Florida in is the middle of its worst drought in recorded history. Our water supply is very low and dropping. Parts of Lake Okeechobee are drying up and its not getting any better.
Where I live in South Florida there has been a drought for 18 months. We started with a stage 1 water restrictions a couple weeks ago. This restricted home landscape watering to 3 days a week from 4am to 8am and hand watering from 5pm to 7pm on the same days. This week we have gone into stage 2. Now I can water two days a week with the same hours. My parents who live in another county south of here are in stage 3 with one day a week watering.
Since I work from home now, I am able to keep up with this schedule of automatic and hand watering. As I have shown in a previous blog posting, I have soaker hoses installed in all my gardening areas and select other locations on the property. These run automatically with a timer on the specified days.
So far there has been enough water for our landscape and gardens. We have had a weekly rain shower for the past couple of weeks, but so far none this week. Even if it rains here, we are still in a drought situation and it will take a lot more rain to get us out of it.
This time of year here our gardens start to experience insect and disease pressure. On top of having to regulate the watering, its starting to get busy around here.This week I have started to see insect damage on the leaves of the pole beans and the new tomato plants. In these photos and below you can see the holes starting to appear on these plants. I have found a black flying insect on the beans which I haven't identified yet and have killed multiple large grasshoppers that we had last year also.
Also, looks like I have found aphid damage on one of our hibiscus plants. Other problems I am dealing with is fusarium wilt and some fruit cracking on the tomatoes. These last two are not really serious in our garden.
On the other hand the tomatoes, pole beans, peppers, squash and cantaloupe are growing well. In the photo below you can see the cantaloupe plant starting to flower.
