Introduction

This blog will be a running account of my gardening efforts.

What makes that special, I suppose, is that I'm at latitude 26 degrees 37 minutes North.  That's subtropical, though some call my location tropical because it's near the sea.  We get very little frost, and it can show up at any time between November and April.  Sometimes we get through the cooler months with no frost at all.

I garden for a lot of reasons.  Most of it right now is simply to provide myself with food that isn't too badly tainted with toxins.  My body doesn't handle toxins well.  I don't have enough retirement income to buy a lot of produce at a supermarket, and I'm a vegetarian.  Besides, homegrown tastes a lot better.

I've had my disappointments lately, it's been rough in spots.  The property I use for my gardening used to be a farm, possibly in the 1950's.  The long mounds of earth are still here, even after the property grew up with pines, palmettos, cypress, and so on.  At one time it was used as a dump.  So it's not the greatest place for a garden.

Like many soils in the subtropics, there are a lot of problems.  Most of it is white sand with a lot of limestone particles, so the pH is very high.  I've noticed that gardeners in my area simply don't use it in general, they go buy topsoil.  I've never done that.

What I do instead is make compost...lots and lots of compost. This lowers the pH and turns the white sand into actual soil you can grow something in.  It takes a lot of work, I'll admit that.  But I don't subscribe to the view that physical exertion is something we should avoid at all costs.  I've always believed that you have to work at things to get anything worthwhile from them.  And of course I do enjoy gardening, so I suppose it isn't really work then is it?

Instead of boring my readers with a tedious lecture on my methods, I'm just going to post a gardening journal so you can follow along with me and see how things go.  After I figure out how to use all the bells and whistles here, I'll be posting some pics of my gardening efforts.  For the past few years, I've been growing almost everything I need in the way of produce using only organic methods...so maybe I'll be able to pass along my skills to kindred gardening spirits on the internet.

We'll see how things go.