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.

Farina

Our rabbits are multiplying, and none of them have even bred yet. After our new addition yesterday, we're up to six.



This is Farina, a beautiful angora rabbit. We had been trying to find one for a while now, but without luck. Then, earlier this week we stumbled upon a flyer at the Stockyard, our local feed store. A breeder had three angoras for sale for $12 each.



We've named her Farina, after the main ingredient in Cream of Wheat. Cream of Wheat is my favorite breakfast food, and because she's known as "oatmeal" colored, we thought it was perfect.

So why do we want this furry little creature? The hair makes for wonderful spun yarn. Mixed with wool, cotton, or other spinning materials, it creates an elegant, warm, and soft fiber.

Roosts

Slowly we keep adding on to our many works-in-progress here in our garden. We finally added the roosts to our coop. It took the ladies a little while to figure out what to do with them (they continued to sleep on the ground), but it seems like most of them have finally caught on. I can't imagine sleeping standing up on a little wooden beam, but if it makes them happy, awesome.

The first of our bounty

So poor little Seymore the Squash didn't really make it too long. The plants have really been overtaken by fungus, but we did manage to rescue this teeny little squash. He's not very big, but we've added him to the fall decorations on the dining table. We might cook him up and get a couple of spoonfuls of mashed butternut, but atleast we have something (however tiny) to show for our work.

A fall dinner

It's finally starting to feel like fall. Squashes are dominating the produce section, and jack-o-lanterns are found on nearly every doorstep. Last night's dinner was very seasonal, another one of our eating goals. On the menu:

Pork and gravy
Mashed butternut squash
Baked zucchini, carrots, and onions
Home-baked whole-wheat bread


The table setting was also gorgeous, decorated with edible and decorative squashes, colored maize, wheat, and pumpkins.





Dinner was followed up with some delicious pumpkin pie and vanilla ice cream.



I was very happy to have a nice autumn dinner. The weather doesn't change much here in Florida, but it's nice to see the food represent the seasons.

Fungus

Florida doesn't have the best climate for growing vegetables. It's very very warm, and terribly humid. The only crops that do really well here are citrus fruits, and strawberries. Some of our plants are suffering from the damp weather, and have developed fungus on their leaves. It started with the heirlooms, but has slowly spread to the commercial plants too. We're looking into remedies, and waiting patiently for cooler, dryer weather.

An epic aphid attack

The other day we went out into our garden to find that our black eyed peas were completely caked with teeny grey aphids. They seemed to be taking the worst hit, but there were also some on the Henderson limas. We decided to try using some soap suds to shoo them away, with plenty of help from Seleighna, the little neighbor girl.

Unfortunately, I think we may have used a little bit too much soap. The aphids were done for, but I think our beans may have been too.



They're kind of yellowing, and have dropped some of their leaves. We're going to pick what's left of the beans soon, and hope that the plants recover a bit.