As your garden begins to bloom, blossom and flourish, remember that you must maintain and sustain your efforts. First and foremost, this means keeping an eye out for trouble before it arises. And trust me, calamity can lurk around almost every corner of your garden. Now I’m sure many of you are asking yourselves just how you’re going to spot trouble before it starts, and the answer is easy. Experience. Mine, your friend’s, your neighbor’s. We’re not reinventing the wheel here. That would be too much work and take me away from the joy of gardening! We are all about maintaining what we’ve started.
Which is easy. We gardeners like to share our knowledge of what happened last season so we can prevent it from happening this season. I mean, all that effort required to peel those garlic cloves and soak them overnight before digging a hundred little holes to bury them tip-side up should not be wasted. Nor should the six months spent watching them grow, right? We want to celebrate harvest, not bemoan the day we pull rotted cloves from the ground. Yikes. That’s no fun. So let me share a few tips I’ve learned along the way that will help you sustain a healthy garden.
Cool weather crops
In Florida, cool weather is a relative term. Cool for me means 75°F. For my husband, it takes 45°F before you have his attention. I’m from Miami, he’s from Ohio. Makes sense. But plants don’t care where you grow them, they only know temperature, sunlight, water–the basics.
So if you’re growing garlic, broccoli, cabbage, anything that likes it cool, you must keep these plants cool. Mulch helps to keep the soil cool. Part shade or screen cover helps keep the plants cool. If you’re growing on borderline climate conditions, do whatever it takes. I’ve roasted garlic while they were still underground before, because I didn’t have enough mulch to protect them from the hot Florida sun.
Wildlife protection
If you growing blueberries or raspberries or anything else a bird might find delicious, do yourself a favor and cover the bushes with netting, or a network of strings pulled over top of them. I spent one spring utterly dismayed to discover that birds were swiping my berries before I could get out to harvest them! I like the strings best, because it allows for the free flow of bees and butterflies for pollination, but not the birds. I realized this would work while sitting at a hotel pool. They used strings over the pool and patio to prevent birds from snatching food off guests’ plates. Smart.
Rabbit and deer also love a good bounty of harvest. For them, you’ll need fencing, repellent, or an alert pet to keep them from invading your garden. I’m lucky. My garden is located in a wide open expanse of yard where eagles and hawks soar overhead. No deer to speak of, where I live. Only alligators. Rabbits don’t dare venture a snack from the beds of my garden. None that I know of, anyway.
Weed prevention
If you haven’t started your garden yet, you might want to consider laying some corn gluten around your plants when they’re young. Sold as “Preen” in your local garden center, this stuff will actually prevent weeds from sprouting as it interferes with the germination process.
Knowing this, do not sprinkle it around your newly planted seeds, else they won’t germinate, either. You must wait until your plants are several inches in height before application. But then, it’s off to the races (because you won’t be in your garden weeding!).
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