At a recent regional garden club meeting, a gardener shared that her plants in a raised bed looked stunted and were not producing fruit. The plants were green. They were not dead. But the new leaves were twisted and cupped, the growing tips looked deformed, and nothing was setting fruit the way it should. She checked for pests and tried fertilizer but nothing worked. What she may not have checked is the manure she spread in the spring.

If you moved to Gulf County from somewhere with a real winter, September still feels like the end of the season. The calendar says fall. The big-box garden center is stocking Halloween mums. Your northern gardening brain is already thinking about putting the beds to rest. Out here, that instinct will cost you the best growing window of the entire year.