It never ceases to amaze me when you stick a little seed pod in some dirt and do nothing more than add water from time to time, and then you see it sprout, just like that. I've seen quite a bit of sprouting action in our dirt beds over the past few weeks.
The beans are already substantially larger, one weekend after I photographed them and they are climbing like crazy. add a little water and up they go. I put that bed under the stairs so I could run string down to them to make a trellis. They seem to be thriving in partial Florida sunlight. Lettuce is another plant that supposedly needs less heat so i stuck that bed on the north side of the house, and with a mixture of lettuce plants and seeds we are seeing solid progress:
The beans are already substantially larger, one weekend after I photographed them and they are climbing like crazy. add a little water and up they go. I put that bed under the stairs so I could run string down to them to make a trellis. They seem to be thriving in partial Florida sunlight. Lettuce is another plant that supposedly needs less heat so i stuck that bed on the north side of the house, and with a mixture of lettuce plants and seeds we are seeing solid progress:They suffered a bit when cool north winds were honking across the Keys last week but they are recovering nicely. When I first started pondering how to grow vegetables in this unlikely place I was pretty much stumped by the lack of soil. I talked with Lisa who told me she had thrown together some raised beds with 1x8 planks and a plywood floor. So at her direction I did the same.
We put cauliflowers, tomatoes and strawberries in the third bed with a good deal more sunshine on it because it's on the south side of the house, still shaded a bit by the coconut palms. In the pot I planted a pomegranate tree i got for my birthday. I also got a ripe pomegranate which I am hoarding... The avocado tree was looking poorly when we got it home with nasty lesions on the leaves but Home Depot sells some miracle concoction that they claim is organic (aren't we all, nowadays?) and it seems to be doing much better: 
The largest bed is five feet by four feet and has a wide mixture of experimental plants. We kind of wanted to see what would grow and how, so we threw a bunch of seeds and plants and up they came, including eggplant, cucumbers, onions and and broccoli I think. They seem to be doing fine:
We put some more tomatoes into pots, threw in a ring of cilantro and watched them grow...Lisa gave us two pineapple cuttings so we stuck them in some pots and they are growing like gangbusters, and finally we potted a Key Lime, a mango and a pink lemon tree and they are doing nicely as well.
I find it mildly amusing that now after years of swearing off it i am once again come full circle and I can be found afternoons before I go into work, checking for weeds, watering and talking to the plants in an earnest effort to get them to grow. Victory Garden indeed, these are seeds cast in most unlikely soil, to paraphrase the Good Book. But they are growing, for now, with an apparent lust for life.
Gratuitous Bonneville photograph, under the house.
The largest bed is five feet by four feet and has a wide mixture of experimental plants. We kind of wanted to see what would grow and how, so we threw a bunch of seeds and plants and up they came, including eggplant, cucumbers, onions and and broccoli I think. They seem to be doing fine:We put some more tomatoes into pots, threw in a ring of cilantro and watched them grow...Lisa gave us two pineapple cuttings so we stuck them in some pots and they are growing like gangbusters, and finally we potted a Key Lime, a mango and a pink lemon tree and they are doing nicely as well.I find it mildly amusing that now after years of swearing off it i am once again come full circle and I can be found afternoons before I go into work, checking for weeds, watering and talking to the plants in an earnest effort to get them to grow. Victory Garden indeed, these are seeds cast in most unlikely soil, to paraphrase the Good Book. But they are growing, for now, with an apparent lust for life.Gratuitous Bonneville photograph, under the house.