Highlands Today
Backyards Blossom Into Vegetable, Fruit Stands
Doug Carman/Highlands Today
Gingerlee Mitchelllindo said she has one or two fruits ready to pick from her garden near Sebring Middle School every month of the year. She had ripe tomatoes and Japanese plums Tuesday.
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Published: March 4, 2008
SEBRING — Melvin Picking knew he was in the middle of citrus and fishing country in Lorida, but he wanted to try growing other stuff.
In his small 20-by-9 foot plot, the Pennsylvanian produces more broccoli, peas and cauliflower than he and his wife can eat. So he lets his garden do his "fishing" for him.
"I trade my vegetables for fish and that works real well," Picking said.
Vegetable and fruit gardens create an edible hobby for several in Highlands County, but it's also an economic alternative for some, according to John Alleyne, the director of the University of Florida's Agricultural Extension Office in Sebring.
Alleyne points to the shrinking acreage and recent diseases attacking citrus crops in the area. Among other fruits, muscadine grapes are already grown commercially and he thinks it could expand as a commercial crop. He also suggested blueberries.
"They are willing to try them to see how they're doing in these areas," he said.
That's how Rod Kelly of Sebring approached it. He took a dozen tomato and green pepper plants from his summer home in western New York and tried growing them here during the winter.
Because it's warmer here, he can harvest the fruits during the winter and pick the ones he planted up north by the summer. But down here, it's a challenge.
"For one, you never know when you're going to get a frost," Kelly said. The sandy soil wasn't ideal, either.
"Once they ripen and turn red, the mockingbirds start to bother them."
It doesn't bother him. The food is second to the work for him.
"Actually, I just do it for my own satisfaction ... it's a hobby that I can get something to eat from," Kelly said.
Gingerlee Mitchelllindo's satisfaction has a monetary value.
She took an empty lot 26 years ago near Sebring Middle School and filled it with dozens of different flowers, vegetables and fruit trees. She grows her own tomatoes, sugar cane, papaya fruit, spearmints and rose buds. She sells many of the fruits to some of the downtown stands.
Mitchelllindo also boasts of her Japanese plums, which resemble pink berries yet have the same tangy sweetness of the bigger variety at the grocery store. Every five years, she even taps maple syrup out of her own tree.
It looks more like a mini-jungle than a garden, but she said there was an order to the chaos.
"You have to choose plants that grow with other plants," Mitchelllindo said.
South of Lake Placid, a church began planting a garden Sunday mostly for the health of it.
Luz Maldonado, pastor of the Good Shepherd Hispanic United Methodist Church, had several volunteers from Home Depot and the church build 24 beds for broccoli, tomatoes, lettuce, peppers, cauliflower and other veggies. She also proposed a small worship area in the middle of the garden.
"The Bible tells us that our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit," Maldonado said Saturday, so the garden would encourage others to be healthy "in our full life, not just in our mind and spiritual life."
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