Garden Journal – April 2020

Spring is a busy time in the garden. The cool weather vegetables are finishing up. The warm weather plants are blossoming and producing fresh fruits and veggies.

Today I’d like to share what’s been happening this past month in our garden. I plan to make the Garden Journal a monthly post. It’s a great way to share with you our gardening seasons here in Central Florida. I also post a lot of my garden photos on Instagram.

The entries below are some of the more interesting posts from my garden journal. It’s just a spiral notebook that I write and drawn in. It’s useful to look back at planting dates, weather, how I treated disease and pests, harvest quantities, etc. I also designed a custom spreadsheet to keep track of the costs associated with our garden. One of our purposes for gardening is to save money by growing our own food. I’ll share later this summer how that is working out.

Journal Entries

April 5^th. “It finally rained!”

It’s the first time it rained substantially in a long while. Our dry season has been frustrating for me. The sandy soil dries out very fast. I’ve had to water with a garden hose using city water. Once it started raining again, we sat out 5-gallon buckets to collect rain water. Our goal is to eventually make a rain barrel.

April 12^th – Easter Sunday – “Seedling Update”

Seeds that are up in the seed trays: jalapeno, swiss chard, purple coneflowers. Unfortunately, the vegetables got leggy. I was learning how to use a grow light and didn’t have it close enough to the tray. Lesson learned.

Tomato plants in the garden are about two feet tall. The Beefsteaks blossomed first. We’ve eaten about half the beets – roots and tops. Once or twice a week we make small salads from the mixed greens.

I found several leaf miners this week. I researched how to treat them organically. Neem oil worked well to stop them from spreading. It also worked on the powdery mildew I found on the zucchini.

April 17^th – “Everything is looking great this morning.”

The Neem Oil seems to have worked well over the past week. Many plants are starting to blossom. Every day this week I’ve been setting the seedlings out in the late afternoon shade to harden off.

April 22^nd – “Happy Earth Day – 50^th anniversary!”

“I went out this morning and took pictures of the flowers and veggies blooming for a special Earth Day post for the blog. I saw my first tomato yesterday on one of the Beefsteak plants.”

April 23^rd – “OMG! We found almost 20 more tomatoes this morning!”

The tomatoes have started growing fast. The warm weather with many days in the 90’s is promoting strong growth. We’re still fighting the blight on the tomatoes. I’ve pulled out three plants now that had the disease. The copper fungicide I’ve sprayed is helping to slow the spread. I don’t think I’m covering the plants good enough with the fungicide. Trial and error.

April 24^th – “Pulled the last beets today.”

Our winter crops are just about done. We harvested 22 beets for a total of 87.39 ounces of root and 50.15 ounces of beet tops. The last few beets had root knot nematodes. I believe the stress on the plants from the heat and dry spring contributed to the problem.

We also had our last salads from the mixed greens. They were getting bitter. I pulled the plants and tossed them in the compost.

April 29^th – “We built a cage around the blackberry shrub to keep out the birds and squirrels.”

The cage was constructed from materials we already had on-hand: chicken wire, zip ties, and metal poles that Mike had found in a dumpster and cut to size. It’s not pretty, but it works.

April 30^th – “I love rainy days!”

It rained most of the morning. I’m drying butternut squash seeds from a squash I had bought. I’m curious to see what they’ll produce this fall. After the rain, I planted a row of dill and tied up a few more tomato branches.

Here is what’s currently growing in the garden:

• Tomatoes: Beefsteak, Abe Lincoln, Black Krim, Cherokee Purple, Cherry
• Swiss Chard
• 1 head of baby romaine lettuce
• Bell peppers
• 3 carrots
• 1 purple onion
• Zucchini
• Yellow crookneck summer squash
• Dill, basil, thyme
• Mixed flowers including purple coneflower and chamomile

Potted edible/fruit-producing plants:

• 3 pineapples
• 2 avocado trees I started from seed this spring
• 14 lemon trees from seed this spring
• 1 sage plant

Plus, we have many ornamental plants around the property. My Earth Day post has some great photos of those.

I hope you liked this post. It’s something different I’m trying. Please let me know in the comments below or via email what you like, didn’t like, what’s interesting, or needed.

Thanks, and happy gardening!

Alisa