Over the last few weeks we’ve been quite busy, but life seems to be settling back down a little at the moment. Currently we’re harvesting okra, some herbs, Everglades tomatoes, hot peppers, sweet potato greens and even some squash blossoms from the gardens. The picture above was taken this morning – all that good stuff is being made into breakfast as I write.

The weather has been tough for gardening, to say the least, and it looks like it’s going to continue that trend over the next week:

Whew. Welcome to the Deep South. And thank God for air conditioning.

These here are days for soaking in a kiddie pool under the magnolia tree with a glass of iced tea and a big slice of watermelon.

The lack of rain and the high heat has been taking its toll on everything. The gardens are suffering, but we did get an inch of rain a couple of days ago that helped.

Fall isn’t that far away. I’m using these hot days as a time to get writing done.

The first draft of Minimalist Gardening is finished and is being illustrated by the excellent Tom Sensible, who also illustrated The South Florida Gardening Survival Guide.

With that finished, I have turned my attention to working on another book that has been in the works for quite a while. It’s tentatively titled The Easy Way to Start a Food Forest: Forest Gardening for Normal People. Many of the instructional materials and ideas on food forests are too complicated and structured, so this book will cut right through to the basics and get people actually planting instead of planning and planning and planning.

Our trip to Hannibal for the Homesteading Life Conference was wonderful and we made a great family vacation out of it.

Also, we have some plans to expand the plant nursery this fall, as the initial sales have been promising and we’d like to do a lot more with starting less common trees from seed.

We will have a plant sale tomorrow, and we’re quite short on one-gallon pots, so if you have some to trade in for store credit, please bring ’em!

Have a great weekend.

-David