I took the day “off” yesterday by helping a friend remove some trees and do brush clearing.

We harvested these this morning:

The Grocery Row Gardens have had all their gaps planted and are just overflowing with greenery right now.

I need to film a video when the sun isn’t as harsh as it is this morning. We have cucumbers in bloom, blackberries on the vines, grapes forming on the trellis, sunflowers going into bloom, watermelon vines starting to run, cassava growth erupting from last year’s frozen stumps and flower blooms everywhere. It’s lovely, and I’m excited to see how much we harvest.

We’ve already pulled in about fifty pounds of potatoes and have more we need to harvest. They’re generally small and the plants aren’t that productive, but we always grow them anyway.

One of the points I’ve repeatedly hammered home in my books is the need to grow staple crops that thrive in your climate. This doesn’t mean you can’t grow whatever you like, and fight to make it grow! If you want to try something harder, do it! Potatoes taste so good from the garden, I keep working to grow them better and to get decent yields. This year we experimented with feeding them cottonseed meal at planting. They grew rich and green, but still are failing to give us the amazing yields you get farther north in good soil with cool springs. They just don’t seem to like the heat and the pounding rains alternating with drought, as we suffer through in Lower Alabama.

As I said to Rachel yesterday, here we seem to have two types of weather: hot drought interspersed with severe thunderstorms and wind. It is what it is, and we grow around it! Sweet potatoes, true yams, okra, Seminole pumpkins and some other crops can take it and give consistent yields… but other things like tomatoes, bell peppers, lettuces, cabbages and other crops don’t like it and vary in success from year to year.

If you’ve built your gardens around what consistently thrives, so you always have a core of good yields, you can let yourself try other crops that are less consistently successful without putting all your caloric eggs in one unpredictable basket.

Eggplants and blackberries are easy here – and are beautiful to boot. Even if other things fail, we still have the easy stuff bringing us a solid, reliable yield. Keep that core and play with other things you like around the edges.

Totally Crazy Easy Florida Gardening shows the way. It will help you immensely if you are fighting to garden in the Sunshine State.