I believe my interest in gardening must be genetic. Because it is something I have only recently grown a taste for. My whole childhood seemed to focus on how not to do yard work. I despised it. I loathed it. When I was about 26 I took a job with a friends landscape company. This did not make me enjoy yard work much more - in fact it made me question just exactly what I went to school for in the first place. 3 and 1/2 years later, I left that profession with a better understanding of lawns and plants, hoping to never have to do it again.
Strangely enough, perhaps like fatherhood, I felt a need to do yard work. Either I've programmed myself to take satisfaction from a day of physical work outside, or something in me really connects with getting down and dirty with plants. For the record, I still hate lawns, and find them to be a huge waste of effort, money, resources, and offer very little return on investment.
I began gardening last year, here in South Florida. I have a slight advantage or disadvantage to some of my northern brethren. While they are finishing up their gardens for the year, I am just getting mine started. The advantage of gardening down here is that while a cold snap/freeze is possible (though usually pretty temporarily, if at all) I get to garden from Sept/Oct to the end of May. That's a 9 month growing period. I could probably even grow through the summer, but it's pretty dreadful and hot, that I would just rather take a break (at the end of this coming season though, I may try my hand at scaling the growing down to self watering containers on the north side of the house).
I called last years garden my "happenstance garden". It was a bit thrown together, and experimental with gardening here in the tropics. I devoted as much time as I could to it, but I still failed it in many ways. My results at the end of the season were mixed. The Tomatoes did great. Broccoli was a bust (they grew great, I just missed trimming the buds so the florets would turn into bunches). My so called Giant Sunflowers only grew to about 3 feet tall (as opposed to 8). My Cucumber's were tiny. I've learned a lot since then. So I'm ready to give it a go again this year, a little earlier and a little smarter too. The nice thing about gardening is that making mistakes teaches you so much, and you develop new strategies to implement next time.
So comeback often, I'll be using this as a place for links that helped me, notes on what I'm doing (right or wrong) and learning about making things stick, and grow in the greenhouse/sandbox known as South Florida.
I would like to give a special thanks to the folks at Homegrown Evolution for their inspiration and tips about gardening in an urban environment. The shear determination of Erik Knutzen and Kelly Coyne to do a lot with their limited resources is a continual inspiration. Please visit their site and buy their book The Urban Homestead.
