ILUSTR8

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Caitlin

My sweet teen keeps me hopping to change her hair quite often.

New additions have been added to the garden. Today, Greg raked and leveled a new spot for another raised bed. Filled it with a nice mixture of compost and good organic soil. I then got to do the fun and easy part of the job...plant! I added in the flowering kale, sweet cherry tomatoes, sweet banana peppers, cayenne peppers and sangria peppers.
I am truly thankful for my hard working and accommodating husband. I am just starting treatment for my Lupus and Fibromyalgia. I am currently in a "flare". The disease has attacked my soft tissues, so my muscles and joints are very sore and angry right now. I am hopeful that I will be able to wield a rake and shovel one day very soon!
I am happy that I was able to hang in there with him for about two hours today before I lost all my energy and the burning sensation started screaming in my joints. Nausea, headache and fatigue has kept me in bed all day.
We also had some destroyers come into our garden, suddenly in the night. I will save that disappointing discovery and our attempts to destroy them for another post.

Ornamental Kale

New heirloom seed starts looking for light

and waiting for a home. It's very late for beans and peas

but I wanted to experiment anyways to see what would grow.

Cayenne Peppers

Sangria Ornamental Peppers

Getting along with Geckos

For the past three years, my husband and I have been living in Sarasota, Florida. Our little home in the tropics has been a new adventure. We are located on the 10a planting zone guide so we are nice and humid pretty much year round. Just a tiny walk and I'm standing and looking at the intercoastal for the gulf. Needless to say, having the possibility of growing year round also means lots of pests. Our lanai has had spiders off an on and I am completely afraid of them. Another pest in the lanai was the geckos. I kept picking them up and putting them outside. This year I have not done that. I am getting along with the geckos and they are taking care of my spider problem and also eating other pests. Yay! You may or may not find them cute but I'm learning to love them and appreciate what they do.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Attempting to grow food in Tiny spaces!

Gardening in the smallest of space in Sarasota, Florida can be difficult. We have .25 acre but most is home, pool, brick paver decking, wood deck, shed and fencing. So we are trying our hand and making the most of any useable space to grow food. Our goal is to create as much food as possible and take advantage of our growing season, which includes just one month of possible frost. So far this year we rescued 14 tomato plants from the local grocery. They were going to throw them out. We mananged to save 12 plants and they are growing hardy and making lots of blooms and tomatoes. I started around 24 starts of a variety of heirloom tomato seeds. The starts include: banana legs, cherokee purple, amish paste, white wonder and other larger red varieties. We are currently growing sweet and purple basil, catnip (to repel mosquitoes - not working yet! lol), thornless blackberries, a variety of peppers, aloe, and rosemary. We have little starts of beans, peas, cucumber, summer squash and zucchini. We will see how all these go. The goal is to reduce the amout of non-edibles and plant as much food as possible. I've been told it's very difficult to grow food here but I will document success and failure just the same. Wish me luck!