January in the South Florida Garden

It's finally the growing season here in South Florida.  While you are perusing seed catalogs and planning your summer gardens I am busy in the garden.  You knew that the seasons were changing because the temperatures dropped: I knew the seasons were changing because the humidity dropped. 

Naked Plumeria

Your trees became a quilt of colors.  Maples become glorious red and oranges, oaks become beautifully burnished with russet, and the poplars explode in all shades of yellow.  Winds come and then the leaves fall to the ground, crunching underfoot. 

Bolivian Sunset Gloxinia

In South Florida, the leaves of my plumerias turned brown and fall off.  The jacarandas and poincianas do likewise.  No stunning displays of color as the leaves slowly turn off for the winter.  The plants know the seasons are changing because the days become shorter and the nights are longer.  They need more sunlight than is available, so they just close up shop, turn brown, fall off.  Thank goodness these trees have interesting branching patterns.  Because they look like sticks.

So, while the plumerias aren't fans of the short days, many common garden plants love the shorter days, longer nights, and lower humidity.  As soon as the days get shorter, the hardy Bolivian Gloxinias (gloxinia sylvatica) awake from their slumber and poke their heads through the soil.  By Christmas, they are always in glorious bloom.  The tubers in the photo above have returned every year for at least the last ten years.  The biggest challenge is keeping them in the bed and not in the path.  Every fall, I find new pups that insist on growing in the pathway.  They are always tucked firmly back in the bed.

Cooler nights brings on the blooms in many orchids.  Kalanchoes are also reliable winter bloomers in the South Florida garden.  

While the phalaenopsis will start to set buds to bloom in spring, the dendrobiums and cymbidiums like nighttime temperatures in the 60s and 70s.  

South Florida Gardening Winners and Losers

So if you follow this blog, you must think I died or quit gardening.  Quite the contrary.  While the rest of the country has been dreaming of gardening, I've been doing it.

The South Florida growing season is drawing to a close and the rest of you are just getting started,  Here is what worked for me this year and what was a flop!

The Biggest Loser!

By far, the worst performers in my garden this season were the cucurbits!  I am not holding a pity party for them however.  They had much going against them, but they didn't give it much of a try.  I know I was not alone.  During a visit to a local nursery in January I overheard the staff in charge of the vegetable section tell a customer they had no luck with cucurbits either.  Our November was cooler than normal, followed by a December that was not only cool, but it was damp as well.  A quick review of cucurbit growing conditions does not include the terms "damp" or "cool".  I managed to get just a few Straight Eight cukes out of a raft using the Deep Water Culture (DWC) technique.  Growing a vining plant using DWC is always a challenge.  We ran string to get it to the garden frame and then just let it grow from there.  The plants in the flood and drain grow beds never produced at all. I ripped them out in January.  Despite many different attempts, I was not able to get new seeds to sprout.  Zero squash, zero melons, few cucumbers.  Cucurbits were a bust!

The Loser Runner Up!

Is there a runner up loser place at the podium?  I don't know if it is official place, but cucurbits were almost beat out by the nightshades as poor performers.  The cool and damp conditions were not embraced by the eggplants.  They were tolerated by the peppers and the tomatoes thrived so the nightshades mixed performance kept them out of the bottom position.  The irregular weather conditions resulted in problems with chlorosis.  I had to chelate more this season than I have in any season past.  This picture is a perfect representation of the eggplant problem this season.  I harvested less than a dozen fruits.  Usually I can keep eggplant going into May.  This year it was done by February. This is the second year I have grown eggplants relying solely on aquaponic methods. Last year was such a success!  This year not so much.  Next growing season, I commit to growing with and without soil. 

The Good Stuff

Now for the winners!  I tried celery in a flood and drain bed for the first time.  OK, true confession time, it is the first time I have tried to grow celery ever.  Maybe celery is easy to grow, maybe the cooler than normal temperatures were a factor.  I just know that it grew exceptionally well. It has been tasty too!

So next year I will try celery again and see if it is a fluke.  As an aside, I discovered that celery leaves are pretty tasty when they are young but bitter when they are older.  It is awesome to harvest your celery and then not spend all that time in the kitchen scrubbing the dirt off.  That is an unsung benefit of growing with aquaponics, faster produce cleaning in the kitchen!

Another big winner were the greens.  I grew kale and swiss chard with lots of success.  The chards took a littler longer to get going this year, but once they got going, there was no holding them back. The chards and kale were grown in both NFT tubes and flood and drain beds.  I didn't try any of these in soil this season.


Last year, the greens in the NFT tubes were the big winners, this year the plants in the flood and drain beds out performed their tube counterparts.  It just goes to show that when it comes to gardening, there are always surprises. 

 

This was my first season with Dinosaur kale.  It grows very quickly no matter the weather or light conditions.  Three plants were all that were necessary to provide more than enough for our table of 2.

The Winners!

The winners were the mints, including basil and the peppers and the tomatoes.  I had tomatoes in soil and tomatoes in my aquaponic gardens.  I tried something old, Mr. Stripey, something new, Arkansas Traveler, and something borrowed and blue, Indigo Rose!

The basil went wild in the NFT tubes.  I had to end up moving a Dinosaur kale to make more room. 

 This is an Indigo Rose growing in an NFT Tube with a little cayenne pepper poking out behind it.  The Indigo Rose seeds were from my son's garden in Ohio.  When I visited in August, I opened one of his ripe tomatoes onto a paper towel and spread out the seeds and flesh to dry.  I brought the dried paper towel home and planted it, towel and all in October.  The Indigo Rose was by far the most prolific producer.  I had them in DWC rafts, flood and drain beds and soil.  They performed well in all situations.  The only down side to this tomato is that it takes for-fricking-ever to ripen.  The portion of the tomato that is kissed by the sun turns a bluish purple, the remainder will turn red or yellow when the tomato is ripe. 

 This was my Arkansas Traveler when it was setting its first fruit.  I only had one plant this year, but will certainly save seeds (using the paper towel method) because this is a great tasting tomato. It doesn't grow extremely large in either plant size or fruit size.  When ripe, it is a pink color.  It is very tasty and low acid.

This is a "Mr. Stripey" that was growing in soil in a pot.  A real down side to buying starter plants is that anyone with a sense of mischief can cause problem in the garden center.  I bought this plant as a start and it was clearly marked "Mr. Stripey", which happens to be one of my favorite tomato varieties.  As it began to set fruit, O started doubting the veracity of the tag.  The tomatoes weren't as large as they should be and didn't exhibit stark striping.  When the first fruits started to ripen I knew I had been had.  The fruits turned red and not the beautiful orange-ish shade sported by Mr. Stripey.  I don't know who this imposter is, but it produces a medium sized red tomato with very light striping.  Unlike Mr. Stripey, it is very low acid. I am not saving the seeds.  I considered prosecuting it for impersonating a beloved heirloom, but decided the real culprit was the person at the garden center, not the plant.

Inedibles in Closing

  Believe it or not, the winter months aren't all about vegetables here at the end of the peninsula.  The shorter days mean that lots of plants start to bloom.  While you are looking at snow, I'm looking at kolanchoes.

 I'm enjoying the orchid blossoms.

 

And the Bolivian gloxinias start to bloom before Christmas and take us all the way through to Easter.

 

My season was a mixture of hits and misses.  Let me know what you are doing to make your season a success.  I'd love to hear from you!

Combating Powdery Mildew

The rainy season continues.  In the Month of June we had a little over 15 inches.  So far this July we have had 13 inches (not counting today) and still a week left to go.  Rainy season means the biggest gardening task is combating powdery mildew.

Powdery mildew is a disease caused by the fungi Erysiphales.  It is a real problem when the humidity and heat rise and will significantly reduce the harvest of your garden. 

The bad news is that I have it on some of my okra in the aquaponic gardens. Because of the fish component in aquaponic gardens, you must be careful that what ever you place on the plants will not harm the fish or the fish's environment.  The good news is that it is fairly easy to combat with non-toxic substances like baking soda. 

Every day for the last week or so I have said I need to treat that powdery mildew, but the rains have beaten me every day. So this morning I got an early start and before it rained, I mixed a solution of  2 teaspoons of baking soda into 1 cup of water.  If you need to make a larger batch, that is a 1:24 ratio of baking soda to water.  Here is a picture of the ingredients and tools (along with the morning's harvest of okra).  I like to harvest before I do any treatment.

Baking soda is alkaline (that means it has a high pH) and anything with a high or low pH will kill mold.  Powdery mildew may have a fancy name, but it is just mold.  Because I want the alkaline mixture to get the mold but not mess with the pH of the fishes' water, I applied it with my basting brush.  If I were doing this in a soil garden, I would make a big batch and just spray it on the leaves.

As you can see, this okra is doing really well.  The leaves are huge!  But they do have powdery mildew.  I

Okra on DWC raft

have been eating from the okra plants in the aquaponic gardens for about 2 weeks now.  The okra plants in soil have just started to flower.  Most of the gardeners I know in South Florida take the rainy season off. They are all amazed that I am able to grow anything right now, even though it is mostly okra and purple hull peas.

Speaking of purple hull peas, would you look at these beauties!  If you are not familiar with this plant, it is a legume and produces a shelling pea.  The pods start off green and then turn the most beautiful color of purple as they ripen.  The taste is a bit milder than a black-eyed pea,

but they do have a black eye.  It is a plant that used to be common (like kohlrabi) but has fallen out of favor.  I am hoping that the new interest in heirlooms will bring back the popularity of this plant.

The one thing that really likes all this rain is the lemongrass.  I can't cook with it fast enough to keep in in check.  If you have any ideas for cooking with lemongrass please share them. Because it is growing like mosquitoes with all this rain.

Speaking of which, I just finished treating and taking pictures when I heard the first rumble.  When I look around this is what I see!