Jujubes in Florida

Jujubes. This is an Indian Jujube, which would not grow here, in my zone (9a), but it grows very well in North Fort Myers, at ECHO Farm.

You can eat either the green ones, which were slightly crunchy and more balanced in its acid/sweet, or the yellow and leathery one, which tasted exactly like a slightly spoilt dried apple. I don't know what this varietal is, but I wasn't terribly impressed with the flavor. I was eating fruit that I'd picked up from the ground around the tree, so maybe I need to try it again. Judging by the smell around the tree, you could make some pretty potent wine from these.

The Jujube tree at ECHO is huge, much larger than the Chinese ones I've seen advertised. This one was at least forty feet, and dominated a courtyard with its gnarled and twisted limbs that reminded me of a mulberry.

Disney's accidental motto...

Ah, for want of a punctuation mark... (EPCOT, end of February 2008)

Pink and Yellow Ipe trees

Taken at EPCOT on February 29, 2008.

Greens in the garden...

Agina Cutting Celery (Pinetree).... Like celery, minus the crunch.

Upland Cress. Mmmmm... Prolific. Crunchy. Nicely bitter.

Red Sails lettuce and Chervil.

Fruit tree and dormancy

Oh, for the record, my pear tree (a Hood from Wilson) broke dormancy last week. All the figs have new growth, as do the pomegranates, mulberries, and most the raspberries (including tony_k's). The only things still dormant are the apples and nectarines.

Flatwoods Plum and Fennel

I was given this bushy little tree, and told that it was a Chickasaw plum... but I've long suspected that it was misidentified, mostly because its growth habit is so low and weedy. I'm pretty sure now that it's Prunus umbellata, the Flatwoods Plum. After blooming in February, these trees produce small, fairly bitter little fruits. A couple of years ago the trees in this area produced a prolific harvest, and I picked a bunch with my son from neighbors' trees. We filled a few buckets, and made a tart and jelly from them. I think the trees are highly variable, and some trees have fairly sweet fruit while others' fruit is sour or bitter. Anyway, the best use for them is jelly, which you can sweeten until the bitterness and sourness is no longer perceptible.

Florence Fennel. This bunch is over a year old. It suffers a bit in the heat and humidity, but produces bulbs pretty readily during the cool season. I like the fronds (in salads) almost as much as the bulbs.

A garden update in pictures

Pot Marigold (Calendula officinalis) from saved seeds. What a happy, trouble-free flower.

A perennial or hardy geranium (G. oxonianum 'Claridge Druce', I think). It's been living quite happily in this pot for years. Blooms nicely all spring.
'Prosperity" on fortuniana rootstock.

Peas from my intensive circular bed. Working GREAT! the carrots are planted in a trench, and for whatever reason seem to grow better there. Maybe they get more water?

I'm letting some of my favorite lettuces go to seed for next planting season.

My mum had a huge old dead cedar cut out of her yard. I got the shredded limbs and branches (the tree company kept the wood, of course...). Beautiful, fragrant, and strangely melodic -- as I tossed it onto my paths and beds, the larger pieces produced that distinctive sound I associate with cedar, like two pencils hitting one another.
Smells like a giant hamster cage in my yard!

The garden in February

I've been growing a geraniums from seeds the past few seasons. They seem to be far hardier than the ones I buy at the bigboxstores -- many of them survived the summer and are blooming again for a second year. The key, aside from growing them from seed, is to keep them in full shade and very dry throughout the hot/wet season. These are Summer Showers Ivy Geranium (the one on the left) and Ringo Deep Scarlet Geranium, both from Swallowtail. I would rate them generally very easy to grow from seed. It surprises me how rarely people grow them from seed.

My Flordaprince peach started to bloom a bit this weekend. Too early, really, but the cool weather over the past few days should slow things down. I love the geometric patterns on the bark, which are brought into relief by the dormant oil I use to keep scale and other pests at bay.

My collards have finally started growing.

Time to install that drip irrigation...

Considering it's a La Nina winter, we've had quite a lot of rain. But it looks like our luck's run out.

My espalier system

I built this espalier frame during December, using three-quarter inch electrical conduit and fittings from chainlink fences. I've planted two kinds of tropical apples (Dorsett and two Annas) and one pear tree (Hood). The length of the trellis is about thirty-five feet.

On either end, I have grapes (Black Spanish and Nesbitt). Along the privacy fence behind the trellis, I have planted Bababerry raspberries and a Fry Scuppernong grapes.

That's four trees and two grape vines in a space that's about one-hundred square feet, or the space that's typically recommended for one tree in a commercial orchard.

You can't see it in this picture, but I've started to run heavy wire every couple of feet to trellis the limbs of the fruit trees, starting at one foot from ground level (for the micro-sprinkler irrigation line) and then about two feet, four feet, and six feet. (I've only run the first two wires so far.) The trellis is seven feet high, which is more or less the exact height of my comfortable reach. (I didn't use a tape measurer when building it, instead relying on my body to tell me how high the trellis should be built and how low the first wire should be strung. The first wire for the tree limbs is exactly as high as I can comfortably reach down, about two feet.)

The whole idea is a system of "human-sized" plants: I won't get on my knees nor will I climb a ladder. It's a rejection of the commercial orchard ethos -- I don't want to maximize production: Instead, I want to minimize inputs and maximize long and varied harvest -- the "backyard orchard culture" promoted by Dave Wilson. What's more, all my reading about tropical apples and pears indicates that horizontal growth and aggressive pruning is the way to maximize production.


Here is my inspiration...

Various seedlings...

This method is my current favorite for starting seeds -- three ounce plastic cups and shredded coir. It doesn't solve the problem of damping off, but the coir is very loose and doesn't decay or compact, so the roots grow quickly and since there's little microbial action, the seedlings seem more vigorous to me. The downside is that I need to use chemical fertilizers, since the coir is basically inert and therefore even fish emulsion doesn't do much. I use a watered-down Miraclegro solution once every other week or so, when I'm feeding my orchids.

'Prosperity' rose

I love the drama of these roses -- all gold and satin. They are pinkish when in bid, and white when blown. This bush is about four years old, on 'Fortuniana' rootstock. It blooms most of the year, but most dramatically in spring.

Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler - New York Times

A very thoughtful and economical article on why we need to eat less meat, by Mark Bittman, the Times' food writer.

I'm not a doctrinaire vegetarian (I willingly eat meat at restaurants or when no other alternative is available), but I have to say the idea that the average American consumers eight ounces of meat per day is, well, frankly disgusting. I assume that is uncooked, but it would still equal two large hamburgers per day, or half a chicken. How in the world did we get to the point where that is the average?

That level of consumption makes no sense: It's expensive, it's categorically unnecessary and even harmful for good health, has horrific consequences for the environment... and, gosh darn it, the real kicker here, most meat that I see sold in restaurants and grocery stores is of low quality and is usually poorly prepared... So, it does not even TASTE good. I remember vaguely the last hamburger I had at McDonalds. It was salty, warm, greasy, and it tasted fine, but not particularly beefy, and it surely did not excite me to eat more...

Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler - New York Times:

"Americans eat about the same amount of meat as we have for some time, about eight ounces a day, roughly twice the global average. At about 5 percent of the world’s population, we “process” (that is, grow and kill) nearly 10 billion animals a year, more than 15 percent of the world’s total.

Growing meat (it’s hard to use the word “raising” when applied to animals in factory farms) uses so many resources that it’s a challenge to enumerate them all. But consider: an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.

To put the energy-using demand of meat production into easy-to-understand terms, Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, calculated that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius. Similarly, a study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days."

A quick garden update in pictures

Broccoli di Rapa, strawberries

My herbs and lettuce garden.

Garden happenings...

A warm day today, though that's predicted to change early this week, with temperatures dipping back into the upper thirties. I spent a couple of hours cleaning up the garden, trying to get things back into shape after the path and patio work. I noticed that my carambola and limão 'Cravo' had finally sprouted, and brought them outside to soak up the rays.

My friend Bill picked up me up an 'Owari' satsuma grafted onto Flying Dragon rootstock. I have a couple of other trees on Dragon: A 'Hamlin' orange (our 'native' DeLand orange) and a 'Honeybell' tangerine. The Dragon rootstock is dwarfing, keeping trees to below ten feet -- though from what I've read, the final verdict isn't in on their ultimate size. Bill has a grapefruit that's already at least nine feet in three years. In any case, the rootstock inarguable brings the trees into production earlier -- Bill's trees produced abundantly this year. My two trees went in the ground only last year, so I haven't had any fruits.

At Lowes, I picked up a Sanbokan Lemon (Citrus sulcata) in a gallon pot for ten bucks... I think I'll grow it in a container, at least for this season. I swear, that's the last citrus I buy.

Let's see... In the veg beds: I'm really frustrated with my collards this season. I bought some plants at Lowes and I guess they must have been bum: Planted right next to Rappini, and while the Rappini has grown well, the collards are still tiny. The first salad greens of the season (planted the third week of September, so four months ago) are about to go to seed (which I'll collect). I have a bunch of 'Red Sails' just now coming into harvest size. To ensure salad until mid-May, I planted more 'Summer Glory' lettuce mix (Parks) last week, so when the Sails come down, there will be more rabbit food to replace it. Strawberries have finally started to produce well -- both patches yield a big handful a day. 'Purple Cherokee' tomatoes are just about ripe. 'Little Fingers' eggplant is recovering well from the freeze. Carrots need to be pulled, and 'Sea Foam' chard is ready to pick again.

Finally, I got in the mail earlier this week two figs that were recommended to me on the Fig Forum at GardenWeb: 'LSU Purple' and 'Celeste.' I got them at Johnson Nursery. They were smallish, maybe thirty inches (pruned) and the trunks were chopstick thick. No complaints, since they were only ten bucks each. Right now, they're sharing a large (thirty-gallon) pot. That brings to five my fig varieties: 'Alma,' 'Brown Turkey' and 'Kadota.' Because of their susceptibility to nematodes, the only fig in the ground is 'Alma.' If it grows without much problem, I'll transfer the others into the ground, too.

More Willis, seeds

Notes to self...

Got my Kadota Fig and Sunred Nectarine from Willis last night. Very impressed -- both much larger than advertised and they appeared in good shape. I put the Mission grape, the Hood Pear, the Pomegranate and Nectarine in the ground, and the Kadota in a big pot.

I also planted all the seeds from Swallowtail, except the Blackberry Lily, which needs to spend some time in the fridge. A lot of seeds!

Need to remember to prick the poppies. Candytuft is up, but Strawflowers are still not germinating. Need to plant more Nasturtiums -- between the Brazilians and the cold, only a couple survived.

Damage from the freeze.

My roses fared all right. The same cannot be said of my bananas, brugs, and daturas. And there was a bit of damage to my tomatoes, but nothing serious.

Our patio remodel.

Between the freeze and the Brazilians, my garden's a mess. But I love the new patio and paths that wind through the flower part of my garden.

"Behind the Seeds Tour" at Epcot

With in-laws in town, we spent the a warm day at Epcot. I took the "Behind the Seeds" tour, a tour of the "Living with the Land Boat Ride."

It's Disney's little "how green are we" show ride; I'm not sure I bought the line that Disney is in any way a green enterprise, or that its research will help feed the world. (On $5 a day, African villagers are supposed to buy hydroponic equipment? My support goes to ECHO, which tries to encourage global sustainability and feed the masses through ultra-low-tech methods.)

Let's face it, most of Florida is an environmental wasteland, and at the center of it sits the tens of thousands of acres around the theme parks south of Orlando. (OK, OK, the center is Big Sugar and the sweet corn industry... The parks are just the inner ring.) What's more, I sat through a thirty minute show on global energy sources (hosted by Ellen Degeneres!) that was revolting for its carefully calibrated discussion of global warming and alternative sources of energy. It was like a kindergarten teacher's graduation day address, only instead of five-year-olds, it was gas and oil conglomerates who each had "something special to contribute." Oh, and global warming is a "hot topic"... hah. But at least it didn't hedge on whether dinosaurs are God's way of testing my faith...

I try hard to ignore the waste and gluttonous consumption that Disney represents, because the kids really enjoy it. It's hard for me not to sound like an old man (I'm not!) or a grouch when I talk about Disney and the parks.

Anyway, about the "Behind the Seeds" tour. More for the hoi polloi than the dedicated gardener. Fair enough. The discussion of Integrated Pest Management was mostly about how cute ladybugs are. And I'm not convinced that hydroponic growing is an improvement over old-fashioned dirt and compost. It certainly is cooler. But the demonstration garden had some really impressive vertical gardening involved, and the tropical gardens were very interesting.

Here's a short slide show of what caught my eye. Better yet, watch it on my Picasa account.

Tomato Growers Supply Order...

I'm going to grow a few more tomatoes this spring than last...

#5859 - SunSugar FT Hybrid - 30 seeds.

#5532 - Southern Night - 30 seeds.

#5186 - Florida Pink - 30 seeds.

#3460 - Tomande VFFNT Hybrid - 30 seeds.