What's Happening in Spring to Summer Florida

I'm a terrible garden blogger, because I get all frazzled and don't do things on a regular basis, but this blog is the big ol' update on stuff that's happening and what I'm doing differently than I did before now.

Pineapple Plant

Here's a pineapple plant that I think I planted in a pot over a year ago.  I had two, but I was a bad plant mommy and left them both in the cold during the winter.  This one was closer to the house than the other one, and it did well.  The weeds in the pot are purslane.  They are actually edible and good for you too, so I tend not to weed them out unless the start crowding my intended plants out.  This plant is starting to get little spikes in the center, so I'm hoping, hoping, hoping its trying to grow a baby pineapple.  

 Wild Persimmon

I live on a long dirt road, and part of it was paved up a ways.  Before the county started paving that part, they started clearing out the area across from me to make a wide path.  I don't know if the county will eventually pave my road (yay if they do, and yay if they don't), but when they were clearing, I managed to find some interesting stuff growing that I saved.  This wild persimmon is one.  There is an adult persimmon growing on the outside of my furthest neighbor's house.  I saw little persimmons growing on it and got all excited.  I hope she didn't think I was stalking her house when I was creeping up by her lot to check out the pretty persimmon tree.  So, I don't know if it's a male or female, but I'm hoping it makes persimmons one day.  My husband mowed it down a while back, and I thought it was gone.  It was gone for months, and after our weird winter, the spring brought the face of new plants into light.  This little tree is doing well!  I'm very excited it decided to give it a go living in our space.

 Sunflowers and Watermelons

I have a small plot of land I use for gardening.  I don't know much about produce yield, so when I started gardening, I tried planing various vegetables in this one small plot.  That wasn't a good idea, because I couldn't get a good yield of anything.  I decided to plant watermelons in the whole plot and to surround them with sunflowers.  My little boy helped me plant the watermelons, and they are starting to get blooms.  I made hills for them, and each hill has about three to four watermelon plants.  I'm hoping to have some watermelons growing by his birthday.  I think that would be a neat birthday surprise! 

 Fennel

Okay, so this fennel comes as a story of sorts.  I had a neighbor who was eccentric, awesome, kind, giving, and full of complicated tangles in her life.  She was a beautiful mess of a woman, and I didn't even realize how much she affected me until I started writing this.  Anyway, a while back, she showed up at my door with an herb kit.  She was the kind of person who would show up at the door asking for a ride, a cigarette, a roll of toilet paper...but she always offered SOMETHING to try to counter the supposed inconvenience of her minor intrusion.  She would come to the house baring excess food from the food bank that she won't eat, extra clothes that she doesn't need...and one day, something happened, and she left us.  This fennel is one of the gifts she has given us, and it grows, grows, grows, on the perimeter of the small plot of land I use for my garden.  Under this big patch of fennel is a something growing.  I don't know what, but it was a bulb that she told me to plant and to tell her what it was when it grew.  It's growing, dear neighbor, but I don't know what it is!  

 Baby Ponytail Palm

My mother-in-law moved into a small studio apartment by the beach to take a job at a motel.  She bestowed upon me the responsibility to take her larger plants because she had no room for them.  She gave me a pretty cool looking plant that I had no idea what it was.  It was very easy to care for until the winter came and I left it on the front porch.  I'm happy to say that after figuring out that it was a ponytail palm, I was able to recover the big plant, and now...there's a baby one!  The baby is doing really well, and I'm hoping to nurse it along for a little longer before giving it to the MIL.  I'm hoping she has room for it, because she must have had the original one for many years.  The original ponytail is pictured on the left, and you can see where I trimmed the dead leaves that happened as a result of my ignorance for leaving it outside during the cold.  I think ponytail palms look like the trees from the Lorax.  I think a ponytail palm would be a good gift to give a teacher during Dr. Seuss day.  It would would be kind of serendipitous, right?  

Wild Mulberry

This mulberry tree is another salvaged tree from the clearing that happened across the street from me.  It was a little stick in some dirt for a long while.  I think the leaves on this tree are gorgeous, and I can't wait for it to get a little bigger so I can find a comfy spot in the yard for it.  One of my toddlers ripped the top of it off, and it's now sprouting brand new leaves there, so it must be pretty healthy!  I'm very proud of this one.

Aloe Vera

Weird angle, I know.  I've been blessed to have been given the gift of aloe.  The big aloe plant in the pot came from another neighbor (a fellow Habitat for Humanity family member) who gave me a small aloe that didn't seem to be doing well.  I was very excited to receive this plant from her, because I was wanting aloe for a while.  I made my husband put it in some of our sandy dirt in a pot, and it just grew and grew and grew!  It's getting flowers again, and it's made little baby aloes.  The other smaller aloe plant came from a good friend of mine who had a gazillion aloe plants in her yard.  She met with me and my crazy brood of kids at a McDonald's playground one day, and before we left, she whipped out a big plastic bag full of aloe plants!  Very excited, I was.  I now have aloes in plants and in my yard.  I have a daughter who is very sensitive to pain, and on occasion she gets a scrape for which the aloe has been a beautiful savior.  Yes, I know.  I have very cool neighbors and friends.  I thank them much!

Banana Plant

I've had banana plants growing in the yard in the past; however, they died during freezes.  I've always been too cheap to buy a big one, so they were too young and weak to survive the freezes.  My new approach is to keep the plant in the pot for as long as I can until I can safely transplant it in the yard and do what I need to ensure its health and stability to survive a cold snap.  I have bigger pots too, so I may just try keeping it in a pot for long while.  This way, I can move it in during cold snaps.  I'm not too afraid to have a tall naner plant in the house, so long as the kids don't rip it up.

Some Sort of Citrus

I didn't even know I was growing a citrus in a pot until I saw this little shoot growing in one.  I was thinking, "what in the world?"  Somewhere in the vague recess of my memory, I remember pushing random citrus seeds into flower pots with my then two year old little kid.  This is either a tangerine, a grapefruit, or a lemon.    I think.  The leaves smell good, though.  It's doing okay, but one of the leaves has a burny look to it.  I have to research what might cause that.  I do have a useless citrus tree growing in the yard:  a trifolate kind.  It has big thorns and three-leaf winged petioles.  I don't have the heart to take it out.  It was supposed to be a tangerine tree, but I got it at Wal-mart, and it was apparently grafted onto the rootstock of an unsavory trifolate citrus tree that makes bitter fruit. During one of our cold snaps, the grafted tree died off, and being ignorant to citrus graftings and freezes and all, I kept taking care of the grody tree.  So so so, this little guy will be the savior one day!

Florida Queen Peach

I got this peach tree from Home Depot about a year ago.  It lost all of its leaves during the winter, so I was surprised to find it not have any leaves when spring came.  It's leafing out now!  It's leafing out!!  Yay!  I know that peach trees are usually pruned so that they form a sort of cup--no center limbs kind of?  Anyway, I can't prune it until it goes dormant again, but wow, leaves!  

Sumac

I pulled some sumacs out of the ground from across the street (which is kind of like our nursery, right?).  They get mowed anyway...so...So sumacs are really cool, because they kind of look tropical to me.  Not only that, but they grow these little clumps of hard berries/seeds that when you touch them and lick your finger, they are very sour, like lemons.  I like to make sumac-ade by taking the berries and soaking them in cold water for about five to ten minutes.  Then you use a cheesecloth or something to strain the liquid which will look kind of like pink lemonade.  You can drink it like that for a lemony tasting sort of drink, or you can add some kind of sweetener to make a sort of lemonade tasting drink.  There is a middle eastern spice that is made from a kind of sumac, and my husband likes to add a little to a spicy barbeque sauce.  I think it tastes amazing.  Anyway, these sumacs were really small when we pulled them out.  So, for a while, they little sticks poking out of our yard.  They're doing so well that they want to kind of take over.  

If it grows naturally...

So, you may have noticed I'm growing stuff that grows around here:  sumac, mulberry, purslane, persimmon, and I even have some passion vines growing.  I figure it has to be hard to muck it up if it grows naturally in this environment.  It's pretty neat to know these things grow, you know, just out here.  I like the idea of cultivating what naturally grows.  I even have a line of beautyberry plants growing along the front of our yard.  Beautyberries are really pretty and very useful.  The leaves are good for warding off mosquitoes, and the berries can make a delicious jam.  The pink of the berries has a very floral kind of scent (the plant is in the mint family), so even though the berries themselves kind of taste like a gelatinous nothing, when you make them into a jam, the floral flavor comes out and is sweetened by the sugar.  Our beautyberry plants are starting to flower now, and the flowers are soft, pink little bunches of flowers that grow along the stalks of the plants.  I love it.  :)  

Blackberries

I should take my oldest daughter blackberry picking.  She LOVES blackberries, and these are growing in our yard!  You can't kick off summer vacation without blackberry picking.  You just can't.  

Canna Lilies 

Oh, and here are the canna lilies that I got from...ba da ba dum, across the street!  lol  They have very pretty yellow flowers and they grow like crazy.  Very tropical looking, and these are growing in the shade by my porch where lots of water pools, and they seem to LOVE water.