Home Gardening

Being in Florida, your crops don't sound weird based on climate. Cacao and coffee look like a lot of trouble to process though, and I'm not sure how a person can stand to eat okra.

You're missing out on coconut, jaboticaba, mango, dragonfruit, sweet potato, figs, rambutan, lychee, loquat, longan, avocado, jackfruit, and pineapple. Note that mango and avocado should be obtained as grafted plants because seeds usually create undesirable plants.

I wish I could put you in touch with my father. He grew up in the DRC he loves gardening and he lives here in the UK now. I grew up with very large vegetable gardens my whole life in Zimbabwe. He has loads of experience gardening in the tropics and I grew up with a healthy respect for this hobby he cultivated. I can offer a tiny bit of advice. Plants will grow in the most difficult of conditions, you probably won’t get it the first time just keep going. My father had chickens (100x better compost) in Zimbabwe we sometimes struggled for water, something that won’t be hard for you however good soil composition can help retain moisture and eek out time when you are water rationing and waiting for rain.

> The biggest challenge for me is finding information

If you can understand Spanish: https://foro.infojardin.com/ is probably one of the biggest communities of gardeners in the latinosphere. Just don't be shy and ask direct and well defined questions. Some people in America has problems with that, in my experience.

In English: https://tropicalfruitforum.com has good technical advice for American and Asian fruits

And there are some people that could help in https://news.ycombinator.com/ of course ;-)

Sounds like a similar climate to northern Australia, pawpaw and kankong grow extremely well.

while we miss out on stone fruit there's a whole world of exotic fruits that only do well in the tropics (except durian, that can rot in hell)

Try beans! There are tons of varieties, theyre pretty easy, and I’m pretty sure they’re grown the world over.

Check out Bill Mollison’s “Introduction to Permaculture” and “Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual”. He breaks things into principles across different climates. They’re also generally inspiring books.

I would recommend this guy (self sufficient me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tX-Mnvt1Oo ) if you are looking for good youtuber who gardens in the tropics/ subtropics.

I've been gardening since my teen years (early 40's now) and moved many times. While I find gardening channels and recommendations useful and enjoyable, starting a garden (as I'm sure you are finding out), depends so much on local (this region) and even micro local (this valley, this yard, this side of the house) conditions. I've resigned the art of gardening to be one based almost entirely in fine scale structure in location. A pleasant artifact of plants having roots. While the themes and structures can be broadly applied, the art can only happen at a fine scale, where an in depth understanding of your local conditions as they relate to your goals and styles of gardening is something that can only be learned in situ.

If you actually want to feed yourself, just go to a Sunday market get 50kg of potatoes and plant them everywhere you can.

Low maintenance, hard to kill and great caloric yield.

> And don't start off trying to grow from seed

This is great advice if you're just starting out. There's a bit of an art to starting from seed.

You need to understand the dynamics like light, temperature, moisture, and seasonal timing. Where I live, you can start tomatoes indoors around February to have great starts that'll go into a greenhouse in March, or into the soil outside in June. That's quite an undertaking to time and get right. This year I got the timing, lighting, temperature, and all the rest right - the plants look amazing - but I have eighteen extra plants taking up a lot of space that I guess I'll just leave on the sidewalk for a lucky gardener in my neighbourhood. I could have used that space in the nursery for so many other useful things, but I had no idea what would survive or if some would be too small or whatever.

Each plant demands its own special conditions, and it takes a lot of space if you start indoors. Unexpected harsh conditions can suddenly ruin outdoor plants. Forgetting to water one day could more or less stunt an entire bed of seedlings. They can be so delicate, and it can really suck the fun out of gardening.

There's no harm in starting out in easy-mode.

Many plants are still pretty easy to grow from seed, as long as you use good soil and find a spot with plenty of sunlight. Tomatoes and chili seem particularly easy, even some commercial varieties not optimized for hobbyists seem to grow okay in a greenhouse here in Northern Europe. I just took some seeds from supermarket vegetables.

Next I'm going to try some more traditional varieties that should be better for hobbyists.

A couple of other things my wife and I have picked up over the last few years for anyone starting out.

1. Mulch mulch mulch! It keeps weeds down and water in and will add organic matter to your soil as it breaks down. Your municipality probably makes tons of mulch from trimming trees and you can usually find somewhere to buy a truckload from them for a few dollars. We put down at least 3 pickup truck loads over the course of the first year in ~200 square feet of beds. Unless you are directly sowing seeds somewhere, you don't ever want bare soil showing.

2. If you have plants that seem diseased or have pests, rip them out or prune the affected parts off ASAP. We don't use pesticides or anything so the best way to keep pest populations down is to keep them from multiplying. Caterpillars become moths/butterflies that make many more caterpillars. If you eliminate the plant or leaves hosting them, they won't get that far.

3. The more you weed, the less you have to weed. This is the same idea as with pests. These things don't spontaneously generate, so every weed you pull up that doesn't go to seed first is one less seed in your soil waiting to pop up. If you keep on it, eventually the only weeds you have to worry about are ones that come over from your neighbor's overgrown beds!

How's your compost? I've reached the point where thats my first question for every gardener I meet.

There are some fairly simple steps that get overcomplicated due to companies selling products.

1) Figure out what you want to grow

2) Look up what kind of soil pH and what nutrients those plants need

3) Test your soil for pH and those nutrients, where possible

4) Amend the soil with fertilizer to correct measured imbalances

A lot of it is trial and error, also. Take note of what you do and the outcomes and keep doing what works. There are so many local variables generalized advice can never hope to cover them all.

You can buy simple soil test kits that tell you about your soil's pH, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash levels. Then you know if/what to replenish. A university or lab near you may also offer a service where you send them a soil sample and you get a detailed report. Probably overkill for a balcony though.

Search ebay/etc for "EC/TDS meter", it's ~10 USD. Cheap ones do work, no worry. Keep your drain water at a stable EC, somewhere between 500 and 2500 uS/cm, and you're golden. If the drain water's EC is low, use irrigation water somewhat richer (+500..1000 uS/cm). Some tap water is already high on minerals, in that case use mainly nitrogen-rich solution.

Btw if your plants look healthy, no action is required.

The short answer is experience. Buy some good quality soil and use it in your planters. Learn how the plants grow and thrive - if they slow growth or do not bloom as much it may be the weather or it may be because it's lacking nutrients. You can also simply give them some fertilizer. If it doesn't make much of a difference it was probably not needed.

If possible you should renew your soil, not be replacing it, but by mixing it with good manure or even just a bunch of leaves. I have experience with manure from rabbits and horses - both can be directly mixed with the earth.

You're getting a lot of responses that answer some of the questions you're asking, but not really addressing the whole picture. There are a lot of techniques and tools you could use to figure out when and how much fertilizer to add, but all of it misses the point. Fertilizer is a band-aid, addressing (usually inadequately) shortcomings of a perverted system, and so are pest-/herb-/fung-icides.

The last question you asked is the key: gardens and farms don't need to replace their soil because they are "feeding" it with organic matter. The organic matter is animal manure, plant litter, or compost (which is... aged animal manure or plant litter). Bacteria and fungi eat that organic matter, larger organisms eat the bacteria and fungi, and plants operate in relation to all of them to uptake the nutrients they unlock from the previously living material. In natural systems, those dead plants feed the next generation in a relatively closed loop.

I've developed something of an obsession with all this recently as I learn through my own garden, and my goal this year is not to use any fertilizers (though I may if I think it's needed), no herbicides or fungicides, and only very little & very selectively applied organic pesticides.

Container gardening can be a bit of a special case, because it's difficult to have a complete ecosystem on a balcony, but integrating organic matter will replenish that too provided you have the soil organisms to do the work. Which is fairly likely.

In gardens and farms you'll usually amend the soil not only with fertilizers but also with as much organic material as you can sensibly get. This way a healthy soil ecosphere is created that will take care of a lot of the soil depletion and pests issues.

On a balcony usually the containers are too small and too shallow to establish this kind of natural system. Also the environmental conditions are often varying too much. The containers might dry out at some time and be over watered at other times.

It is similar to keeping a very small aquarium healthy. The smaller it gets, the more delicate and instable it becomes. Thus to keep it simple, balcony and container gardeners are advised to exchange the pot soil on a regular basis.

Whan you can do to avoid wasting the "spent" soil, is simply to rejuvenate it. Mix it together with a large amount of fresh and healthy compost and other components to give it a boost. No need to throw it away.

If you want to make sure that pests do not survive and accumulate in this process, simply collect the spent container soil into a large compartment and heat it up to 90°C in the oven for an hour or so, sterilizing it in the process.

The other alternative would be to use hydroponics and specifically Kratky Hydroponics on the balcony and window shelf. I'm growing some beet root plants this way atm. Very easy and low maintenance.

The simple answer is to "feed your soil". Basically give back the nutrients lost, and modify the soil to promote growth of soil bacteria.

You can look up what plants you had in there before and what nutrients those usually consume the most of. Then you can look up another plant that specifically generates those nutrients, or you can add them via a fertilizer. Companion plants help get rid of pests that attack certain plants and also increase production of needed nutrients.

Before planting, you can aerate the soil (basically mix it up) while simultaneously adding organic material (grass clippings, dried leaves, sticks, fallen trees), then water it and tend it like the soil is a plant itself. You can also introduce beneficial organisms like earthworms and beneficial nematodes.

"Modern" farms don't replace their soil because they're basically growing monocultures and using a sort of "nutrient flamethrower" to completely drench the soil with what that one plant needs, and pesticides to kill anything that a genetically modified plant can't survive. It's unsustainable and harmful to the ecosystem in many cases, but it results in big yields.

This depends on the species that you are trying to culture. Some plants are avid eaters, other not so much. Orchards solve it using the concept of crop rotation

>how do you find out whether your soil quality is still good enough?

The plants will tell you. But the answer always, always is: how good is your compost?

Until you get composting right, gardening can be very frustrating. But it all starts with a proper compost. You can fix almost any soil issue with composting techniques.

The curious thing about that, though, is that your compost, if its a house compost (based on output from your household) is only going to be as healthy as you, yourself eat. So that is a factor as well ..

Bingo!. Cant recommend tomatoes enough. Roses too if You live in a sunny(vale)area. The combination of clay and sunshine just makes those Floribundas bloom. Its a pity I cant find enough patent free rose bushes. Its time to "free the seeds" in the spirit of FOSS. Perhaps sometime in the not too distopian future.

May I recommend cherry/grape tomatoes instead? In my (granted: limited) experience, they require a bare minimum of work, have a generous harvest window, and -- most importantly -- you can eat them straight off the vine (though sometimes they need a rinse, first).

I would put herbs on the “new to gardening” list. They are very useful to have fresh and most of them grow like weeds. It’s almost impossible to accidentally kill rosemary, oregano, or thyme.

The probably easiest plants to grow for an absolute beginner may be salads like arugula or herbs like bazil and mint. If you have good soil and enough moisture, mint will be very difficult to stop from growing. Once I planted mint into a pot that I placed into the bed to separate it from the other herbs. It broke through the walls of the pot and gave me a great example of exponential growth.

Talking about tomatoes, highly recommend watching this episode of Growing a Greener World.

https://www.growingagreenerworld.com/episode-803-epic-tomato...

https://www.craiglehoullier.com/resources-videos-etc

And if you’re gonna grow tomatoes, throw some marigolds in there too! They’re a nice companion plant — they look pretty and help with pest control for your tomatoes. (I also like growing basil in that mix.)

Yeah the biggest problem with horticulture resource online in English is that most of them are written within the US context. So everything is measured in imperial unit. And hardiness zone only take into consideration about the minimum temperature, and say nothing about heat tolerant. So if you're in tropical country or somewhere else with drastically different climate, you gonna have to go through a lot of trials and errors.

Part of the solution is pesticides. "Natural" pesticides do work. Pyrethrin is very powerful.

Part is cultivating carnivorous insects. Keep cats away from your garden, they hunt and kill the carnivorous insects.

Part is chemical deterrence. Dilute soapy water interferes with the life cycle of many pests. Garlic discourages lots of things.

Part is companion planting. I have not had much luck with this myself, but better gardeners than me (most) swear by the technique.

Be a bit vigilant. If a plant is being attacked, rip it out. Spray soapy water and/or garlic on your plants on a regular basis.

Accept some defeats. You will not win every battle with the little evil creatures. But if you engage with them you will stay ahead enough to have a fabulous garden.

I've been gardening for a few years and have had some similar problems and learned a lot. I also really dislike using chemicals. Each problem calls for a different approach, and sometimes the approach can create problems :).

With fungi - if you mean blight - I've been lucky enough not to have to deal with it. Try to keep plants healthy and leaves relatively dry. If you mean powdery mildew, I think it's a part of life to a certain degree and the best you can do is manage it. Try to keep leaves dry when watering, promote airflow around plants, and cut off old leaves that have a lot of mildew. They should still produce. If you mean fungus in the ground around plants, that's usually a good sign not a bad one.

With cabbage moths, the most effective protection is some type of fine netting/horticulture fleece over the plants to keep the moths from laying eggs, or applying BT (bacillus thuringiensis) periodically. It's a natural pesticide (a bacteria) that's extremely effective against caterpillars. I use it, and it's great, though I'm hoping to use less this year because it likely affects other insects in their larval stages as well (thinking ladybugs and lacewings).

With spider mites... sigh. The problem has seemed to get worse each year. This year I'm trying a more holistic and hands-off approach using compost exclusively (0 or very limited fertilizer use, even organic) to make sure plants are healthy enough to fight them off and produce despite their presence. Also covering soil with dense plantings and other smaller inter-crops to regulate soil temps, hold onto moisture, and encourage soil life. I'm also allowing a baseline population of them in some places (not that I've had a choice) to give predators a food supply so they'll move in and hopefully help keep things under control. The thinking here is a "soil-up" approach that focuses on soil, plant, and ecosystem health rather than simply attacking what may be a symptom of other problems I've created.

Hope this is helpful!

There's no silver bullet.

Cultivate as diverse an ecosystem as you possibly can. Good indicator species include amphibians (esp. frogs), spiders and fungi -- if you're seeing lots of those in your veggie garden, your soil ecology and fixed-plant guilds are healthy.

I had a neighbour complain that they'd had a particularly bad invasion of bugs one season, despite a couple of prior seasons with no trouble. "Third season growing in that spot?" I asked. She answered affirmatively. "Hang in there," was the only advice I could give. It seems that a new veggie garden gets about 2 seasons "for free", then, in the 3rd season, all the bugs find it, but the predators haven't caught up yet. It's highly instructive to run a predator-prey model -- you'll easily see the natural delay between prey population peaks and the lagging predator population peaks. So 3rd season is a downer, but take heart! from there on things steadily get better.

The BIG thing to avoid (assuming you're aiming for completely pesticide-free) is to NEVER use pesticides of ANY kind, "organic" pesticides included! The moment you deploy a pesticide, even on a limited scale, you break the predator-prey networks you need to build and foster. Once you have your local ecosystem really healthy (compost, compost, compost!) you'll hardly ever have serious pest problems. I speak from having gardened this way for over 25 years.

I heard (cannabis isn't legal here) it's mostly identical with growing tomato, so ...

It meets your criteria in a loose sense but I’d recommend Modern Nature by Derek Jarman