Hi James

You are in the same zone like me, 9b, that is the reason I decided to reply.
I am no expert, but I learned few things along the way of my gardening experience.
The most important one is, that you can not change the size of your property, you have to work with what you have.
Some people do more with less and others less with more.
It all depends how successful you are with your crops and how you plan and choose.

I start my tomato and pepper seedlings on my porch. They get some morning sun, when the weather get cooler, I will put them out in the sun and then I will mulch.

Good luck with your plantings!

Silvia

Hi James
Silvia has given you good advice. I will add my 2 cents.

When to do second plantings: the main thing is to avoid ALL your veggies getting hit by a freeze but if you wait till after freeze season you will be very late starting for spring.

2 choices-buy young plants after the freeze date that someone else has started to keep your garden producing

OR start your own seeds in late December-early January in pots so you can bring them indoors on the coldest nights. Then plant them out after freeze chance is over (mid February?).

A farmers job of figuring out when to plant is tricky. I always start more seeds than I need because you just never know what will die, freeze, get eaten, etc.

Good luck.

Denise

Also --- very important....

Things will go wrong no matter what you do and how well you baby your plants. Bugs, wilt, critters, not enough rain, too much rain...

Learn to make salsa out of ugly tomatoes!

My .02 cents. ;-)

Hi James, get ready for the agony and the ecstasy ;-)

When to do second plantings: the main thing is to avoid ALL your veggies getting hit by a freeze but if you wait till after freeze season you will be very late starting for spring.

The same rings true for starting the fall season in early September. It may be too hot, too rainy and too buggy early depending on the weather, AND it is the most active hurricane month traditionally so your babies may get either drowned or blow away, so I usually plan a set and sow date of September 15th, then shift the date out a week or two if we have lots of storms coming off of Africa or it's just too hot....

Tom

BTW, you don't need acres, if you've seen pictures of my backyard garden I'm working with 275SF expanded to the equivalent of approximately 425SF by going vertical.

Tom

Whoa, I am certainly not an expert. This will be my 2nd season and last year I missed the fall season. It is my opinion that tomatoes like to be reset at least once to get a better root system. If you plant in the ground, guess you could mound dirt up around the stalk.

I had good sucess starting in a 3-4 oz soil mix, transplanting to a 9 inch clay SWC and then finally ending up in a 5 gal SWC. Each time they get tranplanted they get buried well up the stalk. Seems to be a question whether better to keep the leaves that are below ground level or pull them off. I tried both and do not remember any drastic differences.

This year I have ordered the burpee starter pods and put them in 3 oz solo cups per Tom.

good luck ,
bernie

Thanks for all the replies. Tom, I tried to search for your posts, so I could see some of your pictures but I couldn't figure out how to do it. Any (step-by-step) suggestions on how I can search for your posts?

Just trying to clarify one of my original questions. If I plant seeds in the ground, should I wait until the seeds have sprouted before mulching, or mulch on top of the seeds? I guess I am confused about whether or not the seeds will sprout through the mulch, or if it would impede them in some way. It seems to me that mulching on top of the seeds would be beneficial in helping them sprout, since the soil would remain moist.

I'm not sure about that one. I start all my tomato and pepper seeds inside and transfer them outside after two weeks into 12oz. cups, then sow/set them and the cukes, squash, and pole bean seeds into uncovered soil for the first month as my experience has been that being in Zone 10 on the water the soil moisture where I live promotes fungal problems for me if the plants are not big enough that the roots soak up surrounding moisture until they get some size on them, then I mulch. The Orlando and Deland folks on the other hand don't deal as much with the heat and humidity problems I have and can mulch right away I think, look how well there gardens look right now...bottom line, it all depends on where you live and where in your yard your garden is located since each yard usually has several different microclimates; example - In the heat of early summer I can only get maters and sweet peppers to survive and produce under the shade of the oak tree on the east side of my garden since it faces south and is considerably cooler due to the shade.

To paraphrase the way Michael would say it, lots to consider, no?

Tom

Hi James,
I suggest that you start your tomatoes and peppers in small pots. Once they have a few true leaves move them to bigger pots and bury them up to the first leaf. Every one does this for tomatoes but the UF Iflas says you can do this with peppers also. I am about to try this with the pepper seedlings I have started for the fall. I have better luck with peppers in pots. Nematodes I think.

good luck