Mulching

Mulching your flowerbeds or gardens is an excellent way to combat some of Florida's gardening challenges. Thick mulching blocks out the sun, deterring weed growth. It also helps keep moisture down in the soil, which is important on hot summer days.

I've been experimenting with mulching lately, with the added twist of combining it with recycling and reuse. Half of my (backyard) vegetable garden is now covered with newsprint (actually crossword puzzles, which adds a bit of whimsy to the aesthetic); the other half supports a thick blanket of cardboard. It's now a competition to see which does better at keeping weeds, pests, and diseases at bay.

Newsprint -
Pros: Easy to shape and handle.
Cons: Flies away when faced with the quick coastal winds, even when I wet the paper and anchor it with stones.

Cardboard -
Pros: Thicker, which will probably be more successful at keeping weeds down. Also, because it is so thick, you will likely need only one layer. Most importantly, it is difficult to recycle cardboard in many suburban municipalities (including this one), so using it as mulch provides a much needed, easy outlet for its reuse.
Cons: Difficult to cut and shape.

Low-Flow Showerheads

Getting a low-flow showerhead is one of the easiest things you can do to reduce your daily water consumption. Give it two showers and you won't even notice the difference!

We chose to buy the ETL Oxygenics showerhead because it was super affordable and one of the most water-efficient we could find.

To search for a low-flow showerhead of your very own, read some reviews here:
http://greenhome.huddler.com/products/category/showerheads

To see the showerhead we bought and read Ben's review of it, check this out:
http://greenhome.huddler.com/products/etl-630-xlf-showerhead/reviews/175

Image from huddler.com

Water recycling

This blog, of course, is not only about gardening. That just happens to be my current pet project. This blog is about striving to live sustainably all-around in the environmentally-unsupportive environment of suburbia. In that spirit, the next few posts will be about things we have already implemented to make our household a little more "green."

The first is water recycling on a very small, low-tech scale. We felt guilty about having to let our shower run while the water warms up, even with our low flow shower head. So we had a small brainstorm and decided to tote a 5-gallon bucket into the shower with us. We direct the showerhead to fill the bucket while the water is still running cold. By the time the bucket is 3/4 full, the water is warm enough for a comfy shower.

Of course, I can't quite ignore gardening entirely in this post though. We choose to use our collected shower water in our garden to help allay the unforgiving heat and sun of the Florida summer (or any season here, really). Ben waters in the mornings, when less evaporation occurs than during the day. [Mornings are better than evenings for watering vegetable plants because the sun dries any water that ended up on the plants' leaves. Leaves left wet are extremely vulnerable to plant diseases, especially in humid climates.]

But you don't have to have a proper garden to use this method of water recycling. We also use the water on our indoor houseplants. You could also use it on your suffering lawn during the summers. Because the water is fresh and clean, you could also use it to soak dishes or wash clothes by hand. Or pour it into your pets' bowls! The possibilities for an extra five or ten gallons of clean water around your house are quite numerous, even if you have no plants at all.

Composting

I went to the library today to do a tiny bit of research on dishwashers, and I somehow came home with an armful of gardening books. Funny how that happens. The one I read today was on composting.

Composting is an essential part of any green lifestyle. There are types of composting to fit every living environment, whether you live in suburbia, the countryside, or even the city. Even when living under the rule of the all-powerful "homeowners association," you can and should compost!

In the suburbs, you have three really excellent choices in composting.

1. You can have a self-contained, outdoor "hot" compost bin. The closest of the suburban systems to what most people visualize when you mention "compost," these are prefabricated plastic or wooden containment systems that make storing, organizing, and creating compost easy. Don't worry, this is NOT the rural-appropriate chicken wire and mulching fork system of old (although you can still compost like that if you'd like!) With these HOA-appropriate systems, you don't have to break a sweat. Here's our composter for a visual aid.

2. You can have a small indoor compost container. The Japanese have perfected many options in this arena. Tiny enough to keep under your sink, these plastic bins require only kitchen scraps and regular additions of a prepackaged activator. Odorless and easy. Appropriate for even the smallest apartment! Click here for an example.

3. You can practice vermiculture. Homemade or store-bought containers host special composting worms that do all the work for you. All you have to add, again, are kitchen scraps. These systems can be used either outdoors or indoors and are odorless. In the deep South, however, you may be limited to using them indoors or in very shady spots outside, since the worms aren't very happy at temperatures over 77 degrees f. Here's an example.

So, put away your excuses, you CAN compost no matter where or how you live. But why should you?

Food waste thrown in the garbage ends up in landfills where, due to the anaerobic conditions, it cannot decompose correctly. Instead of joining the "circle of life," it releases harmful amounts of methane into the atmosphere, which contributes dramatically to global warming. It doesn't matter if you plan to use the compost produced or not; keeping your food scraps out of the landfill reduces your carbon footprint and is a vital step toward sustainable living that every household can and should make.

[The composting book I read today: Compost, by Clare Foster (Cassell Illustrated).]

Enviro Blogs

Some of my favorite environmentally focused blogs. Check them out for some more tips and discussion of green living:

Casaubon's Book
http://sharonastyk.com/
-On climate change and peak oil

Chile Chews
http://chilechews.blogspot.com/
-Sustainable living, food, health, human-powered transportation

Crunchy Chicken
http://crunchychicken.blogspot.com/
-A really fun, all around environmental blog

Earth911
http://earth911.org/
-A more serious reference, mostly about recycling

EcoGeek
http://www.ecogeek.org/
-"Technology for the Environment"

EcoMoto
http://www.ecomoto.org/
-Green innovations, hybrids and electric cars

EcoFabulous
http://ecofabulous.blogs.com/ecofabulous/
-Sustainable consumer products

Low Impact Living
http://www.lowimpactliving.com/blog/
-"The Low Down on Living Green"

TreeHugger
http://www.treehugger.com/
-"Driving sustainable mainstream"

No Impact Man
http://noimpactman.typepad.com
-Read through his archives for some EXCELLENT practical tips on truly sustainable living

Gardening Research

These are the books I'm using to learn how to grow a successful vegetable garden:

Organic Gardener’s Home Reference (Tanya Denckla)
-Useful as a reference book for specific questions and details about crops

The Smart Gardener’s Guide to Growing Vegetables (Bob Gough)
-A nice overview that will help you get your bearings in the garden and teach you the vocabulary of gardening

Gardening/ Solstice: Building & Living in a Warm, Humid Climate (Frank Macaluso)
-Short manual with some good suggestions for hot weather plant varieties

1,001 Ingenious Gardening Ideas (Deborah Martin)
-A fun book that will inspire and help you garden economically

Square Foot Gardening (Mel Bartholomew)
-A must read! If you only read one gardening book, let this be it!
-Very comforting to the beginning gardener and helpful for even the experts in the crowd
-Covers all your bases from creating the beds to harvesting, from watering to pest control

First Attempts

This is our first year as home-owners and, thus, our first year as gardeners. We started planting (both flowers and vegetables) in February, during the "decent" season here in Florida, when people can really enjoy being outside and working in the yard.

With the best of intentions, but with no more knowledge than that found on the back of the seed packets, we got started. We pulled up lots of grass and created many, many square feet of gardening beds, both in our front yard and out back.

I planted mostly wild flowers in the front, which mostly worked well. The sunniest areas still look a little sparse, as many of the plants refused to grow in such a infernal place, but the shade spots are full of lovely plants. The exceptions to this overall growth are the poppies and Shasta daisies I planted under a baby magnolia tree.

In our backyard garden, we planted vegetables: broccoli, zucchini, lettuce, carrots, and onion. Wouldn't you know that broccoli and lettuce are both seriously cool weather crops! When broccoli is grown in hot weather, it will never form a head, let alone florets. Lettuce, when grown out of its season, will bolt (go to seed) early and taste bitter. So, fail.

Our onions and carrots fared decently. The problem with these crops is that I couldn't bring myself to thin them out after they sprouted. So, we have harvestable onions now, but they are dime sized. We can only hope the carrots will be big enough to be edible when they come of age.

Finally, the zucchini. Such a sad story. The zucchini would have been fine...if it had not been for the April/May drought. We were less than intelligent about watering our poor garden when it needed it the most. In fact, the zucchini plants produced beautiful flowers. However, they didn't have the resources they needed to produce any fruit. These are also the only plants in our garden that we are pulling up and composting in order to start some squash anew (and more intelligently!)

So, these were our first attempts. Since then, I have done a lot of research and reading. Now we are prepared to begin again and hopefully create a much more productive garden.

Garden in Central Florida

Gardening in Central Florida, we have some unique challenges in our experimentation with the earth. These are some of the elements we will be learning to work with:

First, our soil is very sandy, which makes it extremely easy to work with, but it lacks rich organic matter and drains water quickly.

Secondly, our seasons in no way resemble those described in gardening books. We sort of have two seasons: "decent" (October through April) and "extremely hot" (May through September). Add to this the fact that we have a "wet season" (June through September) and a "dry spell" (April and May), and you see our confusion when it comes to ordinary "spring," "summer," or "fall" crop divisions.

Likewise, and thirdly, our climate thus requires modifications to many recommended gardening methods. For example, we must ignore the most often recommended watering regiment (water deeply but not often), since the heat dries out the sand quickly.

Then, of course, comes the humidity, which makes many Southern gardens more susceptible to plant diseases. And with no winter, we have no respite of pests either.

Welcome!

Welcome to the kick-off of our blog, Sustainable Southern Suburbia.

This is the story of a couple of newly-weds trying to live self-sufficiently and sustainably in the sweltering hot and non-conducive environment of suburbia.

We will share our successes and failures as we make our journey. And we hope you'll share yours with us as well.