Winds and watercress

Laura Young
ECB Publishing, Inc.

Our Spring officially arrives in mid March, but by the first week we're already seeing a host of lovely blossoms waving about in the notorious March winds. Among the earliest to appear around our house are the daffodils. We planted several clumps of them in 1992, when we built our home, and they've been popping up every year since, cheering us on through the last days of Winter, with their bright yellow centers and softer yellow petals.
While yellow is the most common color, you also can find daffodils in white, oranges, pinks, reds and a range of two-tone combinations. Apparently there are around 100 different varieties of daffodils that will perennialize in North Florida, so take your pick. Stores have bulbs now, although the best time to plant them for a Spring bloom was back in the Fall. If you're just getting started, you might want to get a pot that is already blooming.
The Florida Daffodil Society has lots of good information online if you want to get serious about their care, but honestly we've found daffodils to be care-free, blooming beautifully with no maintenance other than mowing the field they're in once a year.
Another perennial bulb we enjoy is the native blue flag iris. This beauty will show up later this month in our little water garden by the back porch and in the pond aways off, where we put in some bulbs after the first batch multiplied. There are many, many flowering shrubs and low-care perennial blooms that do well in our area. With a little research (or just talking to a nursery worker), you can find some lovely choices that will bring you pleasant surprises every season.

What to Plant in March: Oh boy, it's time to break away from all those winter greens and get the fruiting veggies going. Be on the lookout for transplants of eggplant, peppers, tomatillo and tomatoes. According to the UF/IFAS charts, it's now or never for getting in spring eggplant and peppers; otherwise, wait until late summer for a fall harvest. If, like me, you can't stop yourself from putting in greens at every opportunity, you also can still put in transplants of arugula, Swiss chard and spinach. Other winter holdovers you can still plant this month, but not the next, include radishes, carrots, green onions and green peas.
You can get an early start in March on sweet potatoes and boniato (a form of sweet potato), which can be planted now through June-ish. There are lots of new choices this month for seeds that can also go right into the dirt. Get going on all types of beans, cantaloupes, corn, okra, peanuts, field peas, squashes and watermelon. Yes, the March section of the seed box is bursting!
As I plant, I'm amending the soil with composted cow manure and buckets of decomposed wood. The latter is something new for me, a discovery that came during hurricane cleanup. We have lots of very old pecan trees, and every year a few go down. We've been cutting up the firewood-sized limbs and just leaving the main trunk to break down in place. Over the past year, as we've dealt with the unusually high number of the pecan trees that toppled in storms, I noticed that some that had fallen many years ago had basically crumbled into rich, light soil. It's been easy to fill up a few buckets with this earthy treasure when I'm getting ready to plant something in the garden.
In addition to boosting the garden soil, this process has been boosting my spirits. Now instead of seeing only destroyed trees, I see how they are benefitting the earth beneath them, and offering a little bit of themselves for my garden as well. Online sources confirm the value of rotted wood in the garden, so even if you don't have dozens of decomposing trees across your landscape, you can place some logs here and there among the plants in the garden – decorative to start with and enriching as time goes by.

What's Coming Along: Spinach seeds are sprouting, and potato leaves are emerging. Recent successions of lettuce are approaching edible size even as the earlier plantings appear ready to bolt. The fig tree is leafing out, the limequat is blooming (aaahh) and volunteer marigolds are popping up everywhere. I've interplanted nitrogen-loving cucumbers with nitrogen-fixing snow peas all along the longest garden fence, and so far so good. The garden is a hopeful place to be!

What We're Eatin' in March: Watercress! In addition to enjoying spinach, collards, mustard greens, chard, kale and lettuces, the watercress has joined the greens parade from garden to table. Watercress made a splash in the press not too long ago as the “most nutrient-dense vegetable” out there. Of course, I had to give the peppery little powerhouse a try. When the seeds I ordered came in, I got started right away to figure out how to give the perennial a boggy situation like it prefers in the wild. I used a low, wide plastic container that holds water and filled it with rich soil. The minuscule seeds sprouted easily, and the plants have grown quickly.
Watercress has lots of vitamin K, a nutrient your liver must have in order to produce blood-clotting proteins. Vitamin K also prevents osteoporosis, regulates blood sugar, circulates calcium around the body and protects the immune system. As if that weren't enough, watercress also gives your body a good dose of vitamins C and A. Plus, like other cruciferous veggies, it benefits heart health in many ways, and the list goes on.
I have not made any classic watercress sandwiches yet, just dropped it into the salad, but recipes abound for working this superfood into mealtime. Watercress can be sautéed, dropped into soups, made into sauce, tossed with pasta, added to risotto, creamed into dip, folded into omelets and whizzed into smoothies. I'm looking forward to trying them all!

What's Tempting Me: For all my love of growing veggies, I'm feeling the urge to do a bit more with flowers. After revisiting the information about daffodils, they are calling my name. As Shakespeare pointed out, these flowers” take the winds of March with beauty.” I'd like to participate in that.