I’m good with livestock. I’ve found I excel with poultry. I’ve inherited my father’s abilities in breeding horses. Irish Wolfhounds drip off the trees here. But I have a black thumb where gardening is involved………..a really necrotic thumb. Why?! I’ve asked. Why?! No answers have drifted down from the gardening gods in the sky.

I’ve tried regular gardens……..nope. I’ve tried raised beds with special soils………nope. I’ve tried container gardens (old leaky 75 gallon livestock troughs that I thought would be great)…….nope. I even purchased some of those pretty, cut-oak barrels for quaint container planting……….nope. I know that this part of Florida has poor soil, mostly sugar-sand based. But we’ve got such a potpourri of manure here. Manure everywhere. At one point we even had llamas producing llama manure for us (which I’ve heard was pretty good poo). We have fresh manure, we have aged manure, after twenty+ years we have petrified manure. We have feces everywhere. So I would have thought that with over twenty years of pooping that our soil would have improved some. Apparently not.

I did get one tomato plant once that bore fruit. And I do mean fruit, not fruits. There was one ugly tomato on the vine. It was still green. We were all waiting and watching. It never made it beyond the ugly green stage. I was walking a yearling past it (Deco) and he pulled at the lead enough to reach the tomato with his lip and knocked it right off its stem……….and that was that; the only vegetable that we have ever had here. But I am super stubborn. I will keep at it. It seems silly to have the available area and not planting things to eat.

We are having a new septic put in shortly (oooh, that would be a good post!) and down here where the water table is eye to eye with a standing adult, you have to have raised mounds for a septic system to work properly with the necessary “lift station”. Go on, guess what it’s “lifting”, I dare you! Go on. Anyway my Dad had luck years ago growing pumpkins on his septic mound…….I thought I might try too. It reminded me of an Erma Bombeck title that went something like—“The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank”. Maybe it will work. I won’t plant vegetables that we plan on eating there though I don’t think that would be prudent. Maybe just pumpkins for Halloween or gourds and flowers.

Another area of farming that I’m lousy at is the Apiary Sciences. Sounds good doesn’t it. Sounds like I know what I’m talking about doesn’t it? Well apparently I don’t there either. Vegetable and bees. No luck whatsoever……….zilch…………..but I’m not giving up…………NEVER! It does have it’s draw backs, but being stubborn has had its merits for me over the years. My husband Paul can list a number of its downfalls and pitfalls where I am concerned, but it has usually served me well. I might keep it. Oh wait! My “one tomato post” is not true. I just remembered.

Just last week my daughter told me there was a tomato plant in the woods by the garage with tomatoes on it. That’s where I throw spoiled vegetable from the kitchen that never made it into a salad. I figure the passing wildlife might like to eat it. Well apparently a rotten tomato decided it would grow in the acidic oak leaves, in the shade without any watering or my nurturing, or care, or attention, or tears, or wailing, or pleading………….am I sensing a trend here? I did go out to look at it and couldn’t find it. My daughter said it was there. I’m sure it lifted itself up by the roots and hugged its tomatoes tightly as it ran screaming into the swamp when it heard I was looking for it………enough said.