Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Garden Woes
Why are there so many correlations of agriculture to the Christian walk? Because its so stinkin' HARD! Yeah, to like get saved and stuff doesn't take much for most people, but to really walk out the beattitudes- work! To get a tomato or a bean here and there doesn't take much but to really produce a CROP- toil! Anyway, I'm battling severe discouragement every time I so much as glimpse at our garden. The watermelons are essentially gone. I'd dig a hole and plant a vine in a healthy spot if there were bare dirt to dig in. Not so- weeds and grass are hip high and thick. Our pumpkins were doing so well and seemingly overnight (literally it was more like 3 days) my healthy vines have been thuroughly ravaged by hungry insects. This same "track" is all through the amaranth as well. And the real stinker is that I keep buying sprayers and they all quit on me! I made a great garlic solution to fight our tomato bugs. The second spray it plugged up. I got a big sprayer for the copper solution to fight the anthracnose. That quit before I had even finished the garden. I got another sprayer and that didn't even produce any pressure and so still sits with a full jug of solution yet completely useless. My okra has even gotten eaten now. I bought some neem oil already in its own sprayer for $11. That bottle just barely covered all my affected areas. 2 pumpkins lay rotten. Another sits unripe on my counter as I tried to check the bottom for signs of insect damage and it snapped off. Something is breaking our sorghum so that I now have 2 unripe stalks "drying" in our porch. I'm not sure if they will ripen and be edible, but its worth a shot. I can't even see the sweet potatoes for the weeds. In our second garden, I've staved off the aphids enough to get a huge picking of beans, both the yard long and regular snaps. They tasted great. I've got to find a sprayer that can withstand my burden or I'm going to give up. Did you know locusts are kosher? If all else fails, we can always eat the bugs. And when God says He owns the cattle on a thousand hills, what kind of fencing do you suppose He uses? And what about the wheat and the tares??? If you let the tares go to seed, don't you just have MORE tares the following season? I guess that's why I've titled this blog ADVENTURES in FL homesteading. It's really only our first time and if it were easy everyone would be doing it.
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3 comments:
While you are so much more ambitious than us in this area, I do share your frustration (to a small extent). In the spring we started 4 different kinds of tomatoes, cucumbers, yellow squash, carrots, lettuce and corn in our starter trays and got most of them to sprout. We transferred them outside and now we have just 2 tomato plants, a squash plant and some very small carrot sprouts...all well behind where they should be by this point. The rest just died and I have no idea why (though really no effort has been put into investigating either). Right now, I'm just hoping for a few tomatoes before it gets too cold. I think our next garden will be preceded by a bit of research :). Hope things start looking up for yours!
Ran into this blog while trying to google some ideas to fight anthracnose in my FL garden. It is RAMPANT here. I haven't found anything that works well for it yet, but I might be able to give you a tip about the neem oil. I bought a small bottle of pure neem oil (100% concentration) online - I think it was from Clean Air Gardening. It wasn't very expensive, and I just use a tablespoon or so in an empty sprayer plus a tablespoon of natural dish soap (the kind for handwashing) in a handheld sprayer, then fill it up with water. The dish soap helps it cling to the leaves of the plant. This has worked well to deter pests from my tomatoes, and I think it's a lot cheaper than many of the ready-made varieties out there.
I also plant marigolds near each tomato plant to help with the pests -- they release stuff in the air and soil that kills nematodes and keeps flies away. Plus, you can harvest the leaves to make tea or poultices that help wounds heal faster.
Good luck! You know what they say, we learn from our mistakes. So, hopefully, it'll get easier, right?
Gardening in Florida is like a war with the elements. I can give you some tips if you like, I've been doing it for 15 years.
You can write me at frugalwench@gmail.com
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