Gardening Hall of Fame

Hello all! Spring is starting to creep in (I will write about that once I get some good photos!) and we gardeners are busy getting our beds ready and tilled. One of my friends runs a great blog about urban farming with a family, raising chickens, growing heirloom seeds and connecting with nature called Gardening Adventures. She is so great, in fact, that someone from News Channel 8 ran across her blog and mentioned it to the station manager, who decided to do a piece on her garden!! The news crew comes out tomorrow morning, and the piece should be running some time in the next week. Stay tuned, I will have more information soon. In the meantime, check out her blog!

The sky is falling!

My husband and I have two lovely friends who each own chickens. Chris has always wanted chickens, and even has names picked out for them! I, on the other hand, was like 98% of the population and considered them to be dirty and pointless. I grew up with tales of how farm animals have all sorts of crazy diseases, like salmonella and e. coli, and how dirty they are. It's hard to shake that. However, seeing how much fun our two fiends have, and how easy it looked, I have begun to warm to the idea. I mean, who doesn't want eggs at their disposal every morning? Plus I think my children would really have fun with them. From what I saw of my friends' chickens, they seem very entertaining and full of personality. And ever since last month it is legal to own chickens in my county. We have the space in the back yard, and now is a great time to buy chicks. I borrowed two book from my friend Chris (not hubby, a friend) and she sent me numerous sites all about living with and raising chickens. Very informative! I think my problem is that I am a little overwhelmed at the myriad of choices of breeds and coups and feed. I told Chris (hubby this time) that I would need some help with research this time.

So my question to you my readers is: can anyone recommend a good small breed that is generally easy going? What kind of shelter do they need and how big does it need to be? Is 2 okay or do I need 3 or more for them to be happy? Where do I buy them from? Any tips on having children and other animals around them? Thanks!

All in a days work

My blog a few weeks ago talked about my plans for spring gardens. Well I have already started some of that! My husband decided to help me out in the front yard as a birthday gift (thanks honey!) so we got cracking on fixing things up.

First things first, the walkway leading to the house needed to be remulched and have some more plants put in it, since the pentas are annuals and were dead. Chris really likes gardenias so I decided to buy three gardenia bushes from a local nursery and place those there, along with a pretty cool weather annual (alyssum), and some solar lights we got on sale at Home depot. Here is how it turned out:

Next we remulched the entire front bed with the lemon lime bushes, and my white rose bush. Those are pretty good so I just trimmed those. Here is the white rose bush, with some poinsettias in the background:

Also at the local nursery I indulged and got 2 lavender pots, 2 rosemary pots, 4 different colored pansy plants,  4 jalapeno pepper plants, 4 sweet pepper plants, 4 beefsteak tomato plants, 4 unknown type tomato plants, 4 zucinni plants, and 4 summer squash plants. Here are some of them:

These are hung on PVC piping. The one in the front has my pansy plants. The one in the back is holding the rosemary and lavender. It's a great way to brighten a front porch, and the herbs are within reach of my door if I need to cook with them!

The back container has my tomato plants, plus one of the squash plants. The front has the sweet peppers and one of the jalapenos. I am keeping them in containers until I am certain it will not freeze (maybe mid February) then I will transfer them to my back yard in the raised beds. I can't wait!

I go back to work next Monday (boo!) but I will try to keep up with blogging and updating you all on whats going on outside my door. Until next time friends :)

Yard clean up

So, last year I was pregnant for pretty much the entire growing season. Sure I got things started in March, but as I got bigger it got harder for me to bend down and tend to the garden beds. Eventually I ended up on bed rest and nature took over. Weeds choked out native plants, dollar weeds spread, my vining plants went crazy, and things just died when the cold set in.

Well, I am feeling great now! So I decided to tackle my back yard. First of all my passion fruit completely took over my back area, covering my shed and overtaking two jasmine plants. It needed to be cut way back. Here is the result:

This is cut WAY back. I am positive it will be fine and grow back. The way it just spread and took over everything, I think it should almost be classified as invasive. So after doing that this is what I discivered:

These are jasmine plants. I thought they had died last summer. But lo and behold here they are! If you look hard you can see that each plant has a tendril curling up on the trellises. Yay! I hope they continue to grow and give us wonderful scented jasmine flowers :)

The next task was fixing our oleander. It has about 5 oak trees trying to grow right up the middle of it. Last year, it didn't have as many flowers and they died quickly. I think it was maybe because it is competing with the oaks for sunlight and water. So I went in (it's a jungle in there, the oleander is well over 15 feet tall) and trimmed the oaks WAY back and got rid of some nasty invasive vine in it. Here is the result, right next to my son's car:

That was a lot of work! After that I trimmed and pruned the rose bushes, the blueberry bush, and various other things. Here is what I got:

Yay! Now my back yard is a level playing field ready for things to grow and bloom in it :)

Winter garden

Hello! I thought I would share some pictures of what my garden looks like in Florida during the winter months :)

This is my aloe plant. It was so tiny when I got it! It seems to like the unusually warm dry winter we are having, which makes sense since it's a succulant.

My beautiful magnolia! We did our biannual pruning, so now the last branch starts about two feet from the ground. Did you know trees don't grow up, they just get taller? So branches that are 2 feet from the ground will always be that high. I didn't know this! I want a magnolia tree, not a magnolia bush, so I have to prune it every 6 months.

This is my jewel blueberry bush. Last year it gave us some berries, so I am excited for it this year. There is already some new growth on it.

This is my rose bush. You can actually see the new leaves forming!

This stick tree is actually my crepe myrtle. It looses it's leaves in November and stays looking like I planted sticks in the ground until about April. This things LOVES heat. It blooms late summer and is the first plant in my yard to lose its' leaves.

This is my apple tree, and it's blossoms! It has a cluster of 5 flowers, and another little bundle right behind it that hasn't opened yet. They smell great!

This is my holly tree! It's tiny now (maybe 7 inches tall) but already producing beautiful red berries. I can't wait for it to get bigger.

These are my baby crepe myrtles that I got for joining the Arbor day foundation. I planted them along my southern yard between me and my neighbor. I figured that would make a good natural barrier. As you can see, the top two and bottom one already have growth on them. The third one, not so much, but when I scratch it I see green underneath, so I think it might just be dormant like the one I talked about earlier.

There you have it! The ecosystem known as my yard in January when the daytime temperatures are in the low 70s :)

Spring ideas

January in Florida is a time when many gardeners and farmers are enjoying the winter's bounty of crops.Things like strawberries and blueberries are just coming into season. I can actually taste the strawberries getting sweeter! I cannot wait to go to some u-pick farms with my kids and show them where our food comes from.

Since I missed the fall/winter crop planting (sniff!) I am taking January to get my garden beds ready and make a plan for planting. Wednesday the hubby and I will completely de-weed the two garden beds we have, and put some rich organic dirt on top. Hopefully this will mix with the native soil within the next month and make it great for growing things. We are also going to prune my magnolia tree and rose bushes, and mulch the roses, blueberries, apple tree, magnolia tree, plumeria, and crepe myrtles. Maybe we can get our oleander under control, and weed the front garden beds. We only have from 9-2 until we have to get our son, then any focused involved work is not easy.

Come the beginning of next month, I will plant the seeds for the veggies I want. I won't be doing many from seed this time around. I am planting pumpkin, watermelon and two types of green beans, pole and bush. Our bush beans last year yielded a lot of beans, but they do not continue to produce. Once you pick the beans the plant is done. I will do those again, since they were so successful, but we enjoy beans so we would like to have them all summer. The two crops I will buy established and just plant are tomatoes and peppers. Last year the ones we bought from the University of Florida's green fest did very well. They withstood the summer heat and produced a lot of veggies. Whereas the ones I tried from seed did not make it. So I will not have tomatoes or peppers until late March.

As for herbs, those proved extremely hard to grow from seed too. I will go to a local nursery, Willow Tree Nursery, and buy lavender, rosemary, oregano and thyme. We have planters made from PVC pipe that we hang from hooks on our porch. We will keep the herbs in pots there. They will be easy to water there, and every time someone walks up to my door the rosemary and lavender smell great. Plus they love the evening sun my porch gets. I am thinking about buying them at the end of this month.

So that's my plan! What is everyone else planning on doing?

Hello again!

Hello! I hope everyone has had a wonderful holiday season. I know we did! We welcomed little Piper on November 19. She at least waited until our anniversary was over to make her appearance. Here she is with her big brother:

So, now that I feel well enough to actually bend down and be productive, my mind has once again turned to gardening. I think last year taught me a lot. It was my first year of gardening, and while I read all the books and went on all the gardening websites, I still made mistakes (why on Earth did I plant so many different kinds of veggies?). I can't wait to try again, a seasoned veteran this time :)  I will post exactly what I want to plant in my next blog. For now,it's good to be back :)