The Urban Locavore In SW Florida

[Have kittehs and like the birdies too? Put your birdbath in a tree!]

I should make it crystal clear that I'm not a true locavore. I can really only manage the veggies and certain fruits certain times of the year. I live downtown and there's no possibility of cows or chickens and I've yet to find a local source. Would I go that far if I lived in the country? Possibly....I know I'd love to have a big old pond and stock it with tilapia. I did find a local source for rice [hey, it's Florida, we should be able to grow rice here, right?] and I'm trying to find a local retailer that carries it.

Other than that, I try to keep it to this continent [you can be reasonably certain soy products are from the US.] although even that's not always possible [frozen seafood almost invariably comes from Southeast Asia]. But, as Barbara Kingsolver points out even small changes like locally sourced vegetables can make a big difference.


One big difference from you northern locavores/gardeners, you can grow food year round here. Eggplants, peppers, green onions, swiss chard, grape and cherry tomatoes, and arugula can all be grown year round. Well let me rephrase that. I can grow certain things year round here. I know people who manage big-ass tomatoes in the summer here but I've never felt like putting the work into it. Like the squash.

Which brings me to a point I want to make--a lot of people think you have to be a great gardener to grow your own vegetables or to have the yard that I do [jungle-like but pretty.] I'm not. I only have Florida-friendly plants that thrive without any care. My peppers have spots on the leaves and the peppers are kind of small. I should probably read up on it or test the soil or something. But you know what? 6 pepper plants in containers gives me enough peppers when I want them, and that's good enough for me. If it can't produce with my level of care out it goes. And I try to grow only enough that can be consumed by two people at a time--no canning, no freezing--but that works perfectly with our small yard and house. Although I do often have extras for family and friends.

To the year-round staples I make seasonal adjustment. Winter sees mustard greens [they'll actually do well about 9 months of the year as will most leaf lettuces], rapini, kohlrabi, broccolli, cauliflower and others. After visiting Hong Kong in Feb 2008 I realized we should be growing asian vegetables here in the summer. My biggest success--and it was a HUGE success--were yardlong beans. Man, we ate a lot of beans this summer. Yum. We had a lot to give away too. I also experimented with subtropical sweet potatoes--boniato [I got cuttings from Echo Farms]--which grew great but really you need more room than I have to keep you in potatoes all summer. [I failed to take photos of the summer plants but I will this next year.] Which brings me to another point about limited space gardening. Your best ROI are plants that produce for long periods of time. With a head of lettuce once it's done is done, while leaf lettuce you can harvest from much longer.

More on urban gardening soon...