When I decided to plant another garden, I wasn't sure how successful it was going to be. I had pretty high expectations since it did pretty well last year. We had an endless supply of tomatoes and cucumbers for awhile, but that eventually changed. So, I wasn't sure what to expect this year. It's pretty satisfying when your vegetables actually take off and your able to eat what your growing though. Like anything else, it takes a lot of work and dedication to successfully keep up with it.
We tilled up a much bigger space than we did last year. I was sure that we chose a space that had enough sunlight, but I couldn't be sure until things started sprouting up. We added cow manure in after we tilled up the spot and spread that around. Here in Florida, we just have sand and it's horrible to plant anything in. Olivia and I made a trip to Walmart and we picked out a few different veggies and flowers. We chose cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, sweet peppers, corn, carrots, radishes, corn, zinnias, marigolds, and lettuce. We really hyped it up and talked about it a lot and Livi was super excited to help out. We let her plant most of the seeds and she really enjoyed that.
I think it took 3-4 weeks before we saw any sprouts. Our lettuce and green beans grew the fastest and we were soon able to add lettuce to our salads. I had to change the location of our cucumbers because they were in a pretty shady spot and nothing was happening. Once those started coming up, we stuck some garden stakes in the ground and weaved a piece of metal fencing through them. Once the cucumbers got big and started to vine, we weaved them through the fence. We also purchased some tomato cages from Walmart. They were affordable and only ended up costing us around $4.
Unfortunately, about a month after we planted everything, we had a month long drought. I would water in the morning and evening, but it wasn't enough for some things. We only got 6 cucumbers and only 1 looked normal. The others were deformed and mushy in the center. When I Googled why that could have happened, it mentioned too much sunlight or not enough water. We probably won't plant corn again because its hard to say if it will grow again. It was more of an experiment anyway, because I wasn't sure how it would do here. Green beans did the best for us and we were happy with that because they were tasty.
Ants slowly started taking over everything by Mid-June. I tried a few things, but they continued eating through. I eventually pulled a lot out and just kept the cucumbers and tomatoes because that was all that was growing by then. Our Zinnia's were my favorite part of the garden. They were constantly blooming and I could bring a different bouquet into the house weekly. If we decide to put in a garden next year, we will have it in the ground by April, maybe. It isn't as hot then as it is in the summer months. We might look into building raised beds also to see if that helps. Experimenting and learning new things is pretty exciting when growing new crops. I think it was a learning lesson for all of us between patience, dealing with the sun and ants, and all of the other sweaty work we put into it.
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| One of our first Zinnias. |
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| Cutting some lettuce for dinner. |
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| Barefoot and Zinnias. |
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| Olivia cutting some lettuce. |
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| Some of the beautiful Zinnias we picked. |
