People have told me that the weather in the Florida Panhandle/Lower Alabama is “difficult” for gardeners.

I wouldn’t say it’s difficult. It’s downright abusive!

It’s 4:37AM right now, and I’m sitting in my office with Betsy (the dog) with a space heater running. I just came in from hosing down all my mulberry trees in the Grocery Row Gardens to hopefully keep frost from settling in.

At 7AM we’re supposed to touch freezing, after multiple weeks of warm temperatures.

The warm temperatures have convinced most of our fruit trees that it’s time to leaf out and go into bloom. The eight or so mulberry trees in the main gardens are all covered in tender leaves and buckets of green berries.

And then… frost comes back.

Last year we had the same thing happen, except it was a little more extreme. We hit the 80s, before getting a night that plunged down to 28 degrees.  That absolutely wrecked some of the mulberries, not only taking off the fruit but even freezing entire branches. My 8′ tall Rachel Goodman mulberry froze almost to the ground! And the Peruvian apple cactus – which normally handles weather into the teens – bit the dust.

We also lost most of the year’s blueberry harvests, including all the wild ones we normally forage in the local woods.

Ideally, our gardens would be on the south side of our house, not the north, so they’d get a little more protection from the worst of the weather; yet due to an old driveway and a weird slope, that wasn’t possible, so they must face the northern exposure and do their best.

Fortunately in 2023 we got some rain in the spring and our gardens did well until the end of June. Then the heat really kicked in, and the sky decided it wasn’t going to give us any more rain.

We had week after week of weather soaring up into the 100s without rain. Normally, our okra, cassava, sugarcane and sweet potatoes thrive through the summer and make up for all the other plants that give up in the heat – yet in 2023, the heat combined with drought greatly limited their growth.

We got a little cassava and a decent amount of sweet potatoes, but the sugarcane was half its proper size, and the okra was a flop. The worst of it, though, was the effect it had on our pasture. Instead of growing thick and green, it dried up and provided little for the cows past October, requiring us to buy hay for over winter. Even our pond almost dried up.

Then, right around the first frost when it was too late to save the grass, it started raining. And raining. And raining!

The pond is now full, but the grass is still recovering.

And here we are with a (hopefully) last frost event before the 2024 gardening season really gets rolling.

It’s not difficult. It’s abusive!

Still, we are supposed to learn from suffering and use it for the purification of our souls. Maybe this is all for the greater good.

If you’ll excuse me… I have to go spray down the mulberry trees again.