Right now is the time you want to start planting tomatoes, cucumbers, and so forth. They grow really well in the fall/winter, though you have to watch out for freezes. The summer will cook them and they won't grow well, though you can do two crops a year if you want, the summer crop is pretty lousy. The only thing the summer is good for are watermelon. They love water, actually need it. So get those going in spring, plant them in a low lying swampy sandy area, then when rainy season hits they'll be loving life. Only need maybe a little fertilizer once in a while. That's the only one that will do better in summer.
Those black spots on your blackberries is black rot. It is caused by a fungus that happens in high humidity and warm nights. Though the blackberry should be mostly immune to it and not any problem. If it keeps happening plant a different variety. We do have native blackberries here in Florida but you might get one with too many northern genetics that doesn't do well here. You have to try different varieties. Though none of them on the market today have any native Florida blackberry in them. There used to be some people grew but they are male and female and not self fertile so they went out of popularity unfortunately. There's two types of wild blackberry here- one is bitter and not very good and the other one tastes great. The bitter one usually grows in grassy fields, the great tasting one on forest floors, though not always.
That powder could be powdery mildew- again the high humidity and warm temperatures encourages it. Different plants have different levels of resistance to it.
Aphids- I try to spray areas without lady bugs on them. Let the lady bugs do their work. But in the summer you might want to get an insectidal soap without the neem oil because neem oil burns leaves in the summer.
You don't need to acidify soil in Florida. The secret is just add a lot of compost- Garden soil, potting soil, peat moss, mulch, whatever you can get. It will acidify the soil properly. Because the problem with sand is that it doesn't hold water or nutrients. It's not just PH, which normally isn't a big problem with sand anyway because its pretty close to neutral. You want some peat moss or something that will hold the nutrients. You can fertilize sand all day it just washes away. You can water a plant in sand and the water will just seep through the sand and its bone dry right after watering (or the water sits on top).
There's a handful of plants that like sand- cactus, pineapple mainly. There are a lot of plants that like a sand mixture- some amount of sand but not total sand you get in Florida. But in Florida it rains so much during the rainy season you need at least some sand for drainage so a mixture of sand and compost is ideal and will balance out the PH too.
And when you put all that peat moss or compost down, come back a year or two later and the dirt is pure sand again. The plant will absorb all the compost.
Topic: Newbie in Florida: how to balance the water and the sun? (Read 836 times)