It’s time to tackle your spring garden using tips from the recently published “Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida.”
Authors Ginny Stibolt, a botanist and lifelong gardener, and Melissa Contreras, a master gardener in Miami-Dade County, came together to write this in-depth book as food prices rise and people need affordable produce.
Whether you have a front porch rail for a hanging pot, a windowsill for a window box, a stoop for a potted plant, a spot out back where you can set a bale of hay or acres for plowing or just a sunny window, you’ll find a method in the book for growing your edible garden.
As in growing anything, you’ll need space, light, water and soil. Stibolt and Contreras go into great detail about where and how to plant your veggies for maximum results, with emphasis on organic basics.
Build your soil, kill bugs, mulch to suppress weeds, start a compost pile — all the facts are there for the novice or pro.
Get down to planting your seeds and seedlings and watch them grow with techniques outlined in the book. And if you want to get into seedless, or asexual, crop propagation, that too is all in the book — or you can skip some of the technical details of composting and propagating and get straight to the point of the book — growing Florida vegetables.
From cabbage and spinach to squash and peppers and nearly every herb on the planet, the book provides a thorough overview: regions, planting, growing, maintaining, harvesting and using. A sprinkling of recipes adds a nice flavor to the book, too. My favorite: Ugly Carrot Soup.
You’ll also run into the authors’ sense of humor: Under the garlic listing, for example: “If you grow enough garlic, the vampires will leave you alone.” And details you may not have thought of – this under Swiss chard after harvesting the leaves: “You can still eat the roots after you pull the plants out.”
A full-color section in the center of the book contains 48 pages of photographs with even more ideas and explanations. From that section alone, I learned from a photo caption that “sunflowers exude a chemical that poisons other plants around it, so you can use sunflowers as a weed-resistant border near your vegetables but not with them.”
For me, the greatest part of the book is Appendix 1, which provides gardening calendars for the prime sections of Florida: North, Central and South. These important guidelines are left out of many books I’ve read over the years on gardening here in our Zone 9. Twelve pages of calendar are dedicated to Central Florida alone.
I recently got to touch bases with Stibolt by email:
Q: Tell us a little bit about your blog, GreenGardeningMatters.com.
When I moved to Florida in 2004, gardening was totally different from the Mid-Atlantic states, so I started writing “Adventures of a Transplanted Gardener,” but last year after eight years in Florida and with two Florida gardening books under my belt, it was time to graduate from the old adventures to something more general. Green gardening is a broad topic that allows me to cover pretty much anything gardenwise.
Q: How did you and Melissa Contreras get together to write “Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida”?
I met Melissa when I was on the book tour for “Sustainable Gardening for Florida.” She was the events coordinator at Fairchild Tropical Gardens, but she also was involved in urban gardening in Miami with her Urban Oasis organization. So when I decided to tackle the organic gardening book, I knew I needed someone in South Florida. We are five planting zones apart! It worked out very well, since our backgrounds and gardening experiences are so different.
Q: In a photo caption, your book warns folks to “Beware of seedlings for sale at big-box stores,” because they aren’t necessarily stocking wisely for all of Florida. Wow. I’ve gardened for a couple of decades here and never knew that. Comment? (and thank you for that tip!)
Yes, those big-box stores rely on companies with large distribution systems. It seems that Florida is lumped in with Atlanta, and what works there won’t necessarily work in Florida. Brussels sprout seedlings are offered for sale throughout Florida, but they will not work at all in South Florida because there is not enough cold.
Recently I wrote about the long-day onion plants offered for sale (tinyurl.com/longdayonions), when here in North Florida we grow our onions through the winter when the days are short. Those long-day onions might grow, but they would not produce an enlarged bulb before the hot weather. Those long-day onions are good for northerners who are supposed to plant onions just before the last snow and grow them into early summer when the days are long.
What happens when the wrong plants are offered is that the beginning gardeners think that they did something wrong and they give up.
Customer success doesn’t seem to be part of the business plan for the big-box stores. To me that’s a really sad situation. Hopefully, our book can begin to educate the gardeners so they’ll know not to buy these plants, and hey, maybe even a big-box store manager will see our warning and start to pay attention.
Q: Another tip you give: Leave the roots of cabbage and broccoli in place after the initial harvest so new growth will produce a “come-again” crop. Does this work only once? On any other vegetables?
I’m on the eighth or ninth harvest of my broccoli this year. This will work for most any of the mustard family crops. And come-again growth work on lettuces, chards, basil and many others.
You may notice that we grouped the vegetables by botanical family rather than alphabetically like most vegetable books. This helps with the crops rotation, but it’s also part of trying to help gardeners figure some methods like this that may work for the whole family. It also helped in the planting instructions because we only had to write those family-wide instructions once.
Q: We’re into late March already! What veggies or flowers should we plant now as seedlings? Which ones as seeds?
It’s too late to plant tomato seeds, so you’ll need to purchase seedlings and get them into the ground right away so you can get in a harvest before it’s too hot — once it’s 70 degrees through the night, the flowers do not set fruit. The peppers, also in the same family, will grow right through the hot summers. It’s time to start squash and pretty soon it will be time for okra and sweet potatoes, our summer crops. There is a planting and to-do list calendar for North, Central and South Florida.
Q: Anything else to add for our gardeners here in Zone 9?
I will be speaking in Daytona Beach on (Wednesday), so please urge your readers to come to the Florida Native Plant Society meeting.
“Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida,” by Ginny Stibolt and Melissa Contreras, University Press of Florida, 326 pages, $24.95, paperback
Ugly Carrot Soup
From “Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida,” by Ginny Stibolt and Melissa Contreras. Perfect for using up your ugly carrots and other not-so-perfect or end-of-the-season crops. Serves 8 to 10.
1/4 cup of olive oil
1 or 2 medium chopped onions, with their greens
2/3 cup chopped celery
1/4 cup sunflower seeds, shelled
1/4 cup dried barley
1 tablespoon fresh rosemary
2 or 3 garlic cloves, chopped
8 to 12 fat carrots chopped or sliced thickly
6 to 8 cups of water
spaghetti (an inch in diameter when held in a bunch) or 2 lasagna noodles, broken
1/2 to 1 cup of chopped greens (parsley, broccoli or cabbage leaves, wild garlic leaves or pretty much whatever needs harvesting)
1 1/2 cups of nonfat plain yogurt
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
finely chopped onion greens, chives and fresh dill leaves for garnish
ground pepper to taste
In a soup pot, heat the olive oil. Over medium heat, brown the onions and their greens, celery, sunflower seeds, barley, rosemary and garlic. Stir frequently. As the onions become translucent, add the carrots, stir for a few minutes and then add the water. Bring the soup to a boil and then simmer for about 25 minutes until the carrots become soft.
Add the pasta and greens. Simmer for another 15 minutes until all the ingredients are soft. Remove from the heat, cool and then run the soup through a blender or food processor until it is mostly smooth.
Stir in the yogurt and Parmesan cheese.
Garnish each bowl with a dollop of yogurt, onion greens, chives, dill and freshly ground pepper to taste. If you add a lot of greens, the orange-yellow color will dull, but the soup will still taste carroty.