What a difference a month makes in a Florida spring garden!
        

Look how much the bush beans have grown. You can actually make out the rows without straining. The tomatoes need staking, and many of the vegetables in the garden are starting to flower.

        

Only big change here is that the daikon radishes on the left (white flowers) and the collards (yellow flowers) have more seed pods than flowers now. Still harvesting lots of kale, though. So yummy! My favorite kale recipe is here.

Hopefully I will be eating fresh green beans soon. I have missed them so much. Until then, I am enjoying the delicate flowers on my bush bean plants.

Do you see the baby zucchini? She’s so cute.

    

The marigolds are showing their cheery little faces and the cauliflower even sent up exuberant blooms. When cauliflower is sold, it is sold as unopened flower buds, not as the yellow flowers above right.

The whole plant ends up being pretty massive, as seen here compared to my flip-flopped foot. The plants were given to a neighbor’s chickens. 🙂 I figured they would love pecking at all the seedpods.

Collards are in the same family as cauliflower; you can see that they look the same but they get really tall! Some of them were over 5 feet tall. The chickens got most of these too, but I kept one so it’s seeds could ripen.

So what’s on my to-do list?

1. I hope to harvest green beans, zucchini, and cherry tomatoes this month.

2. I plan to keep mulching to keep the weeds down. When I pulled up the rows of collards and cauliflower, I had very few weeds thanks to a mulch of oak leaves. For more reasons to mulch, you could read my post Why I Mulch.

See all those leaves? My husband was so sweet to get them for my garden. Yes, I know, it looks pretty ghetto now, but I was pretty excited to see them. They should all be gone by the end of the month and my gardens will be super happy!

3. Most of my planting is done, but I would like to start more eggplant, basil, and okra. They really like the hot weather and I think it is here for us gardening in North Florida.

Nothing like the smell of tomato leaves or the sight of vibrant tomato flowers to give this backyard gardener some hope.

Oh wait, look closely! Is that a baby tomato I see?!

What is happening in your garden? Know some gardeners in who are suffering from spring fever but still have snow? Share this post with them to encourage them that winter is not forever!

Coming soon-a post on great ways to save money in your garden!