The Home Park – A Retrospective – Florida Park Service Passport to Nature, History, and Health

The Home Park – A Retrospective

February 2, 2019 Rose Peters 0 Comments

One of my favorite Florida parks is in my own yard! For those of you that know me on Facebook, I realize now that a post about my garden might be your nightmare. I put together most of our yard pictures from the last 3 years and there are over 4000 images! From that, I moved some that I prefer and it’s still over 1000…not practical for this post. So I have narrowed things down to a few pictures from a few categories so that I can show the evolution of things all in one place.

First, here are some lovely pictures of our yard when we first moved it. So crisp and clean and pre-weeds.

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I think the gardening started about a year after we moved in. I had finished unpacking and organizing the house and Jeff had finally moved to Florida full time. Our front yard flower beds were very weedy, so I spent a couple of weekends in January 2017 cleaning it all up. I probably could have stopped there, but instead I got some more hibiscus and other plants to brighten things up a bit.

Look at things now!

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This is also the weekend I learned about glass lizards. I was emotionally scarred for a little bit, thinking I had accidentally cut a snake in half with my trowel. Turns out it was a glass lizard and he’s probably fine.

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It’s fun working on miscellaneous projects in the yard, too. Our first firepit was a cheap metal bowl. By about a year after we moved in, the bowl disintegrated. This was a good excuse to replace it with something to last a little longer. All we did was dig a hole in the ground and line it with paver stones. Two years later and it still is working for us perfectly!

I also got these great cheapo dishes from Goodwill and made some small plate gardens.

And I also made a cascading tower for succulents made out of cement molded from real leaves.

Now it’s filled in with pretty plants 🙂

We have also painted a couple of cute critters and added some Goodwill teapot birdhouses.

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The flower garden got me reminiscing about all of the veggie gardens I have had in the past. This was the same time that our fire-bowl fell apart and we dug the hole for our fire-pit. I used the sandy soil mixed with a bag of miracle grow to start planting some veggie seeds in pots in February. Look at what start growing in the first couple of weeks! That hooked me in and I started to fantasize wildly about turning the entire yard into an edible garden.

I should note that if you are allergic to poison ivy, don’t dig in soil at the base of a mango tree with your bare hands. I got hives every time for a few days until I realized I was mango sap contaminated and not getting mosquito bites!

Then for my birthday, I got a gift certificate to Home Depot and I moved a prickly bromeliad patch all over the yard (for easier management) and replaced it with a butterfly garden. This was the birth of my love for pollinator-focused planting. Check out some cool videos including emerging monarchs, a fritillary forming into the chrysalis phase, and a hungry hungry swallowtail caterpillar munching dill.

This is how things looked before I moved the Bros (bromeliads). I learned that the Bro plants only bloom once. They send out these off-shoots called “pups” that will eventually bloom and make pups of their own. This means you have to keep up with the plants by separating the pups and composting the expended adults. They are so spiny that it was a real challenge to try to tidy the area when it was a big patch like this. I am definitely happier having the Bros spread around and saving this area for a butterfly garden.

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Jeff and I also came to an agreement that I could spend the same amount of money on the garden for my 40^th birthday as he did for his Disney trips and party for his 40^th year. You can buy a lot of plants for the cost of a day at Disney!

Now I have flowers all over the yard!

Ok, I’ll stop posting flowers. I could go on and on and on….

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Veggies Fruits Veggies Herbs Veggies!!

Not long after this, I got my first two raised garden beds. That was a lot of work – try moving buckets of gravel and bags of soil instead of cross-fit! So worth it, though. I got the third one a few months later and have gotten lots of bean, cucumbers, peas, radishes, tomatoes, and other tasty veggies from this space. Since then, I have been spreading out all over the yard to share space with nitrogen-fixers and pollinators and bump up my harvest.

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Look at all of these tasty goodies!

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In April and May, Jeff was gone for a couple of weeks working Jazz Fest and I set up my next project with trellises and passionflowers along the shed. The giant passionfruit can become as big as a cantaloupe!

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Since these first months, I have learned so much about growing, local plants, fruit trees, our microclimates in the yard, and so much more. I have learned that I love gardening, but I am a lazy gardener. I have not fertilized once since I started gardening, and I have probably reached the limit of what I can get away with so this year will be about getting a steady supplementation schedule and drip irrigation system set up over more of the yard. I also have used almost no pesticides so that I don’t kill any of the bees and butterflies accidentally. These practices have helped me to find things that can survive and flourish despite me rather than because of me. The recent drought has surprisingly killed very little which I’m pretty thrilled about.

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Look at all of these cute critters!

We have been embracing wildlife in the yard from the feathered to the furry to the scaled and insects of all sorts.

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The hammock area

We decided to create a patio area to make it easier to sweep the mango leaves in the winter and to minimize the available area for weeds.

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The banana area

We also had this great area in the corner of the yard that we considered using to install a stock tank for relaxing in cool water on hot days. Then we realized we’re lazy people and wouldn’t want to deal with the upkeep. So this has been converted into a circle of banana trees (Ice Cream, Manzana, Red Dwarf, Mysore), another butterfly garden anchored by a peach tree, and a circle of milkweed and pollinating flowers for monarchs.

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Succulents

We have succulents scattered around – the most prominent are these crazy tall plants that spread like crazy and grow so tall with pretty flowers.

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The grape and raspberry patches

For my birthday last year I got a bunch of plants from my folks that I used as an excuse to convert the North side of the house to non-lawn. I converted the ground along the back of the shed to a raspberry patch.