Most of the plants that you’ll put in your yard or garden have a one year or less. Trees, however, represent a long term commitment.  The type of tree that you choose will be with you for many years to come.

If you’re looking for a tree that will provide a return on that long-term investment, you’ll be looking for a fruit tree.  The type of fruit tree you choose will depend on several factors.  Consideration #1 – climate.

Apple trees grow well in the northern parts of the US.  Drop a little lower and peach and avocado trees are popular.  Here in the south, we’ve got  citrus trees – orange, lemon, grapefruit.  Citrus trees require relatively little maintenance and are fairly tolerant to heat, cold, and drought.

A less tolerant, less well known, but delightful tree is the Lychee tree (inexplicably known as the lychee nut tree among the true southerners).  As long as temperatures don’t drop below freezing for more than a few hours in a year, the lychee tree will grow well and produce many seedlings.  One nice feature of the lychee is that the aesthetic appeal.  The lychee grows its fruit in hard shells (the mythical ‘lychee nuts’) that  look a lot like giant, wooden strawberries.

The fruit itself is a delicacy that has never quite caught on in America.  What is virtually unknown here is a favorite in Asia.  Friends with lychee trees have reported that Asian-Americans have stopped at the house and offered to buy their entire crop on numerous occasions.

If you plant a lychee, that may happen to you, too.  But once you get a taste of the wonderful soft fruit, you won’t be willing to give it up.

Whatever type of tree you choose to plant, make sure it is agreeable to your climate and reflects the available space and character of your garden.

You’ve worked hard on your garden. You’ve spent months cultivating those tiny seedlings. You’ve banished weeds and bugs as best you could.  Your toil has been rewarded with some fruits, but there’s still more on the vine.  And now… vacation time.

If you’re relatively new to gardening, it can be a worrisome thing to let go of your garden for a week.  You’ve been its caretaker, and it has been your hobby and your respite from the busyness of modern life.  Now you’ve got to give it up to the care of either another person or to providence.  Either case can be concerning.

There is another option.  With a little bit of forethought, you can make preparations for your garden’s care while you are away.  You can purchase a timer system for watering the plants for about $25 to $50, depending on the size of your garden and the number of zones needed.  With a timer and some well-placed sprinkler heads, you can leave your garden for up to a week without worrying.

Bug protection is another matter altogether.  There’s not much that you can do to protect your garden from the creepies while you’re away.  The best alternative that I know is to have a friend come by once every three days or so to give it a spraying.  If any alert readers have a better plan for protecting the garden while they’re gone, I’d love to read it.  It’s so devastating to come home and find your prize pumpkin/eggplant/fill in the blank eaten up, leaving only a shell to mock you with its size and sheen.

The next time you’re going out of town for a few days, remember to plan ahead for the care and protection of your garden while you’re away.  It will be well worth the effort, expense, and favors called in when you come home to a rich, full garden.

Every garden needs mulch. It serves several important purposes.  The two biggest are moisture retention and weed control.

A good, thick layer of mulch will hold in significantly more moisture than the soil alone would normally retain.  This is one of those multiple blessing kind of applications.  It’s good for the environment, because you’re not needlessly funneling excess water through to the aquifer.  It’s good for your wallet, because you don’t have to water as much.  It’s good for your garden, because the plants are more resistant to the occasional lapse if you miss a scheduled watering.  In other words – it is a good thing all around.

Another key benefit of mulching is that it will impede the growth of weeds.  When it comes to mulch, the thicker the better.  A rookie mistake that many new gardeners will make is spreading the mulch too thin, either because they don’t know any better or to try to save money by spreading the mulch farther.  Don’t do it.  Pile the mulch good and deep.  Weeds are survivors; they’ll  find a way to grow in almost any conditions.  You need that thick barrier to stop most of the weed growth and to retain a good level of moisture.

You can get all the mulch you need for your garden without breaking the bank.  Many municipalities recycle wood from lawn pickup and provide it back to the taxpayers as mulch.  Check your local landfill to see if they have a mulch bin.  Some landfills will have different types available.

Some common variations available are fine, course, and glass mulches.  Stay away from the glass mulch for anything other than decorative planter areas.  Even if your local landfill doesn’t separate out the fine and course mulch, you can still have your choice.  The course mulch will be on the top of the pile.  Fine mulch will work its way to the bottom and can generally be scooped up at the edges of the pile without much trouble.

Whatever kind of mulch you choose to use, with a trip to the landfill and a little sweat equity you can save money and get a high quality mulch for your garden.

Just like in real estate, the three most important factors in gardening are location, location, and location. This point was driven home to me recently when I moved my papaya tree ten feet to the left. One day in the full Florida sun and the leaves turned yellow and shriveled to nothing.

One day.

Before you ask, I had the little tree in a container awaiting planting in the ground. Did you know that there are male and female papaya trees? Apparently you don’t need both to cross pollinate, but you need to have a female to produce fruit. And you can’t tell if it is male or female until it flowers. So… you end up with the little tree in a pot for nine months, just in case it is a boy plant, and you have to take it back to the nursery.

Anyway, while the effects of proper water and nutrition are obvious, placement is less obvious but equally important. I’ve had two eggplants side by side and one thrived while the other merely survived when they were no more than three feet apart. Elephant Ears grow like weeds along the side of my house but will shrivel and die three feet away. Not enough sun – bad. Too much sun –even worse.

If you’re planting a new crop in a new location, I’d recommend starting the seeds in a pot. Once the seedlings are healthy enough, set the pot in your proposed location and watch it like a hawk for a day or two. Only when you are convinced that you’ve got a location with the proper balance of sun/shade, then go ahead and plant in the ground.

One of the struggles that all gardeners face is the constant battle against the bugs. We face the continual conflict between our desire to keep the garden as natural as possible and the need to protect the fruits of our labor from unwanted insects.

I live in Florida where the insects grow to roughly the size of a small dog, so it is even more of a challenge to keep my fruits and vegetable safe until harvest time. I recently discovered a simple and effective natural alternative to pesticide. This is the first natural pest-control recipe that has worked well in my personal experience.

The two part plan involves one old trick and one new. You’ve probably heard that planting marigolds will help protect your plants from insect invaders. You’ve also probably tried it unsuccessfully. Alone, marigolds don’t do enough, but they will boost the effectiveness of other remedies, especially if you plant a busload of them around your most sensitive fruit and vegetable plants.

The new twist is a simple mixture of garlic and Tabasco sauce in water. Put two teaspoons of minced garlic (the equivalent of 4 cloves) and one teaspoon of Tabasco sauce in a quart of water. Mix well in the blender or food processor. Don’t skimp on the mixing. The chunks will clog up your sprayer, so really mix it up well. Then strain through cheesecloth into a glass jar for storage.

Spray the mixture onto the leaves and fruit of the plants. Again, don’t skimp. If you want to do away with the chemicals, you’ve got to really douse the plants with the stuff. I reapply every other day, unless we get heavy rains.

I was initially concerned about the massive doses of garlic affecting the taste of my vegetables, but so far we haven’t detected even a hint. The garlic/Tabasco/marigold remedy has spared me the expense and harmful consequence to our health and the environment that can come with harsh chemical pesticides. The marigolds even improve the look of the garden.
A final word of warning: wear gloves if you don’t want your hands to smell like extra-spicy garlic for the rest of the day. Bugs aren’t the only things that are repelled by the odor of this mixture.

Raspberries et al

Could anything be more delectable in the summertime than a dessert made of juicy raspberries and vanilla ice cream? Yummy!

Raspberries belong to the rose family and are closely related to another delectable berry- the strawberry. Back in the 1800s raspberries were valued for their medicinal use. They were used to clean teeth and sooth sore throats and sore eyes.

If you wish to grow raspberries, then it is important to note that they will begin to bear fruit once they are two to three years of age. Their life expectancy is relatively long- that of eight full crop years.

Conditions for Growing Raspberries

Raspberries require plenty of sunshine to grow. To grow to their full height they need at least six to eight hours of sun per day. Just as roses need plenty of sunshine, so do raspberries.

The soil the raspberries are planted in needs to contain plenty of moisture. A lack of moisture can cause your raspberry plants to grow small and be tough. This will not make them good for eating at all!

The more organic matter you can add to the soil the better. Compost or composted manure can do your raspberries a world of good. You will reap the benefits of the harvest if you add a generous portion of compost to your raspberries.

Planting Raspberries

When it comes to planting raspberries, the new canes should be positioned 18 inches apart in the rows. The rows themselves should be four inches apart if not a little more. This should leave you with six canes that are able to develop and grow to be as healthy as possible in each square foot of the row. In the spring you can weed out the canes that are weaker and will not grow to fruition.

How will you know when a raspberry is ripe for the picking? When it is time to go from garden to table you will know it because when you touch the berry and pull on it gently it will separate from the core. On the other hand, raspberries that are not ripe are hard and will not respond to a gentle tug.

However, you don’t want to wait too long to pick your berries. Berries that are too ripe will be far too soft and squishy and can crumble easily from the core.

The answer to this question is a resounding yes!

But what is compost exactly? To define the term, compost is a “dark, crumbly, and earthy-smelling form of decomposing organic matter”. If this sounds kind of icky to you, then read on to learn more …

There are many reasons why composting is a good idea. It has been estimated that approximately 35% of the waste in any given residential area is made up of materials that easily could be composted, such as waste from the kitchen and yard. Composting in your backyard is one of the most practical, convenient and simplest means of taking care of wastes around your home and reducing the waste that gets carted off to landfills.

Composting helps to decrease the disposal cost for waste, and it saves energy. Not only that but composting reduces both water and air pollution. When you compost you are able to conserve resources. All of the organic resources from your kitchen and yard contain plenty of essential nutrients, and these can then be returned to the earth. This will improve your soil and keep it in top notch shape. This also will enrich the soil and make it healthier for the plants and flowers you have growing in it. If you are growing food, your yield will be greater thanks to the nutrient rich soil.

Another way that resources are conserved is that less fossil fuels are used in delivering organic waste to landfills because there is less to transport. Think about it.

Building the healthiest soil possible should be a goal of every gardener, regardless of what you are growing. Compost is excellent for improving air circulation, water retention and the texture of soil. It does this by breaking down the heavy soils.

Did you know that compost provides a natural slow release type of fertilizer? It does. It is also very mild and will not burn your plants in any way. The other good point that should never be overlooked is that composting won’t cost you a thing!

Organic material in landfills produces methane gas that contributes to an unnatural change in the climate. Prevent this from happening by composting. Do your part to help sustain the planet.