Localized reference books allow the children to find answers quickly, which encourages them to look and learn on their own.  Our county’s extension office enables us to speak with Master Gardeners about trickier questions.  For the biggest challenges, like scorpions, icky bugs and big snakes, we still call the experts.  Daddy and Timothy are tougher than a whole football team when armed with a shovel!