Sally Scalera
| For FLORIDA TODAY
For those of you who have visited the Brevard Discovery Garden (BDG) on Lake Drive in Cocoa, whether for plant fundraisers or to explore the garden, I have some news to share. And for those of you who have never heard of the BDG, I have exciting news to share with you, too: Over the past year, more additions have occurred throughout the garden.
This year, we received a grant from the Pollinator Partnership and were able to add a variety of new native host and nectar plants to our four pollinator areas, which are in two sections of the garden. The garden is always filled with butterflies, honeybees, native bees, and other pollinators. If photography is one of your hobbies (and even if it’s not your hobby), come check out the garden on a Wednesday or Friday morning between 9 and 11 am.
We have added two food forests for those of you who are into permaculture or just love to eat! We are also in the process of creating a third food forest, with different trees, shrubs, and ground covers that produce food.
Another new addition to the garden is our Worm Resort! If you haven’t heard of vermicomposting, and even if you have, come check out the resort. Master Gardeners tend to the worms, providing them with food and harvesting their worm castings, which are used throughout the garden to add organic matter, nutrients, and beneficial microbes to help our plants grow healthy and nutritious.
A great time to visit us will be during our Autumn in Bloom Festival, which will be held on Saturday, Oct. 11, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. In addition to garden tours, we will also have a plant sale of native, Florida-Friendly, vegetables, and herb plants. If you have any gardening questions, you can also visit our Mobile Plant Clinic that will be staffed by trained UF/IFAS Brevard County Master Gardeners. There will also be other plant vendors, plant-related products, and local plant societies joining us. If you have any dull gardening tools, feel free to bring them and take advantage of our $5 charge for each tool, with a maximum of two tools per person.
We will also have a Kids Zone for All Ages, so families can spend the day, have fun, learn new things, buy some plants, and have a fun day. Throughout the day, there will be a garden scavenger hunt, bingo game, coloring pages, plant your own sunflower, glam-up with fairy hair tinsel, plus the chance to play with an adoptable guinea pig from Little Friends Guinea Pig Rescue of Brevard!
Don’t worry about needing to bring your lunch, because we will have food trucks joining us, so you can stay all day. For all those photographers out there, we will also be having a photo contest, and the winner will be able to take a plant home.
Because we are part of the UF/IFAS Extension Brevard County, we are also all about education, so we have presentations and demonstrations set up in both the morning and afternoon, so nobody will miss out on learning about a topic they are interested in.
Two presentations that will be offered in the morning and afternoon: Sub-Irrigated Planters (SIP): A Hydroponic Approach to Health and Grow Your Own Food: A Path to Wellness. Three demonstrations will also be provided in the morning and afternoon: Growing Sprouts & Microgreens: Quick & Easy Nutrition; Vermicomposting: Turning Waste into Worm Gold; and Air Layering: Propagating Plants with Ease.
We will aprovide visitors with a map of the garden so they can see where the different areas are and plan where they want to stroll. The different areas of the garden include a large Pollinator garden on the west side of our garden near the Lattice house that contains nectar plants and butterfly host plants. In the center of the garden is a large Royal Poinciana tree that grows over the Shade garden. In the shade garden are a variety of caladium cultivars, Coontie, Zamia integrifolia, and two Peregrina, Jatropha integerrima, trees that produce red blooms in locations that receive full sun or full shade and are a great nectar source for butterflies.
To the south of the Royal Poinciana is our Tiny Dream Home, and to the right of that is the Worm Resort, so don’t miss that, especially if you have kids. Kids love worms! To the east of the Royal Poinciana tree is the Coastal garden with plants that can handle high soil pH and salty conditions. South of the Coastal garden and east of the Tiny Dream Home is one of our food forests, and the second one is to the southeast.
The next two sections, bordering the orchard, are two raised beds with vegetables and herbs growing, and near them is an ornamental area full of Florida native plants. In the orchard, which borders the east side of the garden, is a large variety of edible plants such as “Arbequina” olive trees, dragon fruit, grape vines, passionfruit, blueberry shrubs, mango, peach, starfruit, loquat, lychee, papaya, “Sugar Belle” citrus trees and more.
The last two sections of the garden, near the pond, are the Bromeliad garden, which borders the pond and connects to the Pollinator, Herb, and Rain/swale gardens near our pump house.
We also have a great opportunity for residents who are interested in purchasing plants from Flowering Well Tree Farm, which is a 22-acre farm located in Pierson, Florida. We have worked out a deal, so they are offering a 20% discount on trees and plants pre-ordered via their website for delivery at the Autumn in Bloom Festival. Their specialty is growing native trees and fruiting plants that thrive in Florida’s unique climate, and you can check out their selection here flowingwelltreefarm.com/. For instructions on pre-ordering plants for delivery to the festival, contact the UF/IFAS Extension Brevard Master Gardeners at Brevard-mg1@ifas.ufl.edu.
I hope that many of you will join us in the Brevard Discovery Garden on Oct. 11, to explore the garden, learn new information, and have fun with the kids, family, and/or friends! To keep up to date on everything happening in the garden, check our Brevard Discovery Garden at facebook.com/BrevardDiscoveryGarden/.
Sally Scalera is an urban horticulture agent and master gardener coordinator for the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agriculture Science.
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