Grape Vines

I'm going to try my hand at growing the native Muscadine grape at my house.  This decision was made spur of the moment (most of my best decisions are) at Wal-Mart when I walked past a table in the garden section selling grape vines. I picked up two Nesbitt's and a Noble.  Since I did not plan this purchase it took me a few days to decide where to plant and trellis these vines, and finally settled on clearing an area along the side of the vegetable garden.  Below are some pictures of the vines and my fancy trellising system. I'll use any excuse to buy interesting bits of hardware, and this trellis was the perfect excuse, so I included a close up of my rigging (feel free to be impressed).  And since I am out of green tie tape, and apparently there is a nationwide shortage of the stuff as I am unable to find any, I had to resort to orange flagging tape. It's not pretty but it did the job.

Fruit Trees!

I love the idea of growing my own fruit, and with that in mind I planted a small orchard last year on an additional piece of property that we own about 5 miles away.  It's a 5 acre parcel and we hope to some day build on it, thus selling our current house. Because of this, I have been abstaining from planting trees on our current property. I know it would break my heart to part with them, especially if they were mature and producing fruit. However, I'm one of those people who enjoys coming home from work and checking on the garden, pulling a few weeds or doing some trimming. Having the orchard off site does not give me the day to day satisfaction of watching the trees grow and fussing with them. So today I gave in and decided to add a few trees to my existing garden area (actually I succombed to my envy of another central Florida gardening blogger bragging about peach and plum harvests from the fruit trees in his yard).  I located a small local fruit tree nursery and paid them a visit, Twin Cedars Nursery on SR 50 just east of Brooksville.  I was impressed with the selection and quality of the plant material, and the pricing was very reasonable.  I enjoyed chatting with the nursery owner, who was very informative, sharing with me local knowledge and performance expectations for the plant material.  I ended up purchasing a Gulf Beauty Plum, a Florida Belle Peach and a Mullberry that the owner refers to as a Clayton (after the property owner whose tree the nursery owner collected cuttings from, he assures me the taste of the fruit will convince me the effort was worth it).

The information I received about these trees: Plum 'Gulf Beauty' - scab resistant, heavy producer with good flavor, and does not need a pollinator (according to the nursery owner, not IFAS).  Peach 'Florida Belle' - older variety that produces larger fruit, great flavor, self pollinated and very low chill hours. As for the Clayton Mullberry, I have no idea what to expect, but I was told that the fruit will taste amazing.

The first step was to amend the bed areas where I was installing the trees. As all Central Florida gardeners know, our soil is pretty sandy. Lucky for me, our neighbors had a couple of large Live Oaks cut down and chipped up a little over a year ago. This mulch has been sitting in their yard just cooking into a beautiful, earthworm filled compost. So I took a couple of wheelbarrow loads of this and worked it into the soil with my beloved garden weasel.  I bought this little gem from Big Lots for $10 on a whim and have found it's the perfect tool for working small areas of soil.  Then the only thing left was to install my trees, and hope the dogs don't pull them out.  They should do well in their new home as they will be getting full sun and are under irrigation.

Crop Selection

Despite how much I like to try new varieties, looking through my notes from last years Fall/Winter garden there are some varieties that did so well that I'm definitely planting them again this year. What's really nice is that I still have seed left from last year.  Here are the veggies and varieties that worked really well for me here in Hernando County last year:
Little Marvel English Pea-fast growing flavorful pea, very productive.
Guisante Sugar Snap Pea-very fast growing, great flavor, very productive.
Pericicaba Broccoli-produces a sweeter broccoli, with smaller florets.
Violetta Cauliflower-purple heads, good flavor.

These are my sugar snaps from last year, I underestimated their height potential when planning to use large tomato cages as supports. I ended up rigging tomato stakes to the cages to give them more support. It worked but looked pretty raggedy:) These are by far my favorite winter crop to grow as they tolerate a variety of weather conditions, produce prolific amounts of pea pods, and the taste is wonderful. My husband would eat handfuls of them straight off the vine (a benefit of growing them organically). The picture below is a baggie full from one harvest, and I harvested probably three times weekly. 

Getting the Fall/Winter Garden Ready

I'm getting excited about my Fall/Winter garden getting close to planting! I have seed catalogs ordered and they should be here any day so I can get seeds ordered. I had a fungal outbreak take out a whole crop of tomatoes a few years back which I believe began with seedlings I picked up from a hardware store. Since then I start practically all my veggies from seed. Currently I have the soil solarizing under a thin layer of clear plastic. I have done this every summer for approximately 6 years and have few issues with pests, disease or weeds. The plastic goes on early August and will come off sometime mid to late September. I have learned to use a thinner plastic as it seems to conform to the soil surface better which allows for better heating (and it's cheaper to buy).