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| Pakistani Mulberry putting out fruit just as fast as it's putting out leaves! |
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| My earliest fruiting tree this year, Florida Prince Peach with fuzzy baby peaches! |
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| Blackberry buds surrounded by thorns, birds beware! |
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| Black Sapote, Mesa, AZ, March 15, 2019 |
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| Dwarf Black Mulberry fuzzy beginnings of mulberries! |
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| Kadota Fig, Mesa, AZ, March 15, 2019 |
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| Bearrs Lime tree, Mesa, AZ, March 15, 2019 |
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| Jennifer Layton, owner of Yellow Boots Yard Care |
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| Hoop structure over very happy and healthy mango trees in Layton's garden, provides cold protection in winter, and shade protection in our hot summer months. The Layton's dog Nora warns me to stay away from her mango trees! |
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| Kimball Layton grafting Black Mission Fig scions on to my Kadota Fig tree under the supervision of my fearless garden-guard dog, Buster Brown. |
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| My Fuji Apple (high chill hours) tree now has Anna's Apple (low chill hours) grafted on! Now I have a much better chance of getting fruit from this tree!! |
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| The Layton's 20+ year old Anna's apple tree glistens with silver scion tags. |
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| Hummingbird feeding on nectar of banana blossoms. |
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| Wow! Look at all of those bananas! |
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| Owner, Kim Vallen, giving a demonstration on how to plant a Mango Tree. |
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| Largest and healthiest Plumeria I have ever seen in Arizona! |
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| The resident rescued pot bellied pig and her piglets! |
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| A Tropical Concept friendly employee (the handsome bearded human, not the Macaw) helping out a customer at the tour in September. |
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| The exotic birds that will be visiting during this Saturday's tour! |
A Tropical Concept is giving another tour this Saturday, and raffling off 2 Starfruit plants!
A Tropical Concept Tour/Demo/Raffle/Birds - Saturday, October 28 at 11 AM - 1 PM - tour at 11:00am. Since winter is coming, we are going to demonstrate a couple of ways to protect your trees from the winter cold. Then a 7gal starfruit and 3g starfruit will be raffled off. So come and mingle and talk birds/plants, and have some cold beverages. Feel free to bring the family, your kids will love it. Feel free to bring your parrots or birds to the event and show them off. Randal Allyn from Az Exotic Bird Rescue will be bringing some of their birds they have, its going to be great! A Tropical Concept Plant Nursery, 4302 S Central Ave, Phoenix, Arizona 85040
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| Passion Fruit flowers! Big and beautiful :-) |
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| Happy geese and ducks at home in their pond. |
For a couple of years now I've been working up the courage to try to grow tropicals. I slowly built up my wish list after seeing what Jay Barringer grows in his food forest, and watching his videos. Kim's no-nonsense approach to planting and caring for tropicals has encouraged me to take the plunge! When I called A Tropical Concept with my wish-list I figured they would have maybe 2 or 3 out of the 4 plants on my list, since I was looking for very specific types of mango. They had ALL of them!
My recent purchases from A Tropical Concept - 1 Miracle Mango, 1 Pineapple Pleasure Mango, 1 Pineapple Guava, and 1 Black Sapote!
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| My hard-working brother Patrick planting our new Miracle Mango in our north facing atrium, surrounded by star jasmine and arabian jasmine. |
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| The Pineapple Pleasure Mango went into a pre-dug hole in an area that gets morning sun and is protected from wind. |
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| The Black Sapote will be planted under filtered light, surrounded by other trees to protect it from afternoon sun. |
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| My new Pineapple Guava will go into a pot for now, until I figure out where it wants to live in my increasingly crowded backyard jungle ;-) |
I bought these 3 weeks ago and they are all doing very well! Thank you Kim and Danny for all of your help!!!
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| The Bee Oasis garden in transition from summer to a fall garden, along with a solar oven in foreground! |
A few weeks ago I was fortunate to attend one of The Bee Oasis workshops, led by permaculture guru of the east valley - Don Titmus. His home is a great example of living a sustainable lifestyle, which we can and should all learn from. Don is a master at sharing his practical knowledge and explaining the principles of permaculture.
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| Overturned metal mesh waste baskets from the dollar store serve as cloches to protect young plant starts. What a great idea! |
Don has 40 years of experience in horticulture and has lived in Arizona since 1981. With 14 years of experience in Permaculture (teaching, design, consults and implementations) he is your man if you need a consult on how to set up or improve your garden, lay out a home fruit orchard, or to implement rainwater harvesting features. As Don puts it - he's out to help heal the Earth one home-site at a time!! I can hardly think of a more noble pursuit.
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| A sturdy set of hand made tools at the ready to prepare the fall garden beds. |
Don demonstrated his method of prepping fall garden beds, using a "low-till" instead of "no-till" method. He loosened up just the first six inches or so of the soil before adding amendments, allowing nutrients to get down into the soil without disturbing the beneficial micro-organisms living happily in their own levels within the soil. I like this concept and am giving it a try in my fall garden beds.
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| Hanging herb drying rack with velcro closure, lets air in and keeps bugs and birds out. |
The fall garden prep demo was followed with a great presentation indoors on the principles of Permaculture. I love networking with other organic gardeners and got to chatting with two from Aravaipa Canyon - home of the infamous 100-plus years old Aravaipa Avocado tree. Interestingly, they had also tried to grow one of the off-springs of this tree, and failed.
Other interesting tidbits of information I picked up were that -
Arbico Organics sells worm castings by the truckload!
Maricopa County Cooperative Extension offers free soil and water testing!
Using black strap molasses in your compost speeds up the composting process!
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| Rainwater harvesting tank at the Bee Oasis collects water from the home's metal roof for use in the garden, with overflow going to a nearby lush shade garden. |
The next Bee Oasis workshop is on Rainwater Harvesting. Participants will get to see firsthand how Don installed his rainwater tank and how he incorporated berms and swales into his landscape to slow the rainwater and allow it to soak into his soil rather than letting it run off into the street!
Homestead Garden Series - Rainwater Harvesting, Saturday, October 14 at 8:30 AM - 11:30 AM - Sustainable strategies for Harvesting the rain for garden and homestead resilience. From the top of your watershed.....Slow it, Spread it, Sink it. Store in the soil or in tanks for later, all this and more are demonstrated at the Bee Oasis.
The Bee Oasis holds classes monthly and has great upcoming topics -
2017November - Soil Building
December - Pc Sectors [with a focus on cold/chill/freeze]
2018January - Composting and more
February - Spring Garden, plan and prep
March - Bee Blocks for Pollination and the Natural Mozzie Trap.
April - Chickens and more
May - Climate, Microclimates and Inner climate
June - Garden Shading and more
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| Jason Trotter of Sage Garden EcoVillas giving us the basics about growing and harvesting olives in Arizona |
On Saturday September 9th, Jason Trotter of Sage Garden EcoVillas kindly opened his yard and home to hold a workshop on how to pick, cure, and finish olives. There was a great turn-out for the olive harvest, everyone young and old, curious to learn how to harvest these little gems. Some had made the mistake (like me) of picking an olive fresh from a tree and taking a bite - DON'T! It won't kill you, but your taste-buds will be very unhappy. Olives fresh off the tree, green or black, are extremely bitter.
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| Olive tea was available to sample. Made from the olive tree leaves, it has a nice mellow flavor. |
Tarps were laid out to catch the falling olives and attendees jumped right in on picking the olives using small plastic rakes attached to extension poles. Even the youngest gave harvesting a try!
It was great to have such a family-friendly event. These kids did a great job harvesting, learned where olives come from (not just from a jar), and had fun outdoors instead of being glued to a screen (computer, tv, phone, tablet).
It turns out that both black AND green olives come from the same tree. The black ones are just riper than the green ones. Accordingly, the green olives need to be cured longer than the ripe black ones in order to remove most of the bitterness.
The black and green olives were separated into 2 different buckets for curing. In the curing process you keep the olives submerged in water and check each day to see if they are ready for finishing. After about a week you move on to the finishing process where the olives are soaked in a brine. For details and recipes, check out Sage Garden's FB page, or attend the next workshop!
There is another Olive Harvest Workshop on Saturday, Oct. 7th from 9:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. Participants will be picking both green and black olives, preparing them for curing, and starting the curing process. Sign up on FaceBook at
EcoVilla's Olive Harvest Workshop
Everything in my summer garden seemed so promising in May.
The zucchini plants were spreading and budding -
My Red-Flame and Thompson Seedless grape vines had survived the bout of powdery mildew and were loaded with their first year grape clusters.
My carefully selected tomato starts that I grew from seed indoors, of varieties that I knew would produce here in the desert - Super Souix, Pineapple tomato, Stupice, Cossack Pineapple Tomatillos, and Cuastralee Beefsteak tomatoes had hardened off well and were starting to set fruit.
Though quite ugly and hogging up space, my volunteer Matt's Wild Cherry tomatoes were constantly producing.
But as the heat of summer set in, the bugs and countless other critters came out, and they behaved as though they were simultaneously starving and dying of thirst. Anything containing moisture got eaten. The grapes seem to be abducted by aliens overnight - they were small low-flying creatures with feathers, remarkably similar to what we here on earth call "birds".
We tried everything possible to keep the alien birds from our tomato bounty - scare tape, bird netting, taffeta bags, jingling wind chimes, the fake owl, surly looking garden gnomes and even the neighbors cat. Nothing worked.
To add to the agony, by June the tomato plants started suffering from curly top virus. So one by one they were removed in a futile effort to thwart the spread of the disease. My pepper plants in a nearby bed produced nothing but little mutant peppers. I now know it was likely due to the curly top virus, likely spread to my peppers by beet leafhoppers (left here by the aliens who abducted my grapes).
Yields were extremely low from all the summer veggies I planted - cucumbers, zucchini, squash, okra, peppers, and tomatoes. I'm still holding out hope for the watermelon and eggplants. The passion fruit vines, with over 40 blooms only produced 3 fruit! The acerola cherry bloomed and bloomed and is still blooming but has never set fruit. One would think that I didn't have enough pollinator-attracting plants, but that wasn't the case. The garden is still full of flowering basil, wild sunflowers, borage, lantana, and in early summer had blooming citrus buzzing loudly with bees, nasturtium vines, bee balm, calendula, marigold and hollyhocks.
So, as in life, things don't always go as planned and we must look at the positive side of things. My garden successes were that all of my young fruit trees survived the summer - peaches, apples, plums, mandarin orange, bearrs lime, and mulberries. The pomegranate has a ton of fruit. Other successes were -
My bee balm plants were gorgeous!
My Red Chard lasted well into July, protected by big bushes of basil, peanut plants, and a few okra stalks.
My Moringa trees are doing great, producing tons of pods to eat, and more leaves than I can ever consume.
My sweet potato vines and malabar spinach are sprawling out everywhere, providing lots of leafy greens for salads.
While being trapped inside because of the sweltering heat, my wild sunflower jungle has provided us with endless hours of entertainment watching the goldfinches feeding on the seeds.
So what have I learned from my summer garden debacle? That it's just too dam hot in the summer for me to properly tend to so many plants. Even with my night owl, Bugzooka-carrying brother patrolling the garden late into the wee hours. Next summer I will stick with easy heat-loving plants that need little attention such as sweet potatoes, malabar spinach, egyptian spinach, and okra. My focus will be on my fruit trees, herbs, and vines, and just a few hardy perennials like artichokes, tree collards, and gherkin cucumbers.
