Like many northern transplants to South Florida, Lila Steinhoff learned the hard way that gardening skills don't transfer. She moved to West Palm Beach from Missouri several decades ago.
"My grandmother always had a garden," says Steinhoff. "She grew everything: green beans, squash, okra, tomatoes, dill, carrots, radishes, rhubarb — even horseradish. And she canned it all."So just like back home, Steinhoff planted her garden in April.
"I was uninitiated in Florida soil and growing seasons," she says. "The seasons are backward here."She also didn't know about nematodes, Florida's most common ground parasite that can decimate a garden literally overnight. "Nematodes killed it all," she says, "and I just gave up."
It wasn't until two years ago when her son, Matt, had a successful backyard garden that Steinhoff decided to give it another try. He built her a raised bed, and armed with much more knowledge and established plants from nurseries and home improvement stores, her garden blossomed.
She first "cooked" the soil by covering the dirt with a black plastic sheet held down by bricks. No more nematodes. Then she worked in manure and peat. "Then I just water it like crazy and plant."In her third season, she's growing cherry tomatoes, Roma tomatoes, okra, rosemary and cilantro. Much of it goes into her vegetable-stocked shrimp gumbo.
Now that she's a converted Florida gardener, she even sees the pluses. Crops are long-lasting. "I just now finished cutting the okra from last year," she says. "It would have kept producing, but I had to go away and couldn't water it, so I just let it go and turned it under."