Getting a Jump Start on 2025
Taming the jungle — Day 1
There is so much to tackle before the 2025 gardening season, I didn’t want to wait until spring in order to start.
I live in the panhandle of Florida in zone 8b. I used to be envious of people who lived somewhere warm and could garden year round. Gardening in this zone is harder than it was back in Nevada where I was in zone 6. Here, although the growing season is longer, the pest issues are ten times what they were back in Nevada as well as the jungle that grows with all the rainfall.
The picture above is what I refer to as my berry patch. When I first moved here I imagined a huge patch of nothing but berries. I spent over a hundred dollars on bare root berry bushes and planted raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries.
They grew fine the first year, and I was looking forward to the following year where I could harvest a bunch and make a ton of jam. The next year came along with a heavy dose of disappointment.
This was when I realized our property has horrible soil. under the top few inches is nothing but sand followed by clay. Needless to say, the berry bushes struggled. Out of the ten raspberry bushes I’d bought, only two survived and the strawberry patch had been taken over by wild blackberry vines and fire ants.
