Hi Y'all! I think this is a fascinating thread. I lurk on this thread occasionally but don't post often.....spending most of my time on the Oklahoma Gardening forum. I do so enjoy reading all the different opinions, ideas and experiences everyone shares with one another. I learn something new about gardening every day and hope I never stop learning. Hi George! I haven't seen you on the Okla. forum lately, but know you are here on this forum a lot. I am glad to see you didn't float away in this summer's floods. :) I always learn so very much from YOUR posts, and I am immensely flattered to think that you might learn something from mine. Oldroser, I agree that some plants that are very well-adapted in the north do not grow well here in the south and vice versa. My DH grew up in Pennsylvania and I try (mostly unsuccessfully) to grow rhubarb here for him. I also have tried many heirloom tomatoes that grow great in the northern and northeastern states and they are never as productive here nor do they produce really large tomatoes here. Raccoons plague us here too. Last summer a friend of ours decided to trap and relocate the coons that were getting his corn. Three weeks after he first set out the live trap, he had trapped 16 raccoons! They got every bit of his corn too. PNBrown, I love CR zuke! It is one of the few spring-planted veggies that is still growing and producing like mad. It is probably one of the toughest plants I've ever grown....the drought and bugs don't bother it here, and it will produce until frost wipes it out most years. Digit, What you say about the origin of seeds is so true! I think many of us don't know a great deal about where the seeds we use come from. I have been trialing watermelons and beans purchased from Seeds of Italy this year....and it seems that many of the seeds I am trying were bred either in the Netherlands or Japan! I think the days of locally-owned firms selling locally-raised seeds are long gone. When I was a child, we purchased our seeds from two Texas-based firms: Porter & Sons, and Willhite Seed. Back then, I believe they actually did produce their own seed there in Texas. Willhite still exists, but I don't know if they raise their own seeds anymore. Some of the seeds being sold as Porter, Improved Porter or Dark Porter Cherry or whatever do not bear much resemblance to the Porter tomato we grew from seeds from the Porter & Son Seed Co. when I was a child, either. :( With your shorter growing season, I think it is amazing you can raise bell peppers at all! My favorite large pepper is Super Heavyweight, but it takes it FOREVER for the peppers to get gigantic and turn yellow. Mary, When I started gardening on my own in Texas when I was 23 or 24 , I thought I knew 'everything' about veggie gardening because I had literally grown up in my family's gardens. All I learned, and quickly, was that gardening is much harder than it looks and I did not, after all, know 'everything'! (Oh the unspeakable arrogance of youth!) Here I am 25 years later, and even though I feel like a fairly knowledgeable gardener in some ways, I now know that there is so much more I do not know and probably never will know. Still, I keep slogging along. As our climate changes, and as we have to deal with new and different challenges (including terminator seed technology, GMO crops and the ongoing consolidation of many small seed companies into huge conglomerates), I think we all must remain as adapatable as the plants we try to grow. If it were easy to produce yummy, fresh, healthy organic veggies in one's backyard garden, everyone would do it! And, clearly, everyone is not doing it. I wish you good luck in your gardening endeavors. Do not become too discouraged. Gardening in our climate is HARD. Don't let the difficulty of it rob you of all the joy it can bring! Dawn

Chandler is so sweet. The strawberry I loved best was called Douglas. It was popular along with Sequoia but Chandler replaced it in popularity. I never got a good crop from my seascapes. I had good luck defeating the bugs by making little fruit hangers out of bent pieces of wire to keep the fruit up in the air away from the bugs. The best thing to defeat bugs is self watering hanging baskets but then when the summer heats up, the roots can roast on the sunny side of the pots. You always get more fruit from a 1/2 barrel or the ground because the plants have more roots. I had less bug damage planting the in the barrel than the ground.

Now, I wanted to talk about temperature for the Strawberry Winter Trials. It is something I thought a lot about before deciding I had a chance. The question was basically, "How far north can we go and successfully have an expectation of reasonable production of strawberries in an outdoor hydroponic system?" But that became more complicated than just drawing USDA zone lines, and I settled for, Will it work on coastal NE FL? To answer that, first had to understand the needs of strawberry plants... Generally it is 50 F - 80 F, with cool nights being ok...but what happens if the res gets near freezing? Nope, no problem a heater wouldn't solve in the reservoir. The problem is keeping enough photosynthesis going. There is a commercial strawberry industry in Florida, which is centered on Plant City, southern zone 9b and even spilling into zone 10. I'm barely 9a and can ride a bicycle to zone 8b at my leisure. So - I thought better just compare what the commercial industry has with what's here: The result: They are several degrees warmer for their average mid winter temperatures, but if I look at their records, we have a lower variability, actually when looking at record lows, we haven't gotten as low. That's good. The only significant risk was actually the average highs from the end of December to the first week of February. They run about 8-10 degrees warmer, 62 vs. 72 F or so. Now I can see where they get that spurt of winter growth to beat out the California crop - an Ah Ha! moment, since California is generally milder, but at a higher latitude. It fits together. So the question will be whether my mid Dec to mid Jan temperatures is warm enough to keep it going, and maybe I'll just be delayed a month in sync with California (and Maybe I should have chosen the 'Chandler' variety). This is a good bet though - since their extreme temperatures fall reasonably within my weather. But Brunswick Georgia is about as far as I would be enthusiastic. Yes. I should have chosen 'Chandler'. However, 'Sweet Charlie' is a proud Gator (Univ. FL) may have some ability to resist Florida pests and humidity, unlike 'Chandler' which is a California variety, and possibly the most succulent. Here is the temperature profile comparing prime 'Chandler' country in Saticoy, CA vs. NE FL, with the same color scheme as the previous graph where Saticoy's data and colors replace Plant City, FL. You can see where that California mildness comes in, but my area is closer to Saticoy through the early Spring than it is to Plant City Florida. NE FL and Saticoy lows are similar and Saticoy is right between Plant City and NE FL, if not somewhat closer to NE FL regarding the average daily highs through the crucial January stretch for the Valentine's Day strawberry race. However, cloud behaving, NE FL gets more vital Sun than Saticoy, and NE FL has a better December to make Saticoy its (our) winter/early spring California counterpart and competitor if there could be one: By June, you can see our average highs go towards 90 F while Saticoy's stick around 80 F for the Summer. That's why they can have nearly year round production, and we can't as the pathogens go wild and the plants can't hold up well at those temperatures and humidity. In Florida strawberries are treated as annuals and planted around October 1 in general, and finish off around June. These are generally short-day varieties to insure genetics for enough Sun to support fruiting. Other types of strawberries require long day length. The whole reason the Florida industry is competitive is due to getting berries out one month earlier before Valentine’s Day, before California is fully online. Unfortunately for Florida, imported Mexican Strawberries from places like Michoacan are starting to spoil the tiny window of opportunity, thanks to stores like Walmart’s shrewd encouragement, Florida's 10,000 strawberry farmed acres fell for the first time last year after being a poster child of modern farming success and has a gloomy projection. Meanwhile, in the last 15 years, Michoacan has essentially gone from nothing exported to offer to increasing acreage to over 10,000 acres as Walmart and multinationals like Dole effectively make the future of Florida strawberries as a commercially viabile employment less and less possible. The benefits are cheaper strawberries optimized less for taste, but for long distance shipping and pretty much are tending to relegate Florida Strawberries to U-Pick and farmers' market operations plus home gardeners. Regulations and government subsidies are widely recognized as grossly unfair against US growers, compared with ever increasing strict US regulations. If only breeders would focus on hydroponic traits in selections, this clearly losing paradigm might be shifted back into the US's favor in some areas, as strawberries is a high value crop that has always been on the edge of possibly going hydroponic. Instead, The best shipping resistant US commercial cultivars principally developed by the Univ of FL (especially 'Strawberry Festival', named for the Plant City Strawberry Festival and commonly called 'Festival') an to a lesser extent Univ of CA (for example, 'Camarosa') and are both adapted well to Michoacan, Guanajuato and Baja California, led by contracts, paybacks and subsidies among governments, drug cartels (Michoacan's economy is dominated by the cartels and nothing can be done withiout approval) and the following multinational catalyst players: Driscoll's, Green Giant, and Dole Foods to follow the Walmart business model using the Sinaloa tomato model. Hopefully this explains why strawberries 'don't taste as good as they used to' and why hydroponics might become a more saving niche and local opportunity, if breeders only changed their mindset (they won't, since our state ag instuitutions receive a couple cents royalties to supply the farmers using conventional growing methods, including from Mexico - simply there are no champions of the hydroponic's cause and farmer's have little leverage when it comes to international trade and the politics of the ag departments of their local tax dollars built). Absent that, recalling the perfect temperature for growing strawberries is a high in the 70's (F) and a low in the upper 40's (F) to 50's (F), as Mexico catches on, I have no doubt that the Florida Strawberry industry and its 12,500 jobs will be out of business over the next 10 years, thanks in part to enterprising Mexicans that made liberal use of UF and UC professors earning "consulting fees" on the side with Mexican vacations helping transfer farm technology in a strawberry wonderland at perfect year round temperatures that slaughters US weather year round at all but the very best months. Part of the Mexican growing systems utilize hydroponic fertilizers for fertigation. I mention this only to show how enterprising farmers can utilize some hydroponic methods and breeding programs set up by state institutions and cannibalize the agricultural interests that established them in the fiorst place. Also, because an unstated goal of the trial was to learn enough to see whether I could start a profitable business growing strawberries. That was a no-brainer - the answer is it isn't worth doing except for a U-Pick farm to sell local high end, high risk crops. BTW, average rainfall in Michoacan is less than 1" monthly (less loss to fungi and bacteria - preferred by strawberries) and solar exposure is always more in Mexico than in California and all the Florida growing months, and intensive picking labor is much cheaper and essentially unregulated. OK, back to the trial, but that was an important topic for my trial, now it will just be for a hobby and I'll leave the up and coming strawberry mongels to the Mexicans, They'll have double the Florida acreage in just the state of Michoacan alone in the next two years and likely continue exporting 98% of it, swamping completely Florida's winter crop which in recent years has been the exclusive provider of strawberries for US consumption representing 15% of American strawberries. I also checked the Solar energy maps from the Department of Energy. While the story on average was not great, the consolation was that some winters have been worse in historical data from Plant City vs. NE FL, I assume due to cloud cover, but at the threshold the 25% more energy they get is difficult to compete with. Final assessment. Yes. Get the earliest producer possible, and plant 2 weeks earlier. That's part of the reason I chose 'Sweet Charlie' which was patented based on three things: Super early heavy production, high brix, and the first strawberry developed for Florida that had Anthracnose (Colletotrichum acutatum) Fruit and Crown Rot resistance. I hope not to be posting examples of this fungus. which is even worse than it sounds! This post was edited by PupillaCharites on Sun, Nov 24, 13 at 12:45

No kids. But we both worked 2 jobs in the years immediately following the construction of our home in 1991. We have done virtually ALL the finish work in our home, and all the landscaping ourselves. How? We put together a list of what needed to be accomplished to get us on the road to "finished". And every day that we didn't work TWO jobs we came home and did something to chip away at the mountain of work that had to be done. I vividly recall coming home from my "straight" job, taking off the skirt, hose, and heels and priming sheetrock or sanding primed sheetrock. I primed woodwork before dinner and did more of it after dinner. We worked every "day off" and every "weekend". It was relentless and we're still picking away at the finer details. You have to have a LIST and you have to priortize the things that must be finished first. You have to figure out how to keep the kids amused/out of your hair. I know this is going to sound "mean" and I don't want it come across that way, but how the hell do you think people who crossed the prairies in covered wagons managed? you do WHAT YOU HAVE TO to get done that which you want to see done. It's not easy and it often requires great sacrifice. I remember the discussion about giving up our "second jobs"... we took in boarders to continue the capital needed to get things done at the rate we wanted to see them finished. And we kept room-mates until we retired our mortgage. I can tick off 3 friends, all single mothers, who have done the same thing; they've had long term boarders with kids and they've communally addressed childcare needs. They've been creative and made tough choices. "Modern pioneer women". You assess your situation. You list the things that have to be addressed. You set priorities. And you work your asses off, learning to satisfy yourselves with the smallest goals. You learn to "make do".