Knowing What To Grow

Instead of allowing little terra cotta pots to dance in your head, know that facing reality is a better direction to go. If you live in Florida, you are probably already thinking about what you want in your spring garden so I would like to drop a few tips and recommendations.

• Only grow what you will eat or give away.
• Now is not the time to try the new “exotic” variety of greens from a far-off land, stick with the basics.
• Be honest about the amount of time that you are thinking you’ll have versus the real time you will actually have.
• Is this going to be a hobby, supplementing your current groceries or are you planning to grow all your own foods?
• Grow vegetables that you can either trellis upwards or drape down over a hip height planter. Roots or shoots tend to take up a lot of space, long grow time and many end up getting hit with nematodes.

For annual spring vegetables, I would recommend you focus on high production so tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, melon, peppers, okra, lettuce, and peas. You can plant radishes in between the main plants as most radishes will only take about 30-40 days to reach maturity as opposed to the majority of others which will take anywhere from 60 to 100.

If you are interested in growing fruit of some kind, I would recommend skipping most of the stone fruits as they are not usually high production for a few years but mulberries, strawberries, and blackberries would be fairly worth investing money into. Check your local nursery for the best varieties.

If you live in central Florida, there are numerous varieties of edible ginger and non-edible that grow well along with turmeric, lemongrass and arrow root. Be careful to research the ginger variety before buying as some are not safe for consumption and can end in a hospital visit.

If you are looking for flowers, plan to drop in some chamomile, calendula, marigolds, gomphrena, dianthus, verbena, tropical sage, and viola. If you check out rareseeds.com (Baker Creek’s website), you can find edible or medicinal varieties of numerous flower species.

While growing kitchen herbs is fairly simple, you can buy dried herbs in bulk and store them away in your pantry as it’s fairly expensive to spend a few hundred dollars on a garden set up, just to grow some chives or parsley.

If you have not yet purchased the books Carrots Love Tomatoes by Louise Riotte, do so as you want to know what to companion plant with your main crops. I’ll be testing out planting green onions with various plants this season and encourage you to try your hand at experimenting to see what works best.

Speaking of carrots, if you insist on trying to grow them, look for pelleted seed as regular carrot seed is incredibly tiny and difficult to see and plant, be sure to check that the company you are purchasing from is a reputable one. I can highly recommend flseeds.com for most of the FL regional seeds.