Tampa Bay Online reports today that city officials are looking at ways to “reconnect with the natural world” with the help of urban gardening. With so many other cities across the U.S. already rife with public vegetable gardens, there’s no reason Tampa shouldn’t be able to join the club.
Yes, gardening in hot, steamy Florida is — to be charitable — a challenge. My own summertime gardening efforts (I live in northwest Florida) yielded a pretty sad harvest: four or five beans, a dozen tiny strawberries that the snails usually got to first and a reliable supply of chives from a flowerpot. July and August are simply too brutal around here.
Spring is sprouting – at least here in the North East. I love having some basic herbs and vegetables growing outside my kitchen, and I’m ready to get started, even if the weather isn’t quite there yet.
Some years I’m more organized than others, but I almost always have some combination of edible vegetation to harvest throughout the growing season.
I take over the sunniest room in the house and cover every surface with my little egg cartons filled with wonderful nutritious soil and the baby sprouts that will become salad and pesto among other things in only a few short months.
Because I live in the wild suburbs of Northern New Jersey, we have significant challenges in having vegetable gardens because the deer and other critters are abundant, confused, and starving! If you don’t build a Fort-Knox style fencing system, it is a wonderful exercise in feeding the local wildlife, but don’t expect to have anything for yourself or your family.
So, we opt for primarily container gardening and keep it up on the deck and our really scary (not) golden retriever, woody, patrols the perimeter. We lose a little to the chipmunks, which are kind of like mosquitoes and have gotten far more brazen than I remember.
Here are my favorite edible things to grow in my little kitchen deck garden containers:
Tampa Bay Online reports today that city officials are looking at ways to “reconnect with the natural world” with the help of urban gardening. With so many other cities across the U.S. already rife with public vegetable gardens, there’s no reason Tampa shouldn’t be able to join the club.
