Prepping My Mothers Garden

My mother was growing crops in her small garden about two years ago, she had quite a few plants growing such as tomatoes, habanero peppers, green onions, beans, and also cilantro. As time went on, my mother was getting tired from working her day job and ultimately didn't have enough energy to continue maintaining the garden so she just left it alone to mother nature. Needless to say, mother nature wasn't too kind with how my mother set up the garden.

Almost all of the plants have produced what they could and died. Now, only a few blades of grass and weeds are left and a few bunches of green onions. All the mulch, the wilted leaves & branches, that you see is what I put in yesterday to bring life to the "dead soil".

Moving back into my mother's house, I realized that the garden was pretty much dead so I decided to start growing some food crops, but primarily in pots. The ones in pots are the ones that I have been updating you all on in previous posts. Honestly, I've also been neglecting to take care of the main garden and instead focused my efforts on the garden in the front yard (which are not food crops) and the potted plants. A while ago, I decided to start planting a bunch of mini sweet pepper plants (which I've posted about before)...

There was a total of 14 mini sweet pepper plants that I planted with these bunches. 8/14 have successfully germinated. The date on the cups is the day that I planted the seed. The two cups with no plants growing (to the left) were given NEW seeds with newer dates.

Here we have 9 mini sweet pepper plants in one plastic food container, 7/9 have successfully germinated, I don't remember the exact day I planted the seeds.

These pepper seedlings will continue to grow so they can be the main food crop that will be used to reenergize the garden since these kinds of plants LOVE the sun. The garden is in an area that gets a LOT of sun with little to no shade, so my mother's decision to plant herbs there, like the Cilantro, without mulch was a pretty bad idea, especially, since nothing is covering them in the hot dry summers days in Florida.

This is what the garden area looks like now with the mulch. I still have to clear up the grasses and weeds that are growing here.

The peppers still have a few more weeks until they are ready to be planted so right now all I'm doing is prepping the garden to get it ready for transplanting the peppers to the ground. By the time the plants are nice and tall, I believe the soil will be ready for them with plenty of nutrients to get them going through the rest of summer. If they survive the summer transplant, then they will be fit enough for the rest of their lives.