Hi! My name is Carol and I’m a plant-obsessed millennial in Central Florida, USDA Zone 9B. I’ve grown food off and on my whole life. I grew up in Michigan with parents who fancied themselves hobby farmers. I spent many a summer vacation picking vegetables and weeding with my two sisters and let me tell you…I HATED IT. I did learn a lot, though, even if I didn’t care at the time.
As an adult, I moved to Florida and founded a small hot sauce start-up with my husband. We specialized in the REALLY hot stuff – I’m talking Carolina reapers, bhut jolokias, and moruga scorpions. When we were scaling up, it was hard to source these exotic peppers so we thought screw it, let’s grow our own. So we did. We ended up growing about 250 of the hottest pepper plants in the world in our urban front yard.
While the hot sauce company may no longer exist, this project snowballed into what is now an organic food forest filled with all sorts of fruits and veggies. Who would have thought the kid who hated gardening would grow up to be the neighborhood crazy plant lady?
To date, I have 11 raised beds with custom irrigation, a carport nursery, a small grove of tropical fruit trees, a slew of exotic succulents, two vertical planters, and two dozen containers of super hot peppers. Thank god I don’t live in an HOA.
The path to successful gardening is paved with dead plants. My mission is to help you learn from my mistakes so I can save you the heartache of accidentally murdering your babies.
This gardening site is focused on Florida gardening but most of the information can be applied to other subtropical regions, too. It takes a little know-how to grow food in hot, humid weather but once you figure it out, you’ll be your neighborhood’s crazy plant person, too.
So, let’s dig in.
