This is not even the first harvest. We've enjoyed a couple tomatoes and an earlier Japanese eggplant. We actually just ate them without my blogging them first! OMG!
My garden gets credit for the peppers. The rest come from the gardens under Larry's care.
The gardening books lie. "Carrots are easy" says one book. "Carrots like full sun all day," says another. What I'm learning is that we live in a subtropical area in which the instructions given by most books aren't applicable. The Ortho book puts us squarely in what it calls "zone 8" and the book is wrong. At least along the coast, the Floridian "zone 9" stripe ought to creep upward. A few carrots are eking out an existence in the box planter, but 12 hours of South Carolina sun is way too much for them. I will NOT give up on carrots. I like them. They keep. They're versatile. This is a learning experience! More will be revealed.
4 comments:
Nice! I'm envious.
Every zone has its challenges, I suppose, but I live in Zone 2 and tried (in past) to grow veggies in a city backyard with too much shade. The SOLE crop I ever grew successfully were snow peas... and man, they grew. And grew. And grew.
Never got a carrot, in spite of trying.
Stupid carrots with their zone elitism.
Wonderful! Now I'm hungry; the Fort's chickens had best beware.
Are these from your raised bed? It looks like you've kept the marauders at bay.
Your photo reminds me of the very first products from our raised beds in the summer of '00, a teeny crook-necked squash and a little pea pod, brought in specifically to give the critters something to puzzle over.
Here, Fonzie (right) and the late, great Max do just that.
That pepper looks absolutely perfect! Rebecca and my mom planted a very small garden and it looks like we'll have a few cucumbers and tomatoes soon. Not sure about the carrots - I heard I'm supposed to wait until after the first frost to pull them...?
Your picture gives me hope for Rebecca's fledgling garden.
ronnie - i just might have to try snow peas. According to 2 books (though, as mentioned, they've proved to be iffy in the reliability department) "sugar peas," as we seem to call them down here, aren't zone elitists!
Sherwood -
Fonzie looks as though he's wondering if these objects came from another dimension.
Christy - Again with the semi-reliable books, but i see nothing in them about waiting for frost! I do see that carrots need to come out when the ground freezes, but they 're ready whenever they mature, 60-70ish days, depending on the type! I'm trying again. If you get some, i'll be envious!
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