A new site

One of our biggest problems impeding our success in the garden is the lack of sunlight. For a good part of the day, our beds are cast in shade which is not conducive for plant growth. We've since gotten permission to put a few beds out front come this spring, which should improve things. We'll still use the beds out back for low-light crops, and use the ones out front for corn, tomatoes, beans, and squashes, which seem to require a blazing sun to do really well. We're pretty excited, and hope to get a head start preparing the soil in January.

Overhaul

As part of our transition to non-heirlooms, we've ripped out a bunch of our sickly squashes, radishes, and other crops. We've now got a bunch of empty spaces for the seedlings we've recently started.

Before we do add the new seedlings, we're going to mix in some ashes, rabbit and chicken manure, and compost. After remulching and mixing in some hay to prevent soil compaction, we'll go ahead and put in our fall plants.

Rethinking things

We haven't been having much luck here in our gardens. Many of our plants are succumbing to fungus, our soil is compacting more than we'd like, and things just aren't going as well as we'd like. Rather than get discouraged, we're kind of rethinking our strategy. Before we started on our garden, we came up with a list of goals and things that are important to us:

Grow things organically
Working on growing soil, rather than growing crops
Growing heirloom vegetables
Keeping as closed a system as possible
Figure out what crops to grow when in our unique climate

With the way things are going, we've decided to make some minor tweaks to this original plan. Everything is still going to be organic, without a doubt. There's no way that we're going to introduce pesticides or fertilizers into our garden. Improving soil quality is still our number one priority, and we're going to retest our soil to see if anything has changed from when we started three months ago.

Probably one of the largest changes we're going to make is the kind of vegetables we grow. Most of our afflicted crops are the heirloom varieties. Compared to the commercial seeds we've been growing, they're just not doing quite as well. For example, our squash.

The commercial variety, which is doing well besides a couple of spots of fungus.

Our heirloom Waltham Butternut, which has completely succumbed to fungus and disease. It was planted about a month before the commercial stuff.

We've gotten pretty discouraged with the way the heirlooms have turned out, and we've decided that now is not the time. If we keep having our crops fail, we're going to lose our motivation and excitement about gardening. After we've improved our soil and have learned more about the planting seasons, we'll try again, but for now, we're going to stick with commercial seeds.

We've also decided to experiment less with planting seasons. We've kind of been veering off from the recommended planting times on the seed packets because of how different our Sarasota weather is from the rest of our zone. Since that hasn't worked out, we're now going to follow the recommendations exactly. Later on, when we see how things have worked out, we can play around with planting times.

Our original goals haven't changed much. We eventually do want to plant plenty of heirloom varieties, and we're still huge advocates of organic gardening. Without making these changes though, it could be a long time until we really see any return on our garden, and to keep ourselves from resenting a failing garden, we need to make a few temporary changes.

Invader in the garden

Every once in a while, we'll hear a dog barking in the backyard, and go out to see what all the noise is about. Rarely do we actually see anything, but finally one day I was out there and caught the intruder in the act.



He was hanging out near the rabbits, barking at them. Every once in a while, we find evidence of something digging into the rabbit cage, and I wonder if this is the culprit. Either way, the pen is pretty puppy-proof, so I don't fear for their safety.

The view from here

The other day, Mr. Dennis decided to clean the roof.



Talk about a busy guy. He's always doing something productive.

Taylor went up with him to help clean the skylights on the roof, and discovered a beautiful view of our gardens from the higher vantage point. He dragged me up there after class just in time for sunset, and it was absolutely beautiful.








It's was really neat to see our garden from another point of view.

A New Blog For A New Garden

College is a blast, minus one thing--- there's nowhere for a garden. While my campus is very "green" and interested in sustainable agriculture, student gardens do get vandalized, and ripened veggies get stolen. Not a very conducive environment for gardening.

I spent my first year at school tending a garden over two hours away. Using a combination of timed sprinklers, coercing family members to tend the plants, and occasionally swinging by to perform damage control, I managed to hold up a fairly respectable garden for about a semester before someone moved the sprinkler for a week, and everything dried up and died. In addition, most of the veggies were gobbled up by hungry family members before I could reap in any of the goods.


Our newly planted seedlings last March. I'm on the right, Taylor's in the middle, and one of my closest friends, Stephanie, is on the left. She and her boyfriend run a great Certified Naturally Grown farm. It's unbelievable.

However, my boyfriend and co-blogger Taylor has an in with two very nice, very generous family members (who also happen to be his landlords) who have given us access to over two acres of gorgeous land just miles from my dorm room. Starting August 19, when I can move back in, we will be able to have a garden, chickens, rabbits, and all sorts of wonderful sustainable food sources at our fingertips.

We've just finished building four 8x4 raised beds, which we hope to fill with wonderful, rich soil, gorgeous plants, and all kinds of delicious vegetables. We've just recently started a bunch of heirloom seedlings ordered from SeedSavers.org.


Heirloom seeds are my absolute favorite. They're totally different from anything in a grocery store, and seem to fare better than conventional seeds.


Sadly, seedling flats (or trays) are hard to come by around here. We improvised, using Dixie cups with holes poked in the bottom.


I used a corn-cob holder to punch through the bottoms.

We planted just under a hundred little baby plants. They should be coming up pretty soon. Then we just have to transport them on the three hour drive to their new home right near my school.


Our new babies, nestled in their dark, damp nests. There was one more tray of about thirty seeds in addition to these.

Now we just need to get the soil for their beds in good shape. So much to do.