PASSION FRUIT

November 2018

My flowers are changing to fruit, so far I have found seven fruit on one vine with still many more flowers yet to change. I believe these are a red variety.

 

Be ware of over planting, I planted this Neem tree several years ago, and now it is 50 feet high and the trunk is 3 feet across.

Photo by Raleigh Barnes

I've been experimenting with my dragon fruit, by tipping my plants. by cutting off a small piece near the tips, it seems to force it to produce more flowers. The photos I have submitted seem to show this to be true. Next year I will try it again. As I am still getting flowers.

The variety of tropical fruit that can be grown in a sub-tropical environment is amazing. I have in a relatively small space over a hundred different types of fruit trees as well as fruiting bush's. Years ago a friend gave me a seedling. It grew, but never flowered and this year I had decided to remove it to plant something else. Well, this year it flowered and fruited. Below is a photo of it, it is in the pom family same as the apple. It taste kind of like an apple and a pear.

Chinese Jujube fruit

NATURAL PESTICIDE

     Natural pesticides are not always chemical or plant base, sometimes the best pesticides are animal base. I'm referring to things like snakes, birds. bats, wasps, lizards and many insects. All to often people are in a hurry to spray poison on everything. True, those harsh  chemicals will do the job. What you haven't taken into account, is that you also just killed off all the beneficial animals too. You spray the beetle or the caterpillar, the bird or snake or lizard that will eat that pest  will also die.
     You may remember years ago farmers used DDT to kill off mice and rat, in the process they had all kill off most of the eagles. Well some of the mice and rats didn't die, but the did a job on the eagles. The eagles are still trying to come back.
     I don't have any mice or rats in my yard and that I encourage the non chemical approach.

Here is a portrait my neighbor, a 5 foot black racer

EATING HEALTHY OUT OF A SMALL YARD

     Super Markets are getting expensive, many of us have try to grow our food in small back yards, traditional methods don't work. I have found that if we are creative we are capable of growing much of our food. All of the plants other then the trees are kept in large pots. The only exception is the Fig trees, because of the Nematodes which stunt their growth.
     Start with your basic fruit trees, if you pick them with some though, you will find that there is an overlap in harvest times. This approach will give you some kind of fruit almost all year. Here in Central Florida where we are able to grow tropical fruit, some of our trees have two or more harvest times.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                We grow citrus which we harvest in the fall and winter, Carambolas in late summer. In the summer we pick Blackberries and Raspberries from our bushes   We also grow some heat resistance vegetables in the summer and all the way into winter. tho most of our vegetables such as Beets and Kale grow best in the fall and winter providing we don't drop in freezing temperates.

     Herbs do well in the summer, we grow Sage, Basil, Chives, Mint and Stevia.