Mavis Mail – Genevieve From South Florida Sends in Garden Pics

A big THANK YOU to everyone who has sent in their photographs and stories. I hope by sharing other peoples pictures and stories here on One Hundred Dollars a Month we can all have a rock star garden this summer. Keep them coming!

~Mavis

This week we travel to South Florida with reader, Genevieve, who shows us that container gardens can yield some crazy good crops:

Hi Mavis!

I have been reading your blog for a while now and I have been meaning to send in some pictures of my garden. For most of the country, the garden season is winding down, but here in South Florida the best growing weather is just starting!

We just bought our first house in January this year and I couldn’t wait to fill all the spaces with edibles!

[The picture above] is a little space in the back of my house. There used to be a basketball hoop there from the former owner {which the HOA wasn’t very fond of} but now I have it lined with City Picker planters, an Earthbox and a bunch of SmartPots. The two trees on the right are a tangerine {foreground} which has a few almost ready and a Hass avocado. On the left is a lychee tree and behind it is a dwarf peach {that I am desperately trying to keep alive in the wrong zone. Haha}.

Alllll my tomatoes! I have several heirloom varieties including Old German and Yellow Jubilee, and a bunch of small bushy patio varieties since they grow so well in the City Pickers. I even had a couple volunteer tomatoes that just sprouted out of the planter from nowhere, back from the dead after a brutally hot summer.

My lychee in the foreground and my sad little Bonanza Dwarf Peach trying to make it to winter 🙁

My latest project. Hubby and I ripped out a ridiculous jungle of landscaping {it took a pickaxe and chain saw to get a palm tree out!} and made this nice space for me to plant more veggies. For me, its more cost effective to use planters and raised beds than plant the soil here, which is full of rocks and very sandy. Here I used SmartPots and a SmartPot Big Bag Bed which is 13 cu ft of growing space! Its full of peppers and a couple bush variety tomatoes and a broccoli plant {which I’ve never grown and am very excited about!}. I like to grow things you don’t see in the grocery store, so I have purple bell peppers, Cherokee Purple tomatoes, San Marzano tomatoes, Black Krim tomatoes and a volunteer cherry tomato transplanted from the back patio. 🙂 The big climbing vine is a passion fruit vine. After a vicious battle with caterpillars on it, its finally thriving and I’m looking forward to its wild looking flowers and delicious fruit in the spring and early summer.

The second part of my front yard garden. Since both hoses are on the back of the house, I put a rain barrel up front so I can water the garden. Those three pots used to have Southern Highbush Blueberries, but they didn’t make it through the summer so I put cauliflower and broccoli there, which are doing great!

The last thing I will put up front this winter is my beloved strawberry jars for some delicious Florida strawberries in January! I had a lot more planned for my garden, but its beginning to be too hard to bend over being 7 months pregnant! And I can’t make poor hubby do it all. 🙂

I hope you enjoy my garden pictures! I love reading your blog, good luck with your new garden and the beautiful renovations to your new house!

A Fellow Green Thumb,
Genevieve

If you would like to have your garden, chicken coop or something you’ve made featured on One Hundred Dollars a Month, here’s what I’m looking for:

• Your Garden Pictures and Tips – I’d especially like to see your garden set ups, growing areas, and know if you are starting seeds indoors this year. If so,  show me some picture of how you are going about it.
• Your Chicken and Chicken Related Stories – Coops, Chicks, Hen’s, Roosters, Eggs, you name it. If it clucks, send us some pictures to share with the world.
• Cool Arts & Crafts – Made from your very own hands with detailed {and well photographed} pictures and instructions.
• Your pictures and stories about your pets. The more pictures and details the better.
• Garage Sale, Thrift Store and Dumpster Diving pictures and the stories behind the treasures you found including how much you paid for them.

If I feature your pictures and the stories behind them on One Hundred Dollars a Month, I will send you a $20.00 gift card to the greatest store in the world: Amazon.com.

Go  HERE for the official rules.