St Pete is like a botanical garden. In certain yards and neighborhoods there is a diverse landscape of exotic tropical plants. For a gardener and horticulturalist like me, who hasn’t spent much time in the tropics it is an adventure just to ride my bike around. On this trip I happened across a very strange fruit on a strange tree.
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It’s been a little while since I uploaded a video because I’m working all the time here in Florida. But now I’ve got a backlog of videos to post about what I’ve been doing in St Petersburg. This is a little tour of one of my first visits to the St Pete Ecovillage, which is a very newly established ecovillage in Florida with ambitious goals.
I love that in January and February there is abundant produce coming from the garden. There are fruits and veggies that ripen only at this time of year, but year round there is something coming from the garden. It was in a subtropical region that the modern form of permaculture originated, and Florida is perfectly suited to it. In just a month I’ve seen romaine lettuce go from seedling to harvestable heads. It’s truly unbelievable.
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Throughout the season I took footage of harvesting various crops, and this is the video montage of those harvests. I show you the course of the season ticked off in vegetable and fruit harvests, from strawberries to fall cauliflower.
Heading out to the vineyard to plant a new bed of strawberries. Strawberries are one crop I can count on to always do well where I live, and I think they might be the best fruit crop you can grow anywhere. They flower and fruit so early in the year, there isn’t time for anything to get to them. They’re also easy to establish and they fruit abundantly a year after planting. In this video I give some tips for moving a strawberry bed and ensuring the plants get a good start in the spring.
Part of living sustainably is getting your food as locally as possible. To maximize the productivity, diversity, and sustainability of foods you get in your diet locally, it’s a good idea to know all the crops that produce the best in your climate using organic methods. There may be many potentially useful fruits available and adapted to your climate that you don’t know about. Continue reading
Though the rain put a damper on my garden plans this season, it was a good year for pears. I harvested over a bushel of pears from two of my pear trees. One is a Bartlett espaliered against my garden shed, and the other is a standard Moonglow. Both are only several years old and this is the first significant harvest I’ve gotten. It’s great to be reaping the fruits of my labor!
