Watch My Food Grow ~ A South Florida Raised Vegetable Garden

Florida Backyard Raised Vegetable Garden

You Have a Very Lovely Squid

April 1st, 2009 by Matthew Steinhoff
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My good buddy Anika dissected a squid at Jupiter Middle School yesterday. She was quite proud of her squid evisceration skills and posted a photo of her squid.

dissected squid: lovely

You Have a Very Lovely Squid

So, upon seeing her squid, I commented that “you have a very lovely squid”. After posting that comment, I was struck by how odd that sounded. I mean, really, how often is squid described as ‘lovely’, let along ‘very lovely’? So, I hit the googles to see if anyone else had made such a declaration about the nature of squids and their loveliness. Google was bare.

Google Search: "You have a very lovely squid." - Matthew Steinhoff

Google Search: “You have a very lovely squid.” by Matthew Steinhoff

Matthew Steinhoff: Inventor of Squid Phrase

I had invented a phrase, ‘you have a very lovely squid’, that had not yet been uttered by humanity and indexed by Google. Subsequent searches using Bing, Yahoo and Altavista also came up empty. Thus, this phrase is mine. Throughout all the land, let it be known that Matthew Steinhoff first said “you have a very lovely squid”.

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Mulberry Bush in Florida Soil Growing Like Crazy

March 26th, 2009 by Matthew Steinhoff
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Mulberry Bush / Tree in Corner of Yard with BerriesA friend of the family gave us some mulberry plants a year or so ago. They were less than 18 inches tall and haphazardly tossed in pots. We planted them along the fence and figured they would die soon enough.

Mulberry Bushes Turning into Mulberry Trees

The mulberries are now 20 feet tall and their bases are more than three inches in diameter. Best of all, they are covered in mulberries…

Fruit of the Mulberry Tree - Mulberries

Each time we go out in the backyard to check on the garden, we pick the black, ripe mulberries. This inevitably leads to a family with stained hands and full bellies. There are so many mulberries I keep thinking that we will try canning mulberries but they never make it to the kitchen without being consumed.

What Variety of Mulberry Do We Have?

I’m going to guess we have black mulberry trees. According to this web page about all things mulberry, the black mulberry only grows to about 30 feet tall. The red and white mulberry trees can grow to 80 feet tall. Given that ours are about full grown and just 20 feet tall, I think they are black mulberries.

The black mulberry, while smallest of the varieties, is the longest-lived. A black mulberry will produce fruit for hundreds of years while red mulberry rarely makes it 75 years.

Mulberry Wine?

Hmm… A few web sites recommend brewing mulberry wine. I hate wine but it might be fun to try making wine from my very own muberries. Anyone tried that?

—Farmer Matt

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Broccoli in My Garden That Actually Looks Like Broccoli

March 23rd, 2009 by Matthew Steinhoff
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My broccoli plants are huge but didn't look like broccoli.For more than a month, the most visibly growing vegetables in my backyard garden were the broccoli plants. They grew and grew. Almost too big. They are now casting a shadow over my red leaf lettuce. However, as big as they got, I never saw anything that actually looked like the broccoli that I was used to seeing on my dinner plate.

Grow Your Own Broccoli — It’s Really Broccoli

Then, last week, we got a lot of rain; eight inches in two or three days. Imagine my surprise and thrill when I saw what I could clearly identify as broccoli!
Why, yes, that is broccoli growing in my backyard raised vegetable garden.Go ahead. Click the picture. Check out the size of my broccoli. It’s not huge yet but at least it looks like actual broccoli.

I wonder how much broccoli I’ll actually get from the garden and how much the plant will produce? Any ideas? Let me know how many people I need to invite to my all-broccoli dinner party.

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