Festival Park Community Garden

Sam Gordon
Jun 21
2 min read

Updated: Jun 28

We're almost done with the 1st of our 3 garden-stiffling-hot months. Today, I explored Festival Park Community Garden and I thought a blog post about what's thriving this time of year might help some of you folks out. A little tid-bit about Festial Park Community Garden, they are a community garden that rents out plots to locals interested. They claim to be the most visited community garden in Orlando (at least out of Orlando City sponsored gardens). Supporting this claim, FPCG has a waitlist if you're interested in joining the coalition. Anyway, back to the blog, let's start with vegetables.

Vegetables Tackling the Summer Heat

The collard greens seemed to be resisting great!
The watermelon was growing beautifully. It's important that it gets pollinated.
The parsley surprised me. Didn't know it could thrive in heat.
The green onions here were also a little surprising to me. I love having flavor around.
Sunflowers, well they like the sun.
There were also a good variety of (mostly hot) peppers looking well (sorry no picture).

Hot Pollinators

The scorpion tail plant was rocking and rolling. Oh my goodness, it had so many wasps on it! This is not the first time I've witnessed the scorpion tail seduce a plethra of wasps.
The mealycup sage had an impressive number of bees on it. See if you can spot any. ( I can see two in the picture.)
This photo has both marigolds and butterfly peas.
Here's 3 different colors of salvia. Salvia is a good pollinator but today it was put shame by by are top two contenders. (It's a slideshow.)
Purpletop vervain (Brazillian vervain) looked strong. Apparently attracts butterflies and bees as well (hort.extension.wisc.edu), though I didn't see any when I walked by the plant.
Black-eyed Susan along with its cousins, different colors of coneflowers (not pictured), were doing great. Also pollinators (en.eikipedia.org)
And Cosmos flowers were found hiding in the garden, doing their thing. I know they attract pollinators well and love the Central Florida summers.