My Spring Garden was left to run wild over the summer. Without shade cloth in Florida’s hot Summer, there isn’t much that will grow. I thought it would be interesting to see what naturally reseeded or survived, and today I got to see the results!
Watermelon, banana, cucumbers, pineapples, ginger, turmeric and summer squash are all growing! There’s still some popcorn and grain corn dried on stalks, they may not reseed until spring. We’re directly on the growing zone 8/9 line. So we still get up to a dozen nights below freezing.
This means we can keep some tropicals in the summer, if protected in the winter, and some more temperate plants that would need shade in the summer… tricky, but exciting! Results will vary each year depending how extreme winter or summer becomes. I plan to add layers to create a food forest.
Growing a food forest is a bit by bit process of building up the soil. It needs to transform from nothing but crabgrass and weeds that’s been mowed for decades. I need lots of flowers to attract pollinators. We let it run wild so we could observe what’s growing naturally in different areas of our land and coincidently attracted pollinators that way! Now we can find what other plants like the same conditions as the one thriving here without any assistance, thus working with nature vs against it.
Make sure you’re subscribed to my YouTube channel to see how it develops! Thanks for your support! https://www.youtube.com/@ladylrbakaplantladysara2916