Re: Weekend...

Jim- I love to hear all about what is happening in the tropics down there! Thanks so much for giving us an update.

Theresa

james singer wrote:

without you-know-what.

Potted up some pepper seedlings that geminated during the week and a bottle gourd seedling. Picked about 10 pounds of tomatoes and a handful of jalapeno peppers [our two major crops]. We've got pineapple starting to bloom, so I need to weed and fertilize them tomorrow.

Tied several more orchids in the orange jasmines and on the ponytail palm and misted them all with Maxicrop. Figure this is probably a good fertilizer [1-0-4] for orchids living in trees. One of these orchids is the wild native that I glued [gooped] on the ponytail a year of so ago. It's finally begun to make itself at home, send out roots, and produce more fruiting bodies. Maybe next year I'll have enough plant to send Scottie a start I promised... oh... a year or so ago.

When avocados bloom, they BLOOM--thousands of tiny flowers that are swarmed over by bees, wasps, flies, and things I've never seen before. Hundreds of them are fertilized and form baby fruit. Then, between fertilization and fruition, the tree begins sloughing off hundreds of fruits--until, I assume, it reaches some sort of accommodation between its ability to have children and its ability to support and nurture children. The crop at harvest will be somewhere around 50 or 60 fruits.

I also noticed today that out big old mango was loaded with baby fruit and the lychee is in full bloom--more flower spikes and attendant bees than I've witnessed heretofore. Maybe a bumper crop, and that would be most welcome.

One last note. The fig tree cuttings we started 2 years ago are now in 3-gallon pots and about 3 feet tall. They need to go into the ground sometime between now and the rainy season. One of them is already producing figs. My kind of tree.

I apologize for being so gabby.

Island Jim
Southwest Florida
27.0 N, 82.4 W
Hardiness Zone 10
Heat Zone 10
Minimum 30 F [-1 C]
Maximum 100 F [38 C]

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