Grow tomatoes, eggplant and peppers over the winter in Florida

Who says we cannot have our cake and eat it too? In Florida we can. With some adjustments, we can grow tomatoes, peppers and eggplant year round, except for the summer season. The only thing we should do is to protect the plants from the frosts. Barring elaborate covering or green house set ups, we can grow these vegetables in containers and bring them inside on frost nights. If you want to venture on to winter growing of these warm season vegetables, you should plant them in some nice containers now:

Here's some eggplant:

Cubanelle Peppers:

and some tomatoes ready to be transplanted.

One thing all these vegetables have in common, they like 65F to 85F degree weather, which can be easily achieved througout the winter in Florida, except for the North Florida. In Central and South Florida we can grow these vegetables in containers and just bring them inside on frost nights. Even in the event they don't fruit in the coolish weather, we can still have an earlier start on the harvest, by probably two to three months by just growing them in this manner.

Sweet potato harvest

Back in July I planted some sweet potato slips from a grocery store potatoes, and now, in October, it is time to harvest the crop. I was astounded by the size of the potatoes:

Just a few of them weighted at four pounds, but total of six pounds from two little twigs grown from a potato:

You can see on these pictures that potatoes are cracked and split, this is because we had so much rain lately. These potatoes are still very edible, but for the storage you need potatoes that are intact. This is why it is advised to grow sweet potatoes in hills, that is in soil piled up well above the ground to provide good drainage. I do not have the space in my garden to dedicate to storage sweet potatoes, but if this is your goal, you need to grow them either in raised beds or in hills.

Usually, it is expected to harvest two to five pounds of sweet potatoes from every slip, depending on the fertility of the soil and growing conditions. But hey, would you complain if you grew even one pound of potatoes per slip from a store bought potato? This is free food at it's best.

Warm season vegetables in October

After a two month lull in production we are starting to enjoy fruits of our labor in October. Warm season vegetables that were seeded in July and August are ready for the harvest and will continue fruiting till Thanksgiving. Cucumbers, squash, tomatoes and peppers are our main crop in this season.

Tomatoes started to fruit:

Peppers are blooming and will start to fruit soon:

Warm season vegetables are quite tricky to grow in the fall because we have to start them when it is excruciatingly hot, in July, but harvest time is limited by cooling weather and potential frost. But it is still worth it because we can enjoy second season of these wonderful fruits. You might want to extend the season by getting a green house and planting fewer plants so they can fit in there, if the green house is small.

What can we grow in October in Florida?

In October we can seed all cool season vegetables and herbs directly into the ground. The weather is cool enough for optimum development of these plants. My zone is 9A, but check your zone for refined planting dates. Even if we get frost in December, these vegetables are not badly damaged by it and survive frosts just fine. Here's an alphabetical list of these vegetables:

Beets	Bok Choy	Broccoli	Brussels sprouts
Cabbage	Chinese Cabbage	Carrots	Cauliflower
Celery	Collards	Kale	Kolrabi
Leeks	Lettuce	Mustard	Onions
Parsley	Peas	Radish	Spinach

Check proper spacing prior to seeding these vegetables.

Radish is a popular vegetable and can be seeded througout the season every two weeks or so to ensure continuous harvest. It grows very fast, you can have radishes a month after seeding.

Approximately at this stage radish needs to be thinned to about three inches between the plants. The thinned out seedlings can be used as greens in salads.

Lettuce is another popular vegetable and can be seeded continiously through March. Pictured below is Romaine lettuce, but you might try other types, such as Black Seeded Simpson and Mesclun Mix; both grow very well in Florida and are easy to grow.