What to plant, when to plant it, and what will try to eat it, for the three Florida growing regions. There is also a dedicated pepper guide.
Never mix homemade sprays. Hydrogen peroxide with vinegar makes peracetic acid; bleach with ammonia makes chloramine gas; bleach with vinegar makes chlorine gas. Every one of these has put gardeners in emergency rooms. Mix nothing but water into anything.
"Natural" does not mean "safe for bees." Spinosad and neem both kill bees on direct contact while wet, and pyrethrin, a plant extract, is one of the more bee-toxic things you can buy. Spray at dusk, after foragers have quit, and let it dry overnight.
The label is the law, including on organic products. Follow the stated dilution, the crops listed, and the pre-harvest interval. Stronger is not better and will burn your plants.
Identify before you treat. Most garden spraying is aimed at the wrong target. UF/IFAS runs plant diagnostic clinics through county Extension offices, and a photo to a Master Gardener costs nothing.
This is the part people get wrong. Any edible produce touched by floodwater should be thrown away: not washed, not peeled, not cooked. Floodwater carries sewage, agricultural runoff, and industrial chemicals, and no home washing step makes contaminated produce safe again.
That includes leafy greens, soft fruit, and anything with a rough or porous surface. Root crops grown in soil that was submerged are also unsafe, since contamination soaks into the ground around them. Produce well above the waterline on an undamaged plant is generally fine.
For the soil itself, the standard guidance is to wait before replanting a flooded bed, commonly thirty to sixty days, so that sunlight, drying, and soil biology reduce the pathogen load. Turning the soil and letting it dry in the sun speeds this along.
The most common mistake in a Florida cool season is sowing a whole packet of lettuce on one day and then facing forty heads at once in January. These crops mature fast enough that a short row every few weeks gives a steady harvest across the entire window instead of a glut and then nothing.
The Conditions tab reads modelled soil temperature at seed depth for your location. Match it against this table before sowing, because most failed sowings in Florida are soil that was too hot rather than seed that was bad.
Tomato, pepper, and brassica seedlings for the fall garden have to be started in July and August, when full sun cooks a seed tray within an hour. Start them under 30 to 50 percent shade cloth or on the east side of the house where they get morning sun only, then move them gradually into full sun a week before transplanting.
Damping off kills more Florida seedlings than any pest. Stand trays in a shallow tray of water and let the mix wick up rather than watering overhead, use fresh sterile mix rather than garden soil, and run a small fan across the seedlings. Air movement alone prevents most of it.
Seed is the cheapest input in the garden and Florida summer germination is uneven. Sow two or three times the number of cells you intend to plant out, then keep the strongest. Thin with scissors rather than pulling, so you do not disturb the roots of the keeper.
A seedling moved straight from shade to a Florida bed will scorch in a day. Give it increasing sun over about seven days, transplant in the late afternoon rather than the morning, and water it in immediately. A shade cloth propped over new transplants for their first few days makes a visible difference.
These self-pollinate, so seed saved from them comes back true to type with little effort. Let a few pods or fruits go fully ripe, well past eating stage. Tomato seed needs a few days of fermentation in water to remove its gel coating before drying.
All cross-pollinate freely, so seed saved from a garden with more than one variety gives unpredictable results, and brassicas cross across what look like completely different vegetables. Kale, collards, broccoli, and cabbage are all the same species. Serious saving means isolation distance or hand-pollination and bagging.
Humidity, not heat, is what kills stored seed here. Dry seed thoroughly, then store it airtight with a desiccant packet, and keep it in the refrigerator rather than a garden shed or garage. Seed stored loose in a Florida outbuilding is often dead within a single season.
Seed from anything labelled F1 will not come back true, and the second generation is usually a disappointment. Save from open-pollinated and heirloom varieties instead, which is also how locally adapted strains like Datil pepper and Seminole pumpkin came to exist.
The plant database now carries a full pollinator and butterfly category: Florida natives, nectar sources, and larval host plants, each with its own planting window and warnings about the lookalikes sold in nurseries.
June through August is the hard season, not the growing season. Heat keeps tomatoes and peppers from setting fruit, afternoon storms drive fungal disease, and root-knot nematodes peak in warm sand. The productive months here are September through May. Empty summer beds are doing real work if you cover-crop them with sunn hemp or cowpea, or solarize them under clear plastic to knock the nematode population back.
Most Florida soil drains almost like a sieve and holds very little nutrient. Compost isn't optional. Work two to three inches into beds each season and expect to replace it, because organic matter burns off fast in this heat. Water shallow and often rather than deep and rarely, and feed lightly but repeatedly instead of one heavy dose that washes straight past the roots.
Some of it holds up and some is folklore repeated confidently for a century. What has reasonable evidence behind it:
What doesn't hold up: most of the specific plant-pairing charts. "Carrots love tomatoes," basil improving tomato flavor, and the long lists of friends and enemies trace to a single 1930s anthroposophic tradition rather than field trials. The one real antagonist worth respecting is black walnut, which isn't a Florida problem. Spacing, sunlight, and airflow will do more for your beds than any pairing chart.
Timings follow UF/IFAS Extension's vegetable pest and disease guidance, condensed into statewide bands. Insects don't read calendars: a warm wet autumn pushes armyworm and pickleworm pressure weeks later than shown, and South Florida runs longer at both ends while North Florida gets a genuine winter break. Treat peak markings as "start looking hard," not as a forecast.
Identification is the weak link in every home garden. Nearly all wasted spraying comes from treating the wrong target: most obviously leafminer, which is cosmetic and self-correcting, and broad mite, which goes unrecognised for months because the animal is invisible. Your county Extension office runs a free plant diagnostic service, and a photo to a Master Gardener beats guessing from a web page, including this one.
Four groups, roughly in the order you should reach for them: physical and cultural first, then biological, then the sprays that genuinely work, and last a group of popular remedies assessed honestly. That last group exists because "natural" and "effective" are separate questions and a lot of widely shared advice conflates them.
Some of it holds up. Cinnamon on seedling flats, milk on powdery mildew, and hydrogen peroxide as a seed and tool sanitiser all do what is claimed, within narrow limits. Some of it does not. Hydrogen peroxide is not a foliar fungicide and does not oxygenate soil. It decomposes within minutes. Epsom salt does not fix blossom end rot and mildly works against the calcium uptake that would. Dish detergent is not insecticidal soap and is the most common way gardeners burn their own foliage. Marigold borders do not control nematodes, though a full season of dense marigold cover can.
Two safety points are worth repeating away from the product cards. Never mix homemade sprays: hydrogen peroxide with vinegar makes peracetic acid, and bleach with either ammonia or vinegar makes toxic gas. And "organic" says nothing about bee safety. Spinosad, neem, insecticidal soap, and pyrethrin all kill bees on direct contact while wet. Spray at dusk, let it dry overnight, and keep everything off open flowers.
Windows follow UF/IFAS Extension's Florida Vegetable Gardening Guide and Florida Gardening Calendar, condensed to the three regions Extension uses: North Florida above roughly Ocala, Central through about Sebring, South below that. Treat every window's edges as approximate. A mile inland versus coastal, or a raised bed versus in-ground, moves them by weeks. Your county Extension office is the tiebreaker, and it's free.
Forecasts are pulled live from Open-Meteo, which is free and needs no key. Soil temperature is modelled at 6 cm depth, not measured in your yard, so treat it as a good indicator rather than gospel. A $10 soil thermometer beats it every time. The irrigation figure compares reference evapotranspiration against rainfall, which estimates demand for a well-watered reference crop; your actual beds vary with mulch, shade, and container size.
There is no public Florida pollinator map API. Xerces Society's Bumble Bee Atlas and the USGS native bee inventory publish datasets for download, not live endpoints. What this page queries instead is iNaturalist, which does have a free open API: the "recorded near you" list is real research-grade observations of bees, butterflies, moths, and hoverflies within about 40 km of your location, filtered to the current month. It reflects where people are looking as much as where insects are, so a species missing from the list may just mean nobody nearby has photographed one.
Submitting observations to iNaturalist requires an authenticated account, which a single static page can't do, so your sightings stay in this browser tab. Export them as CSV before you close it, and use the upload link for anything you want to contribute to the public record.
There is no account and no server, so nothing is stored. Your location lives in the page address. Bookmark it after you set your town and it will come back next time. Your sighting log does not survive a refresh; that's the honest limit of a single file with no backend.