Backyard Garden Week 6

Our square foot garden after about 6 weeks of growth.

Here's a close-up of the squash.

The banana pepper plants are starting to bear peppers.

Backyard Garden - Week 5

Here's an updated picture of our backyard garden. I'm not sure the scare crow is having a practical effect, but Linda seems to like it.



The squash and peppers are prospering and the broccoli, collards, and cauliflower have grown significantly. The coconut coir mulch, perilite, compost, and worm castings has proven to be a very viable growing mixture.

We've survived our first pest attack. We added some fly strips and used a minimal amount of OMRI listed Organicide on some of the individual plant leaves, but all appears to be well now.

Imported Food - Troublesome

According to Tony Corbo, a columnist for Huffington Post, U.S. food imports are rising dramatically.

"U.S. food imports grew from $41 billion in 1998 to $78 billion in 2007. The growth has come in consumer-ready foods, such as fruit and vegetables, seafood and processed food products. It has been estimated that as much as 85% of the seafood we now consume is imported, and depending on the time of the year, upwards of 60% of the fresh produce we consume is now imported. Officials from the FDA have stated that about 15% of the average American diet is made of imported food products." Read more at Huffington Post.

I first became aware of imported beef from Canada, but more recently seafood, fruits, and vegetables. I think this is a very dangerous proposition since most of it is untested. The volume simply prohibits it.

An online acquaintance of mine and publisher of a popular bbq forum posted an item last week regarding his experience with canned fruit from a Midwestern grocery store. The respondents were generally apathetic about it (except for a very small minority).

Has it come to this? Does the prospect of eating dangerous and harmful imported food that is not inspected for contaminants not concern the average American? It definitely should.

Here are some of the measures we have taken to reduce the amount of imported food we eat:

1) joined a local CSA for purchasing vegetables
2) support a local food buying club to purchase locally raised eggs, pork, beef, and bison
3) planted a backyard garden to begin growing our own squash, cauliflower, broccoli, peppers, and collard greens
4) joined a Meet-up Group to learn more about locally grown food
5) exploring online information about farming at Florida Farm Link

We plan to add more as we learn about them. If you'd like to learn more about sources of local food to help avoid food imports, please visit LocalHarvest.org

Planning My Florida Backyard Garden

Linda and I have started planning for this year's backyard vegetable garden. Vegetable Gardening in Florida by James Stephens is a nice reference for planning purposes. There are several charts in the back of the book that list cool weather and hot weather crops.

Florida is a little different in that most vegetable gardens are started in the fall months rather than the spring. It's just too hot in the spring and summer for most vegetables, although in some areas of the state, summer gardens are possible.

We've opted for an 8 x 4 feet raised bed design. The soils are very sandy and for best results, it's best to build your own soil base for the best platform for the effort. We'll be using a 1/3 mixture of vermiculite, worm castings, and coconut husks (coir) for our growing medium. A thick layer of newspaper underneath it all will help keep the weeds down. The coconut coir also makes a very nice mulch to top everything off to help keep down the weeds. Pine straw, pine bark mulch, weed cloth, etc. would also work.