Carrollwood Vegetable Gardening

Now is a great time to get those little veggie plants in your garden.  It's probably a little too late to put in seeds for most vegetables, if you buy those nine-packs from Wal-Mart, Lowe's or Home Depot, you should have time for a decent harvest come May/June.

I like to use a combination of micro-irrigation and drip irrigation for the veggies.  Some veggies don't like their leaves to get too wet from the spray, that's when you would use the drip. Just be sure to plant your starter plant right under a drip hole, and make sure the ground slants toward the root zone, not away.  Due to scientific principles you don't care about, the water will run off if the ground slants away from the plant.  I know this is exactly the opposite of common wisdom, but I learned the hard way when I put my strawberries on nice little mounds and watched them dry up even though I had a drip system. 

Use weed clothe between rows and mulch between plants.  Weeds can steal much of the veggie's nutrients.

At a minimum, fertilize with a 10-10-10 and iron/micro-nutrients.  Both can be bought at the Home Centers.  Be sure to stock up on the 10-10-10 because it might be hard to find in the summer due to legal restrictions.  Of course, this advice is for the beginner.  If you are more advanced, you know you usually add fertilizers in much higher numbers to certain plants, and those products are only available at specialty stores at a premium.

Finally, soil alkalinity is high in this area, and it will reduce the plant's ability to take up needed nutrition if you don't attempt to reduce it.  Buy a simple soil test meter from the home center and check out your soil.  Don't waste money with kits and test tubes.  Iron is your first line solution to reducing alkaline soil.  The Ironite will help.  If you need to bring it way down, try sulfur, but be careful because it can burn your plant roots if not applied correctly.

 This photo is of one of my side plots where I have planted strawberries, onions, carrots, pineapples and oregano.  I try to plant in a two-week rotation, but I never succeed, so at times I have too  many carrots and no basil.  And other times, I'm lowering myself to buying from the local veggie stand.