DIY Self-watering Planter

We read a lot and watched many videos and have adapted these methods to create earthbox-like self-watering planters. If you want to see how we do it, check out the video below.

It's spring in the garden...

And that means - time for a new tour! It is amazing how things have grown! The mangos, pineapples and bananas are fruiting, The tomatoes just keep coming.We walked around the the garden to give you an update on how it all is progressing. Please join us!

August Garden Tour Part 1

It has been a busy summer in the garden. Between fertilizing, weeding and planting new plants, we haven't had much time to make a tour or post much here. We do remain pretty active on Instagram and Facebook, no matter what so keep up with us there if you don't see anything new here or on Youtube.

Anyway, enjoy a look at our garden. We are doing it in two parts because there is so much to see.

Sweetleaf Aquaponics Tour

We visited our friends Dave and Nancy at Sweet Leaf Aquaponics and Dave graciously allowed us to video the tour he gave.


You can learn more about Sweet Leaf Aquaponics at their website and their Facebook page.

A weekend of weeding

Weed free Grass Garden

We spent the weekend weeding in the hot Florida sun. The photo above is the 'after' picture. I wish I had thought to snap a photo of the before photo or a photo of the two wheelbarrows of weeds we pulled out of here. Yes, I guess we had let it go. We call this our Grass Garden because we have mostly planted grasses here. We have muhly grass, purple fountain grass, purple love grass, lopsided indiangrass and lemon grass. The latter two were started from seed. In the back we also have some beauty berry bushes. We trimmed them a bit. All in all a productive weekend. We did a bit of fertilizing and transplanting as well.

March Tour Video is up

Please excuse our absence. Check out how our garden looks!

Getting through winter in Central Florida

Our winter time in Central Florida is still a time to sow seeds and watch our other plants and trees. We keep a good feeding schedule with our entire site, we observe and actually have a journal in which we add data about when we planted an item, when we fertilized, and other data that we feel is important. We also note the condition of the plant and look close for any developments. This to me is a great joy to look as we often feel as caretakers of our plants and want to see if we are on the road to gardening success or if we need to get busy finding solutions!

We recently went to Quality Green Specialists Inc. in Deland and saw exactly what we felt were the twins of our current plants that we felt were struggling. Many of our trees have lost leaves and look as if they are sticks, but alas we find out about trees that are deciduous or evergreen. Deciduous simply means it sheds it leaves annually and evergreen is as it sounds.

We were very happy to see many of the same specimen we are growing in zone 9B are looking the same in zone 9A slightly north of us. Apparently pomegranate can be either  evergreen or deciduous depending on variety but we feel ours is the leave shedding deciduous variety. We also noted our blueberry and fig looked as barren as the nursery's specimens and felt relieved we have a fighting chance after the winter for growth! Note the sparse leaf coverage on each specimen which as I found out is common in the winter here in Central Florida.

Goji Berries

Persimmon (look like bare sticks!)

Pomegranate