Way to grow. 

Not sure where you live in Florida but if old fish are available maybe you could use them as fertilizer like the original inhabitants did in place of cow poop. Would that work?

Saw a couple of ideas on vertical gardening at Pinterest that were interesting. I so want to grow my own lettuce and may give this a try:

Rain gutters:

Hey momoe,

I have 13 years experience in square foot urban gardening, preceded by 12 years of container gardening when I didn't have any land at all, just a big porch.

Would like to share some suggestions, on a take 'em or leave 'em basis.

On tomatoes:

Don't grow indeterminate varieties unless you have a fence to tie 'em up to behind all your other stuff. Only determinate or bush tomatoes. With the exception of cherry & grape tomatoes, which are mostly indeterminate but don't have the big size. They are also good to grow on a fence or hanging.

If you try to grow big indeterminate tomatoes that yield big giant fruits, like Beefsteaks,  they really need a lot of space to do well.  And you waste space and don't get yield.

The absolute bestest finest tomato for either type of gardening in my experience is Stokes's Lunchbox:

https://www.stokeseeds.com/product.aspx?ProductID=39769&CategoryID=145

And I have tried many many varieties in both square foot and in pots, Lunchbox is the best performer by far. You have to grow them from seed but boy is it worth it. The plants are small but the yield is huge. Like 50 per plant! Better yet, the fruit NEVER has any flaws and never gives you any trouble, it never gets cracked and never gets disease or rot, even if the plant does! Tomato plants crowded together or in pots get disease and they are finicky about too much or too little water, competing for sun, all of that. The fruits often get cracked and/or moldy. All of the many other varieties I have grown don't compare to what I get from Lunchbox. Sometimes the Lunchbox plants will get blight or spider mites or powdery mildew or whatever and the plants look lousy but the fruit still comes, bountifully, and perfectly.   And the flavor is supreme for eating, they are big enough to slice for sandwiches, but still meaty enough for cooking. Everyone I have ever given them to raves about the taste.

Whichever tomatoes you grow, you should prune the plants ruthlessly. No good to grow a lot of foliage or suckers going in directions you don't want it to. For example, having branches heavy with fruit way up top of a plant is prone to breakage and losing it before it ripens.

On beans,

I have only been growing beans for about 6 years. I started with Kentucky Wonder because that's what's stocked in the stores. But I moved on to a much better varieties. Kentucky Wonder gets fat and waxy and tasteless real quick if you don't pick young, which means you have to pick every day. For a pole bean, Fortex is much much better, it is stringless and stays more like a French gourmet bean for much longer, and has much better flavor:

http://www.johnnyseeds.com/p-6614-fortex.aspx

Being such  a good cook, you should also consider growing the actual French Filets which are the ultimate in green beans. Also because they grow on tiny bush plants, hardly take up any space, and the yield from one little plant is incredible, I am still amazed how much I get off of just one in a like 2 gallons of soil. Here's Burpee's

http://www.burpee.com/vegetables/beans/filet/bean-french-filet-stringles...

They say there that they are exclusive but that's not true, just buy any seeds marked French Filet.

If you like spinach and lettuces, you need cool weather, which makes it hard for Florida. I'll tell you what I do, maybe you can get ideas from that. In the spring in NYC (zone 6,) I have one bed which I have mixed lettuces. As it gets hotter, I pick out holes in the lettuce bed, and put the pepper plants in those areas, making sure the pepper plants are not shaded. The pepper plants grow and shade the lettuce and in the heat of early summer, they shade the lettuces making it grow longer, keeps them cool. And I deadhead the lettuces as they start to go to seed, which makes them last a little longer still. But eventually, when the pepper plants are tall and bearing, the lettuce has all died away. EXCEPT FOR ONE: New Zealand Spinach. The heat doesn't bother it at all! It is not real spinach but tastes exactly the same, has the same composition. But it is a small trailing plant, kinda like a petunia without flowers.

http://www.burpee.com/vegetables/spinach/smooth-flat/spinach-new-zealand...

My beds are raised (terraces on a hill) so I put it in front and it trails over the edge. So for example, you could also put it around the edge of a pot holding a tomato. (Any tall vegetables in pots, I myself have always put herbs underneath and around the edge, like oregano or small-leaf basil, because this repels the insects.) I can attest New Zealand Spinach thrives in heat and cool and everything inbetween.

Another tip: kale will grow tall, can go like 4 ft., if you pick off bottom leaves as you need it, if you have space for something like that. But you can also get short mini kale (called Dwarf Blue Curled, Vate's Strain.)

I recently started putting green bunching onion seed in a single line around the tomato bed and pepper bed. This has worked out real well, usually have green onions the whole season whenever I need them.)

I never had luck growing eggplant or squash or melons in a pot and not too much luck in a square-foot situation either. They need lots of space. Even the ones that say they are small and bush types. And they need drainage, so you worry that the pot or bed is dry and the plant is wilted, so you water, and it never grows the big roots it needs. Squash and melon plants, they don't like being handled either, bruise easily, so trying to manipulate them to make space for other plants, or grown them on a fence or trellis, you just end up killing them. I keep trying but I get like one squash and then the plant dies. I've tried in huge pots this year, and they rotted.

If you have some cherry tomatoes or a cuke growing up against a fence, I recommend putting Swiss Chard Northern Lights below and in front of them. Looks pretty as well as tastes good.

Cukes are a different story! As long as you get one of many varieties for container gardening and with relatively short vines and smallish leaves that are good for square foot on a trellis or fence. Fanfare, Sugar Bush, Sugar Crunch, Little Dillicious, I can recommend those all.

If you don't have a fence to grow vertical in the back of other stuff, you can make your own with stakes and chicken wire or bird netting type stuff. It's really important to make use of the vertical space so that everyone that needs sun gets it. One thing you with square foot, you have to learn by trial and error is which plants are the shortest and therefore which can go behind each other facing the sun. I've made plenty of mistakes on this front, picking up some bargain at Home Depot that ended up being too big and shading everything else in the bed. So I spend hours fidding with stakes and pruning parts of it out of the way. You don't have this problem with container gardeing, you can move them around. So container gardening is good learning for square foot gardening.

Whenever you are at the dollar store and see the green plastic/wire twist ties for garbage bags on a little plastic wheel, grab them. You will not regret it. You will only be sad when you need to tie up this or that plant and you don't have any left. (And ask friends and neighbors to save the green velcro straps around lettuce and celery that they get from the supermarket.)

Maybe more later if I think of it.