Good god damn

[beehammer]

So about... a year ago?  two years?  Let's call it two years.  I went on a little bit of a seed-packet bender and bought a lot of things I had absolutely no way to use with what I had at the time.  I also had absolutely no plans to put in anything that would let me use them.  Just utterly useless, aspirational seeds.  I was cleaning out my seed packets this year, after putting in all the planters, and I found one with mustard green seeds.

Now, my feelings on gardening to feed yourself are a little... let's be nice and call them gun-shy.  I started out with plants because I wanted to grow my own food.  Not a lot, just stuff that it was difficult to get in optimal shape at the store (tomatoes, strawberries) or very expensive (bell peppers).  It was a nightmare.  I made a lot of mistakes, and Florida's not a terribly forgiving state when it comes to vegetable-growing errors.  My tomatoes went gangbusters, and the ten strawberries I managed to get out of those plants were delicious, but the peppers were a disaster and it turns out that eggplant both has thorns and is really not my favorite thing in the world even farm-fresh and my zucchini all died. 

Yes, you read that correctly.  I failed to grow even a single zucchini.

So I dialed everything way back and focused on plants that are pretty much impossible to kill and have only recently ventured back into the realm of gardening to feed myself instead of gardening to feed bees and butterflies and birds.

Basically, unless what you have is an overabundance of time and a ready-made patch of land just waiting for you to park a plant on it, growing your own food is probably not going to wind up being that much cheaper than just buying it.  Mustard greens, in fact, cost about three bucks for a giant bag of ready-to-use greens.

But mustard greens, you see, are available from a normal store around here for all of two fucking weeks a year.  It's like Christmas, when they show up, and I eat the hell out of them while the stores have them, and then they go away again.  It's not the growing season, either--they show up a little late and disappear early, in terms of when the local growing season is.  So mustard greens are very much cheaper to buy in the store than to grow yourself, when you factor in labor and water and dirt and so forth, but it doesn't matter because they can't be had even for ready money.  And I love them. 

So when the store stopped getting their bags of mustard greens in, I took the packet of seeds, said, "Fuck it." and scattered them in one of the planters that had the fewest things really thriving, because why the fuck not?

That was a month ago.  I just cut my first batch of greens today, and I had them for dinner tonight, and they're absolutely delicious, and there's a boatload more where that came from.  So mischief fucking managed on that front.

Comments

[marahmarie]

I find this interesting as I'm in Florida myself, and we grow our own food mostly in containers out on the back patio (though some of it spends its entire life under the grow lamp inside). You're right on mustard greens, I spend most of the year missing them, too. I love how they're just sharp enough to make my eyes water without making my stomach hurt. No one likes them. Now someone else does...cool.

But growing those I always thought was like row-farming, wherein you need a huge patch of land with actual rows between unless you're just growing say, a few heads...so they fit in a planter? Because I'd like to try this, and have several huge empty planters right now (I'd say they're three feet wide by maybe six inches?). Can that be done within those dimensions?

So I'm really curious...what part of Florida are you in (I'm way North)? Is everything you grow outside? What is it you grow? Did you lose anything in the frosts (we've lost peppers (though not all of them) and a few other plants, so far)? Do you use frost blankets? Greenhouses? Is anything kept inside or grown strictly indoors? Do you use grow lamps? I never meet anyone from FL on Dreamwidth (and almost no one who grows things anywhere, much less things I grow) so I'm like all excited now.

[beehammer]

This is pretty cool, yeah! :D

I'll go into more detail about how I'm growing them in a few minutes, as its own post, so I can throw in pictures and let you see if it'll work for you.

I'm in the Tampa Bay area, so container gardening is pretty popular here, too--the soil's just too damn sandy for a lot of the more desirable garden plants unless you amend and mulch like whoa. The heat and the wind make it difficult to keep non-self-watering container gardens from wilting during the summer, though, so most of what I've got's in raised beds full of a mix of garden soil, composted manure, and peat moss.

We actually had an incredibly mild winter this year, and we didn't get more than a night or two of soft frost. I have a few orchids and a titan arum that had to live in the house for a bit, but anything cooler than 55 makes them sad, so that's something I knew when I decided to grow them. More typically, there's a week or so where you need to roll out the sheets and utility lights if you have frost-tender plants, which isn't too too much trouble and makes it a lot easier to grow whatever you can get to take the heat and the soil.

It also makes indoor planting a matter of preference rather than necessity. I start all my seeds outside on one of the porches and then acclimate the seedlings to the sun before planting in the ground or moving to a planter or a bigger container, but there are people around who prefer to start them in greenhouses or inside their screened-in pool cages because the sun's less intense and there's less chance of animals or bugs getting into them. (Most of my seedling loss this year has been to squirrel aggression.)

Right now, aside from the mustard and the tat soi, I've got Everglades tomatoes going, a peach tree that's blossoming but I suspect didn't get enough chill hours to produce anything useful in terms of fruit, some month-old sweet potato slips that are putting out new foliage, a thornless Florida blackberry that I have no expectations for but couldn't leave behind, and a cotton-candy tree I just got in the ground a few weeks ago.

I have seedlings for asparagus beans, which are supposed to do really well in Florida and taste great, plus okra and collards, all of which I'll be planting right in the ground once they're a little bigger.

[marahmarie]

OK, yeah, I know exactly what you're going through gardening then, because I spent about 15 years living more nearby you in the Orlando area. Sandy soil? Check. Mild temps the vast majority of the time, year-round? Check. Every bug you mentioned in your new mustard-greens post? Check. Sky-high humidty? Check. Almost no rain? Grrrrr. Check.

North Florida (at least the neck of it I'm in, as we're practically up in Georgia) has its own challenges and advantages: the soil's not as sandy, it gets much colder much quicker and can stay that way much longer, the summers are just as hot but not consistently quite as humid, it rains much, much more, and we even got snow a year ago (a light dusting, but still).

I could say I don't have access to a yard because when we first moved into this apartment we didn't; it was covered in trees and brush. Two hurricanes later though it's basically clear, so I could probably grow something back there. The front has some yard, too, but functions basically as a weed lawn and is just not that great.

So my containerizing up until the last hurricane this fall's basically been in actual flower pots and planters (like round or boxy wooden, clay or plastic kinds) limited to our front and back porches and the grow lamp inside (we have a second grow lamp now; it just needs a bulb).

Until I can figure out what (if anything) might be best to put in the newly available bits of back yard we'll probably be sticking to that for now, but looking at your pictures of the mustard green planter I can see the same thing should work in the more narrow, boxy planters I have, assuming the mustard greens don't get quite as monstrous as the over-sized bunches I see in stores, so that's good to know. Thanks for all the info!

[beehammer]

No problem, and good luck! At least when everything's in containers, it's really easy to move around and find optimal spots in the yard for it!