"Laser6328" wrote:
Look around you. Tampa Bay produces most of the
winter (Ruskin) tomatoes. Plant City is famous for
strawberries. If you drive down h-iway 60 you will
see fields of Collard and Mustard greens.
Driving down 60 I've seen fields of cows. Maybe some
trees farther on down closer to the east coast. It's been a
long time, maybe 8 years since I've done the drive to Miami.
I've had success with Mustard Leaf. The leaves grow pretty
nicely.
I understand your frustration with the sandy Florida soils.
I moved to Anna Maria Island from Lakeland a few years
ago and have been burying every bit of organics I can get
a hold of (leaves, 7-11 coffee grounds, seaweed, even barber
hair.) Keep adding leaves, especially oak leaves.
I'm seeing dead leaves are working great at turning sand into
something more than sand. And coffee seems to help as long
as it's mixed with the sand and left a few months with some
other composting marterials before actually being used... (it
kills cucumbers if applied directly to the topsoil and watered
in).
Coffee grounds seem to be no good for cucumbers. The
cucumbers seem to love a 1-2-1 ratio of fertilizer though.
I've got some pigweed growing that is supposed to draw
things up and I kind of like it as it has these sharp thorns on
it and it grows to about 5 feet high and vines like to climb it.
I haven't found very many details about using it to bring
nutrients up to the surface, most people seem to call it
spinach (or amaranthus?). It must have come in some of
the cow manure soil I bought from Home Depot, I don't
know where it came from.
Cropwise, try peanuts (Spanish) or peas as a Nitrogen
fixing green manure.
The peanuts won't survive the squirrels. The squirrels ate
up about 50 cobs of corn I grew.
Be sure to plant Marigolds to fight off Fla's biggest plant
pest, Root-knot Nematodes.
I'll keep that in mind. I'll have to do some research on the
Nematodes. I think it might be possible that those could
have taken out the cucumbers. I'm only assuming that it
was the coffee grounds that did it. Everytime I've put the
grounds in the area where the cucumbers are growing,
the cucumber leaves started turning brown and looking
rotton. There was a problem with silverleaf whitefly on
the cucumbers over the summer, where I found that
washing the leaves with dish detergent or just plain water
seemed to seemed to help... but then some of the things
I was washing off the leaves were Asian ladybugs... so
I'm not sure if I did more harm or more good. At the time
I was messing with the coffee grounds and a second set
of cucumber plants, I stopped watering the leaves and
left all the white, yellow and brown specks (eggs?) on the
bottom of the leaves. I watched quite a few lady bugs in
their larva stages develop. Those leaves on those cucumbers
gradually turned brown and dried out. One vine is almost
completely leafless, produced about 5 or 6 cucumbers
before losing all it's leaves and is currently leafless. So I
believe it was the coffee grounds that are doing in that
particular cucumber vine... it looks pretty much done in.
In the cool weather (winter, lol) plant Corriander and
let it go to seed and dry out to attract ladybugs.
The cucumbers seem to attract ladybugs very well, just
passing that along back to you. I'll keep the Corriander
in mind. The Cucumbers I've had success with are the
Poinsett 76 / MarketMore 76 varieties. I did get some
Yamato Cucumber vines going but they never fruited...
and it appeared that the coffee grounds killed those, but
perhaps they don't last all year long... maybe they only
last for about 3 or 4 months at most... because if that's
the case, I might need to rethink the coffee grounds.
You can forget about growing root crops around here.
I've got some carrots potted in a rich soil that seem to be
growing right now. They just are growing up at the moment,
rather than down. :-) I think you're right about the root
crops.
Stick to cruciforms and fruiting vegetables like tomatoes,
eggplant or peppers.
Cruciform? What exactly is that one? I looked it up at:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=2&q=cruciform
And all I see is having four parts... or cross and most of the
links tend to go to religious references, assuming the cross that
Jesus Christ and others have hung upon as used by the Italians?
I did find cucumiform though which indicates an object in the
shape of a cucumber. :-)
Ed Upshaw
Thanks, Ed.
--
Jim Carlock
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