Florida Urban Homestead

Fall is here, and for us here in Central Florida,  that means planting time is here again.  I hope we have had the last of the 90s.  I cold front is moving in tonight and cooling things off.  Here at the end of October we have been in the low 90s still.  The forecast is for cooler weather in the 80s and perhaps the upper 70s.  My tomatoes are already in the ground and I have planted my cucumbers and some radishes and carrots.  I can’t wait to get some cool weather crops in as well.  So look for more posts and some cool stuff on YouTube coming soon.  Happy Halloween and good planting!

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When the Florida summer heat is as bad as it is right now, it may seem like a waist to think about gardening. The truth is that right now is the perfect time to start seeds and even plant a little. Here is a break down of what can be started indoors, or planted outdoors in August in the sunshine state.

Outdoors:

Watermelon

Okra

Peppers

Pumpkins

Southern Peas

Collards

Corn

Eggplant

Indoors: (for September planting)

Tomato

Broccoli

Cauliflower

Celery

Leek

Lettuce

Cabbage

Cucumbers

Now is also a great time to get the soil ready. I am adding compost, rock dust, and other nutrients to the soil and turning it in. A weak solution of about two tablespoons of bleach to five gallons of water can be sprayed onto garden tools, stakes, and cages to prevent spreading any viruses or other diseases from one season to another, I do this in my driveway. I have also employed a large 50 gallon drum, I picked up from a mask making business that used to contain natural latex, in order to mass produce compost tea. It’s also a great time to hatch a plan on where you want to plant things because it can be important to rotate your crops from season to season. When it comes to the garden, there’s no time like the present.

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Yesterday was a day of sweet sorrow. Two of my tomato beds died out and I was forced to pull them out. With the pulling, I also had a glut of tomatoes bot green and red. I did what any tomato lover would do, make a tomato sandwich with my favorite mayonnaise and make a big pot of pasta sauce for dinner. Now is my time to replenish the beds that gave me so many great tomatoes. I have my compost ready, later this morning I will go get my rock dust and some composted cow dung and perhaps some mushroom compost if I can find it. Some of my new crop is already growing. I have some Roma, Maroglobe, and Rainbow Mix tomatoes growing in the Florida room as well as some peppers, eggplant and some papaya and cucumbers. Over the next two weeks I hope to have three new beds installed and stuff growing in them. It can be disappointing to see a bed of toms die, even when you are expecting it like I was because they were determent tomatoes; however, I will be exciting to start anew with young healthy plants. And I still have two beds of Beefsteak tomatoes growing and flowering.  So to my dead tomatoes and cucumbers, may you compost in peace.

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Sometimes I see something that reminds me of a line in a movie that most of us have probably seen, “Jurassic Park”. It’s the seen where the good Doctor Ian Malcolm says “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”  This line came back to me today as I read about Grafting, no not trees, but tomato plants.  It seems as though someone got the idea of grafting tomato plants to anything the could think of in the Solanaceae family that includes Eggplant, Tomatoes, Peppers, potatoes, and even tobacco!  Yes you can now have tomatoes grow above ground with potatoes underground.  But is it a good idea?  I’m not sure.  Should we get people used to getting cherry tomatoes off potato plants?  Potatoes produce cherry tomato-like fruit that even ripens red but it is poison!  Ok, ok, I know that is a reach for the horrors of grafting but you should Google this stuff.  Pour little tomato plants, so young and fresh next to their little eggplant buddies, and then  WHACK, OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!  Oh the horror, I shiver.  I know I don’t think twice about grafted fruit trees, but this is just, uh, odd.  Oh who knows, perhaps it is the wave of the future and we will all look back some day and laugh.  ”Oh can you believe we used to grow tomatoes on tomato plants?  I mean really, you couldn’t even smoke the leaves!”  It could be that way some day, but a part of me hopes not.

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Tomatoes are by far the most popular thing grown in the backyard garden and they really are easy to grow if you start our right from the beginning.  First off you need to get the soil ready for planting.  If you are planting directly into the ground it is a good idea to test the soil first.  Tomatoes do best in  a neutral to slightly acidic soil with a pH range of 6.2 to 7.0. If your soil is to acidic, you may need to apply some lime, if to alkaline, a great way to boost the acidity is to mix 1 part vinegar to 4 parts water and spread over the garden bed a few days before you plant.   Tomatoes also  love plenty of compost so don’t be stingy with it.  You can buy compost from the store or make your own.  If you are going to plant in a raised bed you can make you own mix of soil.  I like to use 3 parts top soil, 1 part compost, and 1/2  part peat moss. You can start from seed a few weeks before you plant, or buy the plants as starts but you first need to decide what kind of tomato plants you want.  Although they are many varieties of tomatoes, the fall into just three basic

Tomatoes ripening

types:   Indeterminate, Determinate, and Cherry.    Determinate tomatoes grow to a predetermined size that is in their DNA and once they reach this size, the stop growing and produce fruit. Determinate plants fruit tend to come ripe all at once and stop producing.  Indeterminate plants keep growing until killed by frost or pests.  They blossom and fruit the whole season and the fruit ripens at different times on the same plant.   Indeterminate plants can become huge, so it’s a good idea to pinch them back once they reach as high as you can reach and they may need to be caged or staked.   The last kind of tomato is the Cherry.  The Cherry types are smaller plants that produce small tomatoes that can range from the size of a cherry, to the size of a plum.  These are popular in salads.  Tomatoes don’t just come in red either.  Look for yellows, pinks, purples, greens, and even stripes!  Once you have your plants ready, plant them in your garden deep, all the way to the last few leaves.  Tomato plants can grow roots anywhere along their stem so this provides a deeper root system.  I like to add some bone meal to the bottom of each planting  hole to prevent blossom end rot latter on. In any case, keep the soil watered enough to keep the soil slightly moist but not drenched.  Also, do not try to make up for missing a few waterings by dumping too much at one time as this can cause splitting of the fruit.  Feed your plants every 2 to 3 weeks with an organic fertilizer.  if you have a fish tank you can use the waist water from cleaning the tank, or you can use  compost tea.  You can make compost tea from compost steeped in water.  I use old socks or stockings and stuff them with compost and drop them into 5 gallon buckets of water to steep.  I then remove the teabags and pour onto the base of the plants.  If these aren’t your cup o tea, they are many commercial organic fertilizers available.  If the local pests start bugging you, you can use a product like Organocide, or make your own.  Just add a few drops of natural soap and a little sesame oil to a spray bottle of water.  You can also add garlic oil and pepper oil to the mix.  The soap breaks down the waxy coating bugs have and as a result, the dehydrate and die.  The oil also smothers some bugs, especially ones that breath through the skin. the spray wont hurt the plant, but it will kill the bugs and you can use it right up to harvest.   Also, just picking the little buggers off and killing them works well too.  Before long you will have some great tasting tomatoes ready for salads, sauces, and of course the sandwich.

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Ok, it was the week end and my most of my tomatoes are still green.  What to do?  I can work hard in the garden and not sit back with a glass of iced t ea and a tomato sandwich!   I mean I do have some ripe cherry tomatoes that taste great in a salad but a little small for those two pieces of bread with some Hellmanns mayo.  So I grab my wife and off we go to find us some produce and most of all tomatoes.  I don’t want the impostors  from from the supermarkets, you know the ones, they kinda look like a tomato but not quite.  They are like tomatoes from another dimension where tomatoes are hard, tasteless and used as golf balls and for self defense, but never eaten.  But I digress.   We went to one of my favorite places to got for such things, The Vineyards at Holly Hill.  It’s a nice place where they grow Muscadine grapes for wine

muscadines

and some of the best tomatoes iv’e eaten.  To top it off the maters are grown just feet away from the stand!   I got beautiful beefsteak tomatoes for $1.99 a pound and I knew where the money was going, to the farmer!  Oh and do they taste great!  What they do not grow at the Vineyard, they co-op from nearby farmers and I got the sweetest watermelon I have tasted in a long time there. The melons were so fresh that the cuts on the stems were still moist and green.  I also got some great Florida onions and cucumbers to make my special salad.  The salid is a simple one, you just slice up some tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions in a Tupperware type container and fill it up with some juice from a jar of pickled peperoncini and let it marinate for a couple of hours.  Man that tastes great!  Anyway, this blog has made me hungry so I’m going to go grab some of that salad and a hunk of watermelon.  I’ll be doing a garden update soon, Happy Farming!

Vegetable Stand at The Vineyard at Holly Hill

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