What do you Grow?? The Garden Thread

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I ate the first tree-ripened mango yesterday. This is about three weeks earlier than usual. Because the mangoes are very popular with the local wild population - and with one of my dogs! - I have had to put an electric fence around the trees with the ripening mangoes:

[url=[url=https://imgur.com/zXT77TQ][/url]]PortableElectricFence[/url]

This is a portable fence. I had to weed whack grass and miscellaneous herbaceous plants down to the ground. Then walk around the two trees with the fence and connect them up when they get all the way around. They are charged by some equipment that brings the current from the house to the fence, but I don't remember what it is called.

Here are Angie mangoes. Angie is named for the wife of Bill Whitman, who made his money designing surfboards for Florida. He was honored in the East Coast Surfers Hall of Fame. After he got too old to surf, He started growing rare tropical fruit in his yard and is quite well-known among rare fruit enthusiasts. His house was on Bal Harbor, which is an island and the water keeps the air temperature from freezing. He brought in truck loads of the best soil available to a depth of 4 feet. Now that is a garden! He is the only person who has fruited a mangosteen in continental US. (Though I have not kept up with fruiting mangosteen, so someone else might have done it by now.) Mangosteen is considered the Queen of fruits.

[url=[url=https://imgur.com/VxqWske][/url]]Angie[/url]

Mangoes, as well as other tropical fruit trees, produces better tasting fruit after a few years of producing. The first few years, they are not so tasty. This year, this mango was SO TASTY.

The next mango to ripen is Maha Chinook. As you can see it is quite differently shaped than the Angie.
There are hundreds of different varieties of mangoes. I have 7 named varieties and several seedling mangoes.

[url=[url=https://imgur.com/aPqknnd][/url]]Maha Chinook[/url]

Many mangoes are green when ripe. Angie and Maha don't turn color. Other mangoes turn yellow and even red. Some mangoes are supposed to be eaten green and are used in southeast Asia cooking as a vegetable.

Several years ago, my wife came rushing in and screamed for me to come outside. There was something laying on the ground and she didn't know what it was. Initially she thought it was a dinosaur egg. I went outside and pushed it around with a stick. Obviously not a dinosaur egg. So I took it into work and an old timer said, "It's a Paw Paw".



It is the only tropical tree that grows this far north in Indiana. It turns out that we have many Paw Paw trees on our property. It is a relatively short tree with very large leaves. It comes from the same plant family as custard-apple, cherimoya, sweetsop, ylang-ylang and soursop.

Pawpaw fruits have a sweet, custardish flavor somewhat similar to banana, mango, and pineapple, and are commonly eaten raw, but are also used to make ice cream and baked desserts. The fruit have large black seed that take up a large amount of the fruit.

Chilled pawpaw fruit was a favorite dessert of George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson planted it at Monticello, his home in Virginia.

Those are great looking pawpaws, jimmym. We are too far south for pawpaws, but can grow the relatives you mentioned like custard-apple and cherimoya. I grew a custard apple in my yard when I lived in town. Although the fruit was sweet and soft, the taste did not appeal to me. Sweetsop and soursop are too tropical for me to grow.

If anyone interested in tropical fruits gets to Miami/Homestead, there is a garden that has hundreds of rare tropical fruit. They have a ylang-ylang tree, which is the "secret" to Chanel #5.

I now have mango envy.
Those look so delicious.I always heard the best way to eat a ripe one is in the shower.lol
Paw Paws are all over the place here.I think that awful late frost may have gotten them also.
I also have wild persimmon trees.
Maybe the only fruit I get this year will be from raspberries,wine berries and blackberries.I have elderberries also but the birds really really love them.I have to cover the fruit or I get none.I’m thinking brown paper lunch bags on the individual clusters.
It’s been so rainy here I’m having trouble getting the garden planted.On the plus side I don’t have to water and the container plants are thriving.

Garden needs a good weed









Potatoes seem OK after the frost.

Your garden looks very tidy compared to mine.The rain prevented weeding here and the weeds really enjoyed all that water.Looks like we are finally going to dry out.
I will be busy.The ground ivy aka gill-go-the-round has been on the move.At least it smothers out other weeds and pulls up easy.Makes good mulch and the bees like it when it’s blooming.
The wild yam or cinnamon vine is also needing to be eradicated.

Started work for a new customer this Friday morning: the garden was her late husbands and hasn’t been touched beyond lawn-mowing since he died three years ago.
Ground elder, perennial forget-me-not, comfrey and lords-&-ladies have settled in nicely in that time: nothing for it but to painstakingly dig over all the ground between the plants to a depth of eighteen inches one square foot at a time!
(Or should that be ?)

Your potatoes and spinach are looking very well dominikee: have you heard of Japanese Sickle Hoes?
My brother got me one a couple of years ago, relatively expensive but best tool I’ve ever used for quickly knocking back the weeds on ground you can’t dig currently: much easier to control and avoid accidents I find.

Lots of weeds here, broken lawnmower, broken strimmer too but it's nice letting it all go. I don't know the sickle hoe but I used to use a diamond hoe from Holland when I worked at Riverford organic farm, it was pretty amazing but I haven't seen one since. I feel all done in terms of major efforts, I'll sling a bit of compost on the potatoes and wait till the weeds are bad enough to tear great handfuls out. It's been nice eating the veg, mostly spinach but also lettuce, pak choi, radishes and turnips.

Your garden looks very productive, domineekee. Good work. I do have tropical greens I could pick, but by the time it is dinner time, I am too beat to go out and get them. Ridiculous. I think there is an executive function deficit here. On my part, not yours.

I have been eating mangoes and bananas. I don't know what the banana variety is. The bananas are tiny compared to the store bananas, which are all the same variety which I can't remember now either. Cavendish...thank goodness for google. But my bananas are incredibly good tasting and have a slightly moister texture but are also firmer. They are at peak ripeness when the skin begins to turn brown.

The yard-long beans are starting to climb.

We were in the dry season, as in the grass and soil brittle. Then suddenly about a week ago it started raining and raining and raining. Exciting thunder boomers. Plants jumped up and looking good.

I have put in the ground (finally!) two imbe trees that have been growing for 10 years in pots! Garcinia livingstonei. A relative of the mangosteen, but no where near as good.

The pond is full and the creek is running high.

I sit down to rest by the Scarlet Ladies' Tresses which are just at the end of their bloom stalks. I look into one of the last flowers. And I am so happy. I can't imagine anything better than sitting in the shade looking at a native orchid.

One of these:

This is the one I’ve got (Niwaki): they call it a “weeding hoe”.
£18 plus p&p!
However, goes through pretty much everything that isn’t a tree like a hot knife through ice cream
Also durable enough to use as a super-light machete (slashing through brambles etc.)
Probably are other folks who sell them at a less extravagant price...

^ This tool interests me. But do you have to bend over to use it?

Miss Lizard, I don't eat mangoes in the shower, but I do eat them over the sink with water and paper towels nearby. Mango juice will stain cotton. Probably washes right out of polyester, but I don't have any of those.

We have had about 7 inches of rain in the past two week and another five inches forecast for this week along with flood advisories. Too much rain when the mangoes are ripening can lead to cracked fruit OR fruit that tastes watery and diluted.

I had started two types of new tomatoes: seeds from the exceptional volunteer tomato from this spring and some seeds from a tomato variety in Russia that was sent to me, gratis, along with a seed order for goumi. They were really growing well, and I repotted one of each, because I don't really have room or inclination for more tomatoes. Someone ate off the entire volunteer tomato. And then, because I wasn't paying attention, someone else ate up more of the small seedlings. The latter someone turned out to be a cutworm.

So, I have repotted the well-eaten volunteer seedlings and will see if any of them come back.

In my work, the last week of the month is crazy due to the monthly deadlines and that is when I don't look at the plants carefully. That is how the cutworm got so many of the seedlings.

I have now harvested two tomatillos. A half-dozen or so pineapples are now full sized and I'm just waiting for them to turn just the slightest bit yellow. Then I will bring them indoors to ripen so I am not just feeding them to the local wildlife that love ripe pineapple.

^ Tool is about the same size as a trowel, so it isn’t a standing up one.
Quite often when I use it I’m keeping the ground under shrubs clear, so I’m either on all fours or lying in the ground to get access

Yeah, our garden tends to have minimal maintenance at the height of summer due to our workloads: it gets watered and that’s about it!

Hope your mangoes turn out alright through the rain, and same for the munched tomatoes :fingerscrossed:

Cutworms are just evil.
I’m still weedeating because of all the rain.More rain maybe on the way with the remains of Cristobal.(Pronounced here as Crystal Ball lol).
The ground ivy is trying to swallow everything.Must vanquish it.Next attack is on the wild yam.
I have four batteries for the weed eater so it’s on weeds,take that.
If I only recharged as fast.

Here is what I did today:

[url=[url=https://imgur.com/vENzat3][/url]]Mower in Pond[/url]

I hope you got it out okay.

The only thing injured was my dignity.

There are no brakes on the mower.