Collards

With so many of our vegetables failing, it's so nice to see our collards doing well.

Collards are one of my favorite foods. Nothing beats a huge pot of collards cooked with bacon.

Chicken feeder

Up until last week, we were wasting quite a bit of chicken feed. We'd put it in a pile in the run, but when it rained, most of the food went to waste. Our local feed store wanted close to 50 dollars for a one-gallon poultry feeder, which wasn't about to happen. We tried an automatic pet-feeder, but the dish was so wide that they'd just jump in and scratch it all out. Then Mr. Dennis had a great idea.

We went to Publix and asked the bakery department for a left-over icing bucket. After drilling some holes and attaching it to a shallow plastic dish (like the kind that goes underneath terracotta pots), we had our nearly-free chicken feeder.

Powdery Mildew

So our squash have been looking sickly for a while, and we've finally narrowed it down to Powdery Mildew. It's a nasty little fungus that grows on the surface of rough leaves as a result of humid conditions and poor air circulation. We looked up some remedies, and decided to try a mixture of baking soda and water (one tablespoon per liter)*.

We sprayed all of the infected leaves and then let them dry in the sun. It seemed to kill the mildew on contact. If this fails us, we've also read about a milk solution that can be applied to the leaves.

*We later learned that this mixture was too strong and burned some of our leaves.

Beans

After our beans died as a result of our soapy aphid treatment, we quickly went and picked all of the ripe pods. We only wound up with a small handful of beans in the end, but had the plants not died, we could still have harvested more over time.

When we pulled up the bean plants, we did see plenty of little nodules on the roots, which means that the nitrogen-fixing bacteria were in fact doing their job. Some improved soil and a handful of beans is better than nothing.

Attracting pollinators

We've been noticing a lack of insect life around our garden. To remedy this, Taylor and I have been working on adding some more flowers which will hopefully attract more bees, and other buzzing creatures.

We're also trying to make sure we add some useful flowers as well. So far we've started some echinacea and lavender seedlings, and will hopefully add more later on.

Priming the chicken coop

While Taylor and I were out one evening, Mr. Dennis surprised us by painting the chicken coop with primer. Hopefully we'll paint it pretty soon, and have a barn-red chicken coop with a white picket fence. I just love this coop's charm.

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.