A quiet day on Skinny Island; brilliant blue sky in morning giving way to high, thin clouds and stiff wind from the northeast by mid-afternoon. No birds on the beach, nothing in the water. Everything taking the day off, marking time until spring. It gets like this every February, when we’re all just tired of what passes for winter here. I don’t want to hear it from you folks in real winter climes. It’s all relative, after all, and this is Florida. I can see the palm trees.

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Trying to grow anything beachside is a challenge, what with the wind and salt air, but trying to sustain a vegetable garden is its own particular kind of insanity. We cleared a fifteen by twenty-foot plot behind the house, pretty well protected from the wind and salt by the house and trees, but after three years, it’s still very much a work in progress.

We’ve had prior experience, and were pretty spoiled by that, as it turns out. At our first house, in Tallahassee, we had a big, beautiful, successful garden.  You turned the soil, threw in some seed and stood back. It was rich soil, there was plenty of rain always, everything we tried bloomed and fruited, so we pretty much thought we knew what we were doing. This place is another story altogether.

The salt air is one thing, the soil quite another. It’s not quite beach sand, but not far from it, with so much silicon content water rolls right off it.  I’ve built it up a little year by year, partly from the good compost pit we maintain, all the vegetable kitchen scraps, coffee grounds, and lots of leafy matter from the bays and oaks, but it’s still got a long way to go.  For a couple of years now we’ve had good luck with herbs and lettuce, but not so with squash, peppers and tomatoes.  Everything would start out fine, would leaf out and blossom even, but no fruit would appear.  The herbs and lettuce do fine because there is no fruiting. The leafy parts are what you want.

So I tried something new last fall, which I’m going to continue when I do the spring planting in a couple of weeks.  I tried growing in a hay medium. You lay out a thick mat of hay, a good six to eight inches, and start it composting with potting soil and organic fertilizer. When you plant, either seed or starter plants, you clear a hole in the hay and set them in a handful of good soil in this medium.  I tried it with bell peppers, Habanero, Cayenne, and Jalapeno, with great results until the first freeze of December killed them.  When I pulled them up they all had good root balls spreading in the hay soil.  It holds moisture and continues making its own fertilizer as it breaks down.  A thick mat of hay has been down over compost and leaves through most of the garden for about three months now.  We’ll see.

Water is another issue. Through the growing season the thunderstorms and showers typically form several miles inland where the east and west coast sea breezes collide, then move back to the east.  All but the very strongest rain out before they ever get to the island. We’ve had a lot of dry summers lately. We water with a garden hose, but it’s never enough.  Now we have rain-collecting barrels, too, and we’ve had a good start to the year rain wise, so we are hopeful that portends a wet spring and summer. Progress will be posted.