Garden joy: Growing more than just fruits and veggies
Now is the time, late but not too late: You can still grow food straight out of the Florida earth, just like some green thumb in South Jersey, West Missouri, East Ohio or North Tennessee. Like some old honker who loves tomatoes more than God and can spin them from the soil like a carnival foodie can spin cotton candy — but only if he plants in April.
That ain't us, though. We aren't harnessed to April, even though we live in North America.
We can grow tomatoes, peas, carrots, potatoes, squash, eggplants, beets and okra. Also, Southeastern Asian vegetables like yard-long beans, bok choy (a little Asian cabbage-like vegetable with graceful urn-shaped bottoms rising to spread leaves above) and daikon, a long spicy radish pretty much unparalleled in stir-fries.
You like stir-fries, don't you? Communists enjoy them too, but let's not hold that against them.
And don't forget greens: not just lettuce and spinach, but collards, mustards, kale, turnip greens and the turnips themselves, both the below-ground plants and the greens above.
This is not a lot of hard work. You simply delegate, unlike Jimmy Carter, our 39th president, who was famous for not delegating when he should have and for growing a lot of peanuts. Maybe peanuts don't require delegation.
Do you have a kid in your house? Do you live with some fool who wants to watch football and drink beer on the weekends?
Simply mark out a 30-by-30-foot patch of ground in the backyard, throw a shovel and a rake into the middle of it, frown at him and point to it. Muster a commanding voice and thunder a single imperative word: "Go!"
If that won't work, you'll have to do it yourself, like a real American: Dig up the ground, turn it over, hack, mash and rake it into something like good dirt, and get ready to plant.
Do this in the next couple or three weeks and you'll be harvesting in the spring when other Americans hope the ice melts.
Oh, and chickens, ducks and cows — you can grow those, too, if you don't mind a little blood. I've had enough of blood, at least for this week, and I do mind. I'll stick to vegetables and fruit for the time being.
Tomatoes are my favorite. I've learned (from my wife, who knows a lot more about it than I do because I've spent too much time watching football) that tomatoes can thrive until the nighttime temperatures get over 80 F or drop below about 40. They can survive a night in the 30s, though, and if you cover them should that happen, the temperature will be no problem.
When the person you delegate has prepared the garden space, you'll want to add as much organic material as you can. If you don't have cows, horses or chickens serving as fertilizer factories — if you don't have manure hay scraps — you can buy mulch and organic compost.
The more you can do to make your soil less like sand, the better.
A lot of people advocate a raised space. With it, you have complete control in your plant bed.
And we like newspapers as a lower layer of mulch, with something spread on top — the hay scraps or your kitchen toss-outs mixed with the sandy soil. In the initial stages, it acts as a weed barrier and helps the soil retain moisture. Then the paper, made of wood pulp, goes back into the soil, becoming a soil "amendment."
Gardens are not just about food, as you can see by the word "amendment." They're also about politics and that damn lefty print media.
In our big garden we've used newspapers for three years, and the soil is now discernibly darker and richer than it was as just sand. It so happens that the paper we use — day after week after month after year of The (Gannett-owned) News-Press — is printed with a biodegradable ink, too.
That means all the crap Donald Trump has said or promoted, not to mention some of the stuff Joe Biden comes up with, along with all the bad news from Ukraine or Sudan or a Walmart or a club in Colorado Springs — all of it is ultimately fertilizer.
More than a century ago, the poet W.B. Yeats pointed out that "Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement."
A garden is love of sorts, and it needs both excrement (fertilizer) and water.
Many gardeners install drip irrigation, which is probably better for water conservation. But our garden is small, so we hand water. We supply water directly to the plants.
This way, you visit with your plants every day, like any self-respecting lefty hippie. You see if they have nutritional deficiencies (turning yellow? Missing iron) or if pests have arrived — stink bugs, hornworms or caterpillars. You know what's going on with the plants because you pay attention to them every day.
Let me conclude by thanking both God and the fossil fuel companies for climate change. And I want to thank climate change deniers, too, people obviously on God's side.
In recent years, our freezes in southern Florida have been less frequent, which means if your tomatoes or any other vegetables or fruit go into the ground as seeds or little plants in November or December, they're less likely these days to get clipped by a six- or eight-hour freeze in February.
Maybe we should all start driving more and voting for programs that allow drilling in the tundra or the Gulf, or promote coal mining in West Virginia — you know, the usual.
Burn those fossil fuels, baby, and help create a better garden climate!
This column was originally published in November 2022.
