Tour of Worden Farms

Yesterday, Taylor and I went with a group of New College students to go visit the only commercial organic farm on the west coast. We drove all the way out to Punta Gorda, where we found the 55 acre family-owned, Certified Organic farm.

After watching a quick film about the farm's history, we loaded up onto a hay-filled wagon and began our tour.

This adorable puppy decided to hitch a ride with us, too.

We got to see quite a few of the eleven fields where they grow a variety of crops. The lettuces looked delicious and we got to taste a few of the tomatoes which tasted just like candy they were so sweet.

They had a pretty big greenhouse filled with plenty of seedling trays waiting to be put into the ground.

All in all, it was a pretty cool place. It's great to see an organic farm so close to home. There were a couple of things that I didn't agree with. They ship in hundreds of tons of processed chicken manure from Perdue chicken farms half-way across the country. They don't use any of their wastes as compost for crops. They also use approved natural pesticides, and I'm really not sure how I feel about that. All in all, it's much better than the conventional agriculture going on here, and it's cool to see it available to the public.

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.

Natural pesticide

I'm so glad that there are now an abundance of resources about organic gardening. Our outdated bookshelf still contains plenty of old gardening books that basically worship pesticides and fertilizers, which pretty much contradicts everything I'm reading in gardening books today, focusing on organic growing.

My mom has some rose bushes that over the past month have been sucked dry by aphids, green teeny flecks-of-an-insect that suck on the stems of plants, gaining nutrients for themselves, but depriving plants of food. My mom tried some natural remedies, like soapy water and rubbing alcohol, but nothing could get rid of these fleets of aphids.

So we tried something else.


We called in the troops! For $9.99 we purchased 10,000 ladybugs, which we released on our screened-in patio. A few days later, there were no aphids to be found! This little group of ladybugs found a dark home under the glass of a table.

It's been a couple of weeks, and there are still plenty of ladybugs around. Remarkably, there are still plenty of spiders hanging out on the rosebushes. These spiders would probably be dead had we used pesticide sprays, but instead, they're still around catching other pesky insects.