People have told me that the atmospheric condition in the Florida Panhandle / Lower Alabama is “ difficult ” for gardeners .
I would n’t say it ’s unmanageable . It ’s downright abusive !
It ’s 4:37AM decently now , and I ’m sitting in my office with Betsy ( the dog ) with a blank heater running . I just came in from hosing down all my mulberry Tree in the Grocery Row Gardens to hopefully keep Robert Frost from settle in .
At 7AM we ’re supposed to adjoin freezing , after multiple weeks of warm temperatures .
The warm temperature have convinced most of our yield trees that it ’s fourth dimension to leaf out and go into bloom . The eight or so mulberry trees in the main garden are all covered in bid folio and buckets of green berries .
And then … frost make out back .
Last year we had the same thing happen , except it was a little more uttermost . We hit the eighty , before get a night that plunged down to 28 degrees . That absolutely wrecked some of the mulberries , not only taking off the fruit but even freeze out entire branches . My 8′ marvelous Rachel Goodman mulberry froze almost to the ground ! And the Peruvian apple cactus – which normally handles weather condition into the teen – bit the dust .
We also lost most of the year ’s blueberry bush harvests , including all the violent ones we normally scrounge in the local Wood .
Ideally , our gardens would be on the south side of our family , not the Frederick North , so they ’d get a little more protection from the worst of the weather ; yet due to an old driveway and a unearthly slope , that was n’t possible , so they must confront the northern exposure and do their best .
as luck would have it in 2023 we got some rain in the spring and our garden did well until the end of June . Then the heat really kicked in , and the sky settle it was n’t going to give us any more rain .
We had week after workweek of weather soar up into the 100s without rainfall . commonly , our okra , cassava , sugar cane and sweet potatoes thrive through the summer and make up for all the other plants that give up in the heat – yet in 2023 , the heat combined with drouth greatly limited their outgrowth .
We got a fiddling manioca and a decent amount of sweet potato , but the sugar cane was half its proper sizing , and the okra was a flop . The worst of it , though , was the effect it had on our pasture . Instead of growing thick and unripened , it dried up and provide trivial for the kine past October , requiring us to bribe hay for over wintertime . Even our pond almost dried up .
Then , mightily around the first hoar when it was too late to save the grass , it started raining . And rain . And raining !
The pool is now full , but the grass is still recovering .
And here we are with a ( hopefully ) last frost event before the 2024 gardening season really gets rolling .
It ’s not hard . It ’s abusive !
Still , we are conjecture to study from suffering and use it for the purgation of our souls . Maybe this is all for the greater goodness .
If you ’ll apologize me … I have to go spray down the mulberry tree trees again .
