10 Tropical Vegetables That Grow Great in a Florida (Easy Garden Swaps)

Don't waste your time fighting for every little success in your garden when you can simply plant crops that grow well in Florida. These 10 tropical vegetables to grow will far outshine their traditional counterparts for more production with less effort. Every gardeners dream!

__________________________________ 🌱 Buy Vegetable Seeds 🌱___________________________
Shop my curated collection of organic heirloom seeds that thrive here in Florida:

_______________________________ 📚Videos Mentioned 📚 ________________________

__________________________________ 👋 Florida Seed Club 👋______________________________
Get 3 varieties of in season veggie, herb, & flower seeds shipped to your door each month:

__________________________________ 👩🏼‍🌾Free Planting Guide 👩🏼‍🌾______________________________
Get a free Florida what to plant when cheat-sheet by subscribing to my free monthly newsletter:

____________________________☀️ Recommended Garden Equipment List ☀️_________________
Everything from fertilizer to tools:

_______________________________ 📚Recommended Reading List 📚 ________________________
Suggested reading for starting a Florida veggie garden:

__________________________________📆 Upcoming Events 📆 _____________________________
I teach several classes online and in person a month on rotating topics:

_______________________________ 👋 Book a Virtual Consultation 👋________________________
Video calls to get all your questions answered - it can be as long or short as needed:

_____________________________________ 👍🏼 Follow Me 👍🏼 ___________________________________
Follow me on Facebook & Instagram for quick tips and tricks:

[CH-hmud]

I am in central Florida, every year I grow all kind of tomatoes, big, medium! I start my crop in December, by by April and May I am picking tomatoes, squash, peas, carrots, green beans, onions, potatoes, celery, drying my herbs, canning! By the rainy season I am done! That’s my time to do other projects!!! I grow Marconi peppers, very prolific, I have grown bell peppers from ALDI seeds! Peppers, potatoes they are very heavy feeders.

[davidthegood]

My recommendations: cassava, chaya, true yams, sweet potatoes, Everglades tomatoes, Seminole pumpkins, yard-long beans, okra, Okinawa spinach and longevity spinach. Those all do incredibly in Florida, and make gardening super easy. Also - you are right on seasoning peppers!

[elliottmcfadden]

I grown vegetables in Central Texas with very similar challenges. I would add the following recommendations: for cucumbers, take a look at Armenian cucumbers. They are actually melons so they do well in the extreme heat and humidity and grow all summer when traditional cucumbers die or get bitter. They are also huge, like at least a foot before they get too big and seedy. For garlic, try Elephant garlic over winter. They are actually an onion, not true garlic, and don’t need the cold weather time. For squash, look at Cucurbita moschata varieties which do well in the heat and are extremely vine borer resistant. Examples would be butternut squash, Seminole and Cherokee pumpkins, and Tromboncino squash, which can be harvested either as summer or winter squash. Finally, on green beans if you can’t trellis but have room for bush beans, plant cowpeas in the summer. Most people harvest them when they dry out for the beans (like black eyed peas), but if you harvest them green and thin, they taste like green beans with a nutty flavor, like the foot long beans.

[tessaambler]

I was into gardening when vegetables become so expensive especially peppers, tomatoes, cucumber, long beans and squash! (I just throw the seeds in each raised beds we have attached made by hubby of 4 decades). We’re 60 years old and decided to retire after seeing our loved ones died similar to our ages so we like to enjoy life to the fullest in simplicity! Thanks again for sharing your videos, happy gardening everyone! ❤️🤗

[ItsJbunny]

wow ur videos are so helpful and ACTUALLY geared towards florida heat gardening THANK YOU! subbed.

[kaylahull]

SUCH a helpful video. Almost every plant you mentioned, I've tried and failed to grow or get a good harvest from. Shifting to these alternatives seems like working WITH the grain instead of against it. LOVE IT!

[marilyncook]

Another suggestion for celery is tropical celery. The stems are skinnier but the flavor is identical. It grows well down in the Caribbean. Same with Culantro which grows year around in my Florida garden. 😊

[LaRa-youknowit]

BEST video yet! Just what I wanted to see. Info on plants I’ve never heard of, and want to try. I’m in Land o lakes Fl. I’m excited to try these. Keep these type videos coming. Thx again.

[VanOutloud]

TY for this awesome video. It was very insightful. You mentioned celery sitting around too long and it goes bad. When my kids were young my second boy was tasked with cleaning up after a meal. He didn't know how to wrap up the lettuce or the celery. So he got paper towels and wrapped each and stuffed them in a plastic grocery bag. I didn't notice his "mistake" until a couple weeks later. When I finally found the lettuce it was in better shape than I expected because of his mistake. The paper towels act as a desiccant absorbing the moisture that causes premature rot. Since then we've been wrapping all our leafy vegatables they last 3-4 times longer.

[reneegandy]

I grow both peppers; to grow bell pepper 🫑 in Florida is plant them in the shade or put up a sun shade over them.

[backyardwarrior]

I definitely will have to try some of those alternatives so thanks for the video. Green beans or "bush" beans taste way better than long beans. We have not had a problem growing green beans in our Florida backyard in spring or fall. They don't mind the sandy soil. It's one of my top recommendations for new Florida gardeners.

[lovehealthmarket]

also, my lacinto kale is 2 years old. this video is of gems!!!

[Gnomelandsecurity]

Floridian here I grow bell peppers every year.

[gabriellemcnamara]

thank you for your advice! I'm a novice gardener in florida and I've been struggling to find heat-tolerant plants for my limited space on my apartment patio. I'm growing bush beans now (it's mid-may and they're just flowering) and we'll see how long they survive LOL I will try long beans next time. Would love to see a video on things to grow with limited space, and what plants grow well together.

[gerrylavelle]

Thanks for the tip about seasoning peppers. Southern wilt wipes out any sweet peppers I try to grow. Also, I pretty much solved my nematode problem but now it's pickle worms attacking the cuikes and army worms attacking the tomatoes. Thanx for your videos.

[adigmon]

Red noodle beans taste like mushrooms when you cook them down. Love them too!

[etiennelouw]

Nice, I started my garden in August 2021 in Cape Town, South Africa, lots of mistakes. I use square foot in the back yard and started a food forest in the front yard. I have noticed micro climates in different places so I still have to adjust for this still. Also learning about what goes in the food forest and what in the square foot parts. From grass to what I have now, from tree less to 3 small trees. This is a mediterranean climate, not a lot of Utube input.

[sv]

Great video and very helpful, thanks. yes, hard to have a garden in Florida. Needs to be watered a lot, and fertilized.
harvested some delicious cucumbers and One day I went to pick again and 😮 eaten from green worms. 😢
I will try again this year and try out neem oil or dish soap

[waynespringer]

I grow cucumbers here in NE OK where it's routinely over 100 degrees and 70-80% humidity and have never once had squash vine borers on them as they do not have a large enough stem for the vine borer to borrow into.

[bretburt]

I'm wanting my first FL garden after living in CA for most of my life. In CA, it was almost impossible to not have a good harvest of zucchini and tomatoes. But I will need to think of the Squirrels as well, didn't need to worry about them much in California as they were all ground squirrels, as opposed to tree squirrels. I like them so I don't want to relocate them.