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.