The last one

Hey all!


Well, it's the end of the semester and the end of my little garden. This experience has been valuable to me. I've learned several things about gardening. It's more work than I thought it would be. I did harvest some vegetables over the semester. I got a ton of green beans, a couple of squash, cilantro and some broccoli. The freeze hit us hard and I lost all of my tomato plants, my bean plants, my squash plant and my cauliflower. I was really sad about the cauliflower. My struggles this semester have been with weeds! Hand weeding takes so much work! The weeds seemed to return as fast as I could pull them! Obviously the cold was another challenge. Even in Florida we still have some cold nights. I still have my cabbage growing and another broccoli plant that I'm waiting to harvest. I'm giving them a little time to grow before I harvest them. All in all it was a good experience. I will say that working on my garden, even though it was dirty and time consuming, was very relaxing. It was nice to get out there during the week outside of class and just pull weeds and let my mind wander or listen to music. I see why a lot of people take up gardening as a hobby. It can be very therapeutic. I also got to share some good conversations with my classmates and had a great teacher who knows a lot about gardening and is patient and willing to help with whatever he can. I don't know that I'll jump right in to growing a big garden in my own yard, but I'm glad I took this class.

Thanks for reading!

Amanda

Looks Like I Fell a Bit Behind!

Hey all!

Well, call me a slacker. I haven't been here to update my blog in a while, so I'll try to get caught up in this post.

Some of the seeds I planted didn't sprout...namely the carrots and cucumbers. I'm pretty disappointed about the carrots. I was looking forward to them. Here are some pics of my garden a few weeks ago.

Things were going pretty well for my other plants. My tomatoes were starting to grow fruit, I got a couple of squash and my beans went crazy! I harvested a whole bunch of those.

I haven't cooked them yet, but I think I'll just steam them and eat them as a side. I gave some to my dad and step mom and she did cook them and said they were great! I'm excited to give some a try.

The last couple of nights have been really, really cold here, so earlier this week we had to get the gardens ready for the freeze by harvesting what we could. I got some more beans, but my tomatoes weren't very large yet. I pulled up my cilantro and planted it in a pot at home. I did the same with my pepper plants to save them from the cold. I didn't try to move my tomatoes because I was told they wouldn't make it.

On Thursday, I went to check my little plot and found that my tomatoes, beans, squash, and cauliflower were in bad shape.

I'm pretty sad about it. I don't know if they can recover or not. I'm guessing not. This is my first real garden, and I'm a bit surprised at how attached I've gotten. It was very hard to leave them there knowing how cold it was going to get.

Fortunately not all was lost. My cabbage and broccoli survived the cold.

Hopefully I will get a little something from them before it's all over. The semester is about to come to a close, so my little garden will be no more. I've learned that gardening is both easier and harder than I thought it would be. It's easier in some ways in that my plants grew pretty well even with minimum care, but pulling weeds by hand required a lot more time than I'd anticipated! I'm definitely going to start a garden at home after this experience. I'll be back to update when all is said and done.

It's Just a Little Setback

Hi all!


We were supposed to plant our seeds in class this past Tuesday night, but mother nature had other plans. The rain didn't let up in time for use to get in done. I will be getting it done on Tuesday night. I hope it doesn't rain again because I'm ready to get started!

Til next time
-Amanda

Hi all!

My name is Amanda and I am a student at the University of Florida (Go Gators!). I'm an agricultural education major and this semester I am taking a vegetable gardening course. This blog was started to document my progress. I've never grown a vegetable garden before, and I'm not known for my plant growing abilities, so this could get interesting! Below you'll find a photo of my proposed garden.