Summer heat and some things sweet

The end of July has finally arrived and that gets me a little happier. It's almost time to start a few things from seed and to get ready for the Fall growing season. But just because it's Summer doesn't mean nothing grows here in Florida.We've had several watermelons and a couple nice sweet pineapple and papaya to eat and share with the neighbors. The sweet potatoes are taking over and I am going to harvest one bed today.

We had success with some of the herbs but the red potato pieces I planted did nothing. They started to grow then abruptly died. Here are a few pics of what we have going on today.

Along the east side of my house the papayas have really taken off and the small avocado is loaded with fruit. Several avocados have just fallen off but I think it is because the tree is still very small. I'll be surprised if most of these grow to maturity.

Here the Carambola is really putting out a lot of flowers. The tree has gotten much larger than it was in the Spring and hopefully will produce a large crop this Fall.

Here is what is left of an Everglades tomato that grew by itself along the fence. We harvested lots of the small and very tsty fruit from it for several months. It just grew and produced all Spring even through the drought we had going on without ever being watered or complaining. Then again Everglades tomatoes are native to Florida from what I understand so they grow pretty well without help here. It is full of Tomato Hornworms now and pretty much stripped of foliage. I keep looking for signs of parasitic wasps on the hornworms but none yet.

My Florida Prince peach has really branched out with new growth so hopefully we will get some peaches next Spring. I think it only requires 150 or so chill hours to produce but if Winter is anything like the last one we will be lucky to 15 chill hours. Let's hope for some cold this year.

Here the two blueberry plants that actually did something seem to be pretty happy. I fertilized them real well with some organic acid mix fertilizer from Groworganic.com that I ordered a couple years ago on sale. They seem to love it.

Now on to the sweet potatoes. They love the hot weather and are taking over this section of the garden. The variety is Beauregard and they were planted on April 20th.

 Sweet potatoes are in the Morning Glory family and some times you will get some blooms on them. As I was cutting away the vine from the bed I am harvesting today I found one.

I also found that everywhere the vines touched the mulch they began sending out new roots which suspect would end up resulting in more tubers. This gave me an idea to try next time I grow them. When I first plant the slips I will let them grow and as they vine out I will cut some off and root them in some water. Then set them out in another bed and do it again a few times. Maybe this way I can stagger the harvest out. These are supposed to be mature in 90 days and since our hot weather can be much longer than 90 days I should get a couple crops from them.

As I cut away the vines I found some animal has been digging in the bed and eating the tubers right at the top of the soil. I think I am going to have to lay some fencing over the top of the bed next time to keep the animals out.

Here is a good sign as I started digging  around.

This is what I ended up with. Not too bad. Also I only found one grub in the bed where I dug. Last year grubs had infested my beds and pretty much destroyed most of my sweet potatoes. This year I sprayed the beds with parasitic nematodes for the grubs and it seems to have worked very well.

Here is some damage where the invader ate part of the roots. Also I found several large skins right at the surface of some of the plants where they were completely eaten or I would have gotten a few more larger sized tubers. Oh well, I'll remember that next time and plan to remedy it.

 Here I have planted the shoots off the sides of the pineapple in pots ready to grow the next crop. Also we have another one beginning to form a fruit.

That's it until next time. Now on to decide what we will be starting from seed and planning on where everything will go in the beds for the Fall season.