Fall 2024 Event Calendar
Want to grow your own vegetables but don’t know where to start?
We’ve got you covered! This class will equip attendees with a full toolkit of knowledge to grow thriving vegetable gardens year round. Florida can be a challenging place to grow a garden for beginners. We will share techniques and strategies to move towards nutritious abundance from the home garden.
This class will be primarily led by Josh Jamison, drawing on over a decade of full time growing in Florida. We hope to condense all the critical knowledge for succeeding in Florida vegetable gardening into a tight one day intensive. Florida is in a very unique situation compared to the rest of the continental US, being a subtropical peninsula with sandy soil. This makes many US based gardening guides irrelevant and vegetable seed offerings poorly adapted. We will go into great depth on systems for overcoming these unique challenges. With the right strategies, Florida gardens can be extremely abundant using entirely natural means. This class will involve lectures and also some hands on time in the gardens at Cody Cove Farm. The class will be focused on home gardening but will also have relevance to growers looking to make the jump towards small scale growing for profit.
Topics covered will include:
- The year in growing – Timing is critical for farming and gardening. We will walk through a calendar year and what garden tasks go on throughout each unique season and how prevailing climatic conditions inform decision making.
- Variety selection – It would be impossible to overstate the importance of variety selection in the hot and high pest/disease conditions in Florida. Fortunately, we have proven variety selections for all of the important vegetable crops. We will also take a look at some easy to grow vegetables for Florida gardens that are underexploited.
- Irrigation – Water is critical for a thriving garden. Many people find irrigation an overwhelming topic, and we want to demystify this critical topic. We will discuss and do hands on demonstrations with micro-sprinkler and drip irrigation systems appropriate for Florida gardens.
- Garden bed construction – In our ultra-sandy soils, we have had fantastic success building raised beds. We will share all of the specifics of our system with raised bed production but also discuss in-ground growing techniques.
- Soil fertility maintenance – This part of the class will cover strategic uses of compost, organic fertilizer and mulch in vegetable garden systems.
Sign up for “Vegetable Gardening in Florida” course now!
Invite the abundance of the tropics into your yard!
This class will give attendees an insight into the many edible and nutritious perennial crops that can be grown in Florida gardens. The focus of this class will be on highly diverse perennial plantings, often called “food forests”. These agroforestry-style plantings can yield delicious and nutritious food through the whole year with relatively low time and resource inputs compared to other types of gardening.
This class will be primarily led by Josh Jamison, drawing on over a decade of full time growing in Florida. Perennial crops live for at least a few years, in contrast to typical garden vegetables which live for one season. We will look at the top performing perennial fruits and vegetable plants for Florida conditions. Although they live on a more annual cycle, we will also cover the tropical starchy root crops of the world and their role in Florida gardens. This course will give attendees the tools to build a highly diverse home garden that yields all kinds of nutritious produce throughout the entire year. Combining the proper crop choices with good design and management principles can produce incredibly high yielding garden systems. The course will include lectures but also walking tours and discussions on the farm. Cody Cove Farm hosts large diversified plantings with hundreds of types of edible crops that you can see and taste for yourself. Meals at the event will be largely based on crops grown at the farm that are covered during this course.
Topics covered will include:
- Crop profiles
- Understanding the Florida climate
- Design
- Irrigation
- Propagation
- Fertility management