The Simple Life at Home

I'm about ready to begin a new endeavor; one that will require a lot of time and planning and work and dedication. No, I'm not having another child - I'm planting a garden. A vegetable garden, to be exact.

Now, this is not the first time I've attempted this. In our old house, I had a small garden - nothing fancy, a few tomato plants, a pepper plant or two, some herbs. What I was able to harvest (read - what the raccoons and birds didn't get) was yummy. This time, though, I'm going all out. I'll be planting: tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans, cabbage, broccoli, onions, cauliflower, carrots, lettuce, zucchini, peppers, spinach, cherry tomatoes, radishes, parsley, mint and rosemary.

Now, I don't have acres of land to plant in. I live in the suburbs and have a fairly small yard, once you take out the space our screened-in porch takes up. So I'll be putting the garden inside the screening. There it will be protected from the local wildlife, be less exposed to pests and more convenient to water. How am I going to grow (hopefully!) all this inside my porch, you ask? Square-foot gardening! Believe it or not, all of what I listed above can be grown in just two 4' x 4' plots. At least, if you know what you're doing! I don't, so I don't know if I'll be able to pull it off, but I'm going to give it my best shot.

I'd love to be able to just step out onto the porch and pick the ingredients of a wonderful salad. To slice into a nice, juicy, red tomato - one that was truly vine-ripened instead of being picked to early and shipped half-way across the country. To go out and snip some fresh mint and parsley when I want to make tabbouleh for my hubby.

So one of my top to-do's for this week is to go to the store and get the materials I need for this project - something to frame out the plots with, the soil and fertilizers, seeds and transplants. I'm really excited. I've been wanting to do this for a while. Foolishly, in the past I followed directions on the seed packets and have just thrown things in the ground whenever the mood hit. But this time I've really researched the whole "gardening in South Florida" thing. It's a totally different kind of gardening. I''ll be trying to get the whole thing set up this week and then "solarizing" the garden to kill off nematodes for about 5 weeks or so. I hope to have things in the ground by mid-September. I'll post pictures if anything actually grows.