It’s puzzling to see your comments about growing food here. Citrus, tomatoes, blue berries, strawberries and sweet potato love sandy soil which is present nearly everywhere in the state. I grow arugula, chard, beets, asparagus, collards, lettuce, onion, leek, sweet potato, yuca, longevity spinach, numerous types of peppers, egg plant, mustard greens, coffee, avocado, etc.
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also, raised garden beds work well and buckets for potatoes etc. potatoes can often be grown in a giant garbage bin w/holes in it and ya just turn it over and dump it when they’re ready to harvest.
finding a local ‘edible garden/farming’ group is probably a great thing to get involved in. there’s always tips and tricks for doing certain things.
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My parents moved to the Gulf coast of Florida in 2004, in a community east of 75 and on the south side of the Manatee River. My family and I have been going to this part of the world just about every year, at least once, since then. It really is full of wonder…incredible parks with great hikes and waterways, stunning and varied wildlife, the coast with beautiful beaches, outstanding crab-shacks and tiki-bars…so much about it is fantastic. But we have also seen it undergo staggering changes in that time. Farm and pasture giving way to concrete, strip malls, newer increasingly congested and homogenous housing developments, and giant apartment blocks. And infrastructure that hasn’t kept up. This change has been accelerating at a terrifying rate, and we have begun feeling alienated during our visits, as much of the character of the place gets swallowed up by rampant growth.
Then just in mid-August, my dad died from complications related to cancer and stroke. My mom has advancing dementia, and I have been spending a lot of time this year trying to help them both through these challenges of aging. Because of my mom’s care needs, my siblings and I have determined to move her close to me, up in the Pacific Northwest.
Up until a day or so before Ian hit, my mom’s neighborhood was tracking to be right in its path. It felt surreal and oddly in keeping with my parents’ decline in health this year that the home they loved so dearly should also somehow be swept away. Then Ian made a sharp turn southward, and instead completely devastated a different community. I feel terrible for the relief I feel in this, knowing that my mom being spared of this storm meant that someone else bore its brunt.
Florida just feels more and more like a tragedy to me. Big hugs to anyone more directly affected.
edit: @konputa wasn’t meaning to directly reply to your comment, pardon the non-sequitor 
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I’m glad to hear she was spared. It sounds like you’re already dealing with a lot.
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I’m sorry for your loss, Big hugs to you and yours and may you keep on keeping on!
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don’t get me started on this, a whole different topic I could go on about for hours.
It’s another reason I am fasting after breakfast for as long as I can. I go pickup bulk organic foods once a month, otherwise it’s a 30 minute drive to the grocery store and like 2 hours out of my day if I need anything simple. Ridiculous. Urban sprawl. Car-centered infrastructure. What happened to the humans Earth created? Now secondary to technology man has created. I honestly believe that the personal vehicle is the bane of this world compared to the marginal positives it brings, mostly travel based. If people used the personal vehicle for travel only that would solve a vast majority of problems, related to food security and job security as well as pollution.
Vehicle use and infrastructure should be a privilege, not the absolute default.
And I fucking love trains. Why don’t people like trains anymore? If I could walk, bike, and train everywhere I absolutely would.
And where are the “strong” early towns of colonial America? Ones centered around agriculture, animal rearing, and access to water? Oh right, Henry Ford got rid of them to sell more vehicles and enslave us to our Saudi masters.
I have been struggling to start a zero waste home bakery because I can’t face the fact that everyone I sell to has to drive a multi-ton scrap of metal to buy some simple bread from me. Do I ship it locally and utilize the network of the post office, which has to run anyway? There’s nowhere people walk around here so I have absolutely zero options but move.
I guess in this society my main option is move to the country and commute to a place with heavy foot traffic to do business. If shit collapses I’d rather have a food forest than a job with now worthless dread presidents.
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Extremely off topic but still related to hurricane based food security…
I have ~ 200 things growing on VERY small space. Most tiny and minuscule meant for occasional herbal use, but does it really matter if I have them going when main large producing fruits and trees take upwards of 5-6 years to establish?
I am talking about SHTF food. What would you do if you can’t go to the grocery store tomorrow? Nothing in Florida, you’re fucked if you didn’t prepare. Our staple caloric crops are root vegetables that take ~10 months at least. What are you planning? To cull scurvy while slowly dying consuming oranges all day? I just picked up 5 cassava plants, she said it took 12 months and got 10lbs per plant, yes, wonderful… in 12 months!
We can’t start growing crops here and have continuous edibles after 30-40 days like moderate temps and northern soils. Indians would migrate when huge storms came, with vast knowledge of foraging. All these people moving down here and destroying the land is fucking it all up even worse. Every time I go out something else has been cut down.
My main point for “what grows here” is that I don’t know about you but 90% of the “standard” things I plant here get destroyed by green cabbage looper worms. Organically, you can use BT, but I raise monarch butterflies and that is a broad spectrum caterpillar killer. Bad news for the state butterfly, one of my favorite things in all of nature’s palate. So I refuse. I do my best to use permaculture methods but the normies love to spray their lawns with RoundUp all day and create super bugs. These worms render said 90% of vegetables useless. Aphids I can deal with.
If you have some secret knowledge here I’d love to have it, because they eat every leaf that exists and anole lizards don’t find them until it’s too late. I use castile soap, occasionally neem oil, and cayenne pepper.
Besides the 100 medicinal/culinary herbs I have, I’ve got: 4 Ethiopian coffee trees (one very tiny, three small-medium), Barbados cherry, papaya tree, key lime tree, orange tree, hog plum tree, dragon fruit, tamarind tree, Jerusalem artichokes, dwarf plantain, standard plantain, two banana trees, black sapote tree, guava tree, moringa tree, two blackberry bushes, two Jamaican ackee trees, moringa tea tree…
About to buy: nutmeg seeds, muscadine grape vine, peppercorn vine, kava kava, allspice seeds, plus a number of very unsual plants for my zone: Red Aztec spinach, goldenberry , Hyacinth beans, tomato tree… The former will take probably 6 years to produce.
Annuals in the ground : sugarcane (probably 300 days), okra, Jing red okra, name yam, sweet potato, purple Japanese potato, Seminole pumpkin (first try), Everglades tomatoes (first try), cucamelon (first try), West Indies burr gherkin (first try), a prolific sesame plant over 6 feet tall that’s about to go, about 10 types of peppers (in pots, almost died, struggling on), and about 5 different types of tobacco.
Guess what I’ve gotten from all of the above? Besides 3 Barbados cherries last summer, absolutely NOTHING. This stuff takes time down here, it’s sandy, dry, and humid. But again, I am always open to things and learning, so I am hoping that with these new and more unusual yet suited crops I will have something to show for all my work.
I had raised beds and tore them all down. A positive of raised beds for northern producers is that they drain faster; the exact opposite of what I want down here.
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