Fall Garden

I hear that fall gardening is the way to go in Florida. This is the first time I've attempted it, but so far most everything looks pretty good. At least when I get a chance to see it. With the shorter days, it's getting dark by the time I get home from work. So some evenings I'm doing flashlight gardening. But there are flowers on the bean plants. The nasturtiums are getting huge. The beets that recovered from the bad rain last month look great. Carrots are looking good. Lettuce is healthy. The only things that really didn't make it are the swiss chard (something gnawed on it), one of the brocolli's (ditto) and the sorrel (never did germinate).

Days are short, the sun is low and temperatures are cooler, so the plants are growing much more slowly than in a spring/summer garden. But the biggest difference that I've noticed between this fall garden and summer gardens is the relative lack of bugs. I've had to pick some eggs and caterpillars off the bean plants, but I really haven't noticed any other bugs (other than whatever ate the chard and brocolli). We did have a fire ant infestation in one corner of the raised bed. I dug them out, taking a few of the carrot plants with them, but they seem to be gone for good now. I'm not sure if they crawled over the border wall or burrowed under.

With the sun lower in the sky now, and most of the leaves still on our trees, the hours of sunlight have really been reduced. By December we will have lost all of the sweetgum leaves and some of the hickory leaves. The live oak and laurel oak leaves will stay on all winter and drop in the spring when the new leaves emerge. I'd like to measuer the solar radiation that this garden gets. It seems very limited, but so far the plants are healthy, so I suppose it is enough.

Can't wait to start the harvest! That will be the true test!

Harvested this week from the summer garden:

Peppers (habanero, poblano and tangerine), and four acorn squashes. Some of the habeneros went into a peanut soup tonight. The squashes are for our Thanksgiving squash soup.