In the Garden Right Now
In the garden right now · Zone 10a
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Late summer · August and September
This is the quietest the garden gets all year, and it fools people into thinking they missed something. You didn't. August is not a harvest month down here. It's a setup month. Everything you seed in a tray right now is what you eat in November.
Going in the ground
What I'm planting
- Tomato, pepper and eggplant seed. Into trays, not the ground. They go outside September into October. Start them four to eight weeks before you set them out.
- Okra. Seed straight in the ground. Okra hates being moved, so skip the tray.
- Seminole pumpkin and calabaza. The two squashes that shrug at Florida summer.
- Sweet potato and boniato slips. Boniato goes in year round here. Give it 120 to 180 days.
- Callaloo. Amaranth if you want the formal name. It grows like it has somewhere to be.
- Malabar spinach, longevity spinach, Okinawa spinach. The last two make no seed at all, so you plant a cutting from somebody else's plant. That's how mine started.
- Roselle. Late August is a real window. Four months to calyces, so November.
- Papaya, pineapple, sugarcane. Still fine to set out.
- Ginger and turmeric. From a piece of root, not from seed.
- September only: collards, kale, mustard, Chinese cabbage, lettuce, southern peas, bush and pole beans, cucumbers, carrots, turnips, bunching onions, squash, luffa. September is when the door cracks open.
Producing
What I'm picking
- Starfruit. Peak. August and September is one of its two best windows all year.
- Guava. Main crop, August through October. It gives a second smaller one in early spring.
- Barbados cherry. One of three to five flushes it throws in a year. Three weeks from flower to fruit.
- Miracle fruit. Flushes roughly every two months. In a pot down here you can get six harvests.
- Longan. August is it. By early September we're done.
- Mango. Tail end. If you still have fruit it's a late variety like Keitt.
- Jaboticaba. A light scatter. Its real peak is late March.
- Also going: sugar apple, atemoya, avocado, passion fruit, papaya, banana, jackfruit.
- From the beds: okra daily at peak, boniato, sweet potato leaves, callaloo, malabar spinach, chayote, long beans, peppers, and Everglades or cherry tomatoes.
Struggling
Where I'm losing
- Rain. Almost 70 percent of our whole year of rain falls between the middle of May and the middle of October. August and September also catch the tropical systems.
- Roots drowning. Papaya, avocado and passion fruit can be gone after 48 to 72 hours in soggy soil. Not weeks. Days.
- Fungus and bacteria. Bacterial spot and target spot on tomatoes. Gummy stem blight on the pumpkins, so keep mulch off the vine base and water in the morning only. Mango anthracnose is worse in a wet year.
- Root knot nematodes. Their numbers are highest at the end of a crop, which is right now. Okra, beans, peppers, squash and cucumbers all feel it.
- Bugs with an appetite. Silverleaf whitefly, southern armyworm, melonworm, pickleworm, tomato pinworm and melon thrips are all working overtime.
- Regular tomatoes. They will not set fruit when nights stay above 70. That's physics, not your thumb. Everglades and cherry are the two that keep going.
- Cool season anything in August. No broccoli, no cabbage, no lettuce. Wait for September and October.
- Loquat and mulberry. Out of season, both of them. Loquat comes back February through May.
Dates on this page follow the UF/IFAS South Florida planting calendar and the tropical fruit harvest tables.