Best pineapple ever!

What's bright yellow, sweet and juicy? The best pineapple ever, that's what!

And I grew it myself!  

Wahoo!  Look what I grew!

This wasn't the first pineapple I've grown - far from it - but it was certainly the biggest, the juiciest and the sweetest one yet.

A bowl full of sweetness!

What makes one pineapple better than another?  Each one I've grown has come from store-bought fruit.  Just your typical grocery store pineapples.  It could be the soil or location, weather conditions or a combination of those factors that enabled this most recent pineapple to develop into such a large and tasty fruit.  I suppose I'll never know for sure.  What I do know, is the delight I've found in growing (and eating!) my own pineapples.

The mother plant behind me has two more suckers on it
that might develop more fruit 

If you haven't tried growing one yourself yet, give it a try.  Pineapples are among the easiest fruit to grow.  Simply cut off the top of a store-bought fruit and place it in a scraped away spot of soil.
 

Lobbed off top ready for planting

Pineapples can be grown in a sunny spot or in the shade.  I've successfully grown them in both.  The pineapple top doesn't need to be buried deeply.  It doesn't need any special soil. Pineapples, which are in the bromeliad family, are no-fuss plants.  Once one has been set in the ground its only requirement is to be left alone.

To learn more about growing pineapples, check out my post from last August:

Pineapples - easy to grow, yummy to eat

Who says you can't grow raspberries in Florida!

We've always called them 'black caps' but most people know them as black raspberries.  

When Ralph and I lived on Cape Cod, picking (and eating!) blackcaps was one of our favorite things to do when the fruit ripened in early summer. Black caps canes grew wild all along the edge of wooded areas. To protect ourselves from the plants' prickly thorns, we'd don long-sleeve shirts and jeans before heading out to the woods to gather our bounty.  

And what a bounty it was!  Small but sweet with slightly tart overtones, wild black caps were the perfect fruit to usher in the start of Cape Cod's short but welcome warm weather season.

Look what I picked!

Fast forward several years.  We moved to Florida in 1987 and found ourselves needing to learn a whole new way of gardening. We were told by experts that so many of the plants we loved in New England would simply not grow in Central Florida's semi-tropical climate.

Including black caps.

For a long time we believed the experts, but that changed about four years ago when a friend who knew how much Ralph missed his berry fix suggested we try planting Mysore raspberries.

Mysore raspberry is a large scrambling shrub native to the lower Himalayas that has adapted well to Florida's limestone or acid sandy soil. Our friend gave Ralph a young plant to begin with and in just one growing season that small start sent out many new shoots and grew considerably taller.

At maturity, Mysore raspberries top out between 10 to 15 ft tall, which, after four years of growing, is about the height of the multi-caned plants now thriving in Ralph's garden.

A clump of Mysore raspberries growing in a planting bed
next to the compost pile

Yesterday I went into the garden to check on the raspberries.  I brought my camera with me because a few days before when I was there (without my camera) I noticed many bees on the raspberry flowers. I wanted to see if they were there again.

Sure enough, they bees were busy buzzing around the pinkish-purple blooms flying from one pretty blossom to another as I followed them with my camera.

When I finished taking pictures, I gathered a small handful of ripe berries to give my husband. Mysore raspberries aren't nearly as prolific as their New England relatives but they still provide a tasty treat for Florida berry lovers.

While Ralph loves the berries, for me it's all about the wildlife and I was more than delighted to see not only such beautiful flowers on the Mysore plants, but to find so many pollinators attracted to the bushes.

If you're a northern transplant who misses growing raspberries, consider adding some Mysore raspberries to your garden.  Below are two nurseries that sell Mysore raspberries.  If you decide to order some or already have a bed of black caps in your garden, let me what you think of the fruit and how they're doing.  Experts tell us one thing, but those of us experimenting in our own backyards are the ones who really know what works and what doesn't.

The more we learn from each other, the better gardeners we all become.

Mysore Raspberry Sources:

Just Fruits and Exotics

Florida Hill Nursery

Snapshots from the beach

Looking back through photos I took last week makes me realize how many wildlife encounters can happen without doing much more than biking, rowing and walking back and forth from the house to the car.

My bike rides either took me along the ocean at low tide or through nearby beachside neighborhoods. At the beach, the waves were wild this past week.

Crash!

And sunrises were as different as they were beautiful!

And while birds at the beach were plentiful, I didn't take many pictures of them this time.

A sandpiper seeking an early morning snack

A flock of brown pelicans flying overhead

I may not have taken many pictures of birds by the ocean but I snapped off quite a few shots of herons and ibises when I rowed down the canal on the west end of our property.

 

 

Biking through residential neighborhoods also yielded some exciting surprises. On several mornings I found myself frequently stopping to photograph interesting things along the way.

In the backyard of one house in Silver Sands I saw a hawk perched on the tip of a topless palm tree.
 

Another day I pulled over to photograph a pileated woodpecker hammering away on a utility pole.

But not all my pictures were of wildlife.  On the same street where I saw the woodpecker I noticed a creative entry display that I just had to photograph.

As well a stone wall punctuated by bromeliads and aloes

And then there was there was the encounter I had with a snake as I was walking down the pathway from our house to the car.

If you've been reading my posts for a while you probably know that I'm a fan of snakes and so I was delighted to notice this slender rat snake basking in a ray of sun in my 'chair' garden.

Despite the cool, windy weather, the beach once again rewarded us with gifts aplenty. Wildlife, flora, beautiful sunrises and sunsets over the lagoon. Happy days.

An excess of plenty

The fruitful season has begun. The wild blackberry vines around the lake are covered with flowers and a few berries on the mulberry trees near the north side of the house have already started to ripen.

Blackberry flowers portend a fruitful season ahead

Without a winter frost to deter growth, our papaya trees continue to produce large, orange-fleshed fruit and the carambola tree is covered with clusters of shiny, yellow starfruit.

Ralph reaches up into a productive papaya tree to harvest a ripe fruit

 

In many yards, loquat trees, which start producing in February, are reaching the end of their season. But at our house several late blooming varieties are still bearing a crop of apricot-colored ‘Japanese plums’, another name for these underappreciated landscape edibles.

Loquats coexisting with a grove of bamboo

In the orchard, our nectarines, peach and plum trees are flowering, but I’m not expecting much of a harvest. In order to produce reliable crops, stone fruits require far more attention - yearly pruning, fertilization and protection from pests - than Ralph and I are willing to provide. Considering the amount of neglect they receive, any fruit those trees give us will truly be a gift.

Peaches aplenty in 2012
We don't expect as big a harvest in 2017

 

But some types of plants actually thrive on neglect and those are the kind of plants I especially love. My Surinam cherry bushes, for instance, look more promising now than ever. In the dozen or so years since I first planted them beneath the shade of a live oak along the driveway, I’ve never seen as many flowers as I’m seeing this year. If even a fraction of those flowers develop into fruit, I’ll be on Surinam cherry overload when picking time rolls around.

Surinam cherries in various stages of ripeness

Pineapples are another fruit requiring little if any attention. Lately I haven’t been eating many pineapples but for several years a few slices of pineapple were a daily part of my diet. I’d buy a pineapple at the store, slice it up and save the crown for planting. The evidence of my consumption can be found tucked under rose bushes, hidden beneath orange cosmos flowers and scattered haphazardly elsewhere around the yard. 

A new pineapple growing amidst a bed of orange cosmos blooms

The lobbed off top would find purchase in the sandy soil and I’d forget all about it until one day while out picking flowers for a bouquet or taking a stroll around the yard, I’d notice a young pineapple starting to develop. A few months later a homegrown pineapple would be ready to pick.

A small but flavorful homegrown pineapple

Pineapples are a type of bromeliad, and like other members of the Bromeliaceae family, they have minimal soil and water needs. I grow them by simply inserting a lobbed off top into a semi-sunny, dry location and then let nature take charge. Over the course of a year, the crown develops into a mature plant producing a brand new pineapple. Delicious to eat and ridiculously simple to grow, just the way I like gardening to be. 

During the years when our four children were young we never had enough fruit to fulfill the needs of our fruit-hungry family. Although we planted our own bananas, pineapples, peaches, plums, nectarines, figs, loquats, persimmons, starfruit, Surinam cherries, blackberries, mulberries, oranges, pomegranates, grapes and avocados, some edibles produced better than others and crops varied from year to year. 

Grandson Atom enjoys a mouthful of black mulberries fresh from the tree

Yet regardless of how great or small a harvest might have been, when the kids were young no harvest was ignored. We picked them all, savoring the flavor of homegrown fruit. What a joy it was to experience.

These days, with only two of us at home, Ralph and I are surrounded by an excess of plenty. Fortunately, my daughter Amber lives nearby and I can mail the occasional “remember your roots” packages to our faraway offspring. But as much as it helps to send care packages to my kids, it still troubles me to see fruit falling to the ground.

More wild blackberries than we can ever pick or eat

These days, our fruitful obsession is feeding the birds, squirrels, feral hogs and other wildlife as much - if not more - than the humans who planted them. 

Squirrel eating fig

But I suppose that’s the way some things go. We plant. We grow. We harvest what we sow. We share when we can with those in need and if some of those recipients happen to have feathers or fur, so much the better. At least the crops will not go to waste.

It’s the start of Central Florida’s fruitful season, for all of nature’s creatures.

Wild hogs feeding at dusk on fallen berries beneath the mulberry trees

Be the garden - simple rhymes for complex times

by Sherry Boas

Step by step

Day by day

Let your heart

lead the way

Up the stairs

Down the rows

To the place
where loving grows

Practice patience

Pull out weeds

Concentrate
on simple needs

Be kind

Be nice

Steadfast...Go slow

Be the garden
that you sow

Step by step

Row by row

Be the garden

that you sow

Whose been nibbling my tomatoes!

One of the first things I do when Ralph and I arrive at our beach house is check out the cherry tomato plants climbing up the stockade fence.

Volunteer cherry tomato plant climbing across the stockade fence

"There's so many ripe tomatoes," I announced after our recent arrival.  "It must have rained here like it did in Groveland."

Various stages of ripeness

Traveling back and forth between two places throughout the month can have its challenges, especially when it comes to gardening with vegetables.  The flowers I grow - mostly succulents and native plants - are fairly tolerant of neglect but vegetable plants tend to suffer when they don't get regular attention.

However, that's not the case with cherry tomatoes, at least not with the ones we grow.  Most of ours are volunteer plants that popped up on their own from last year's dropped fruit. These marble-sized morsels of sweetness behave more like wildflowers than their rather persnickety pedigreed cousins, which helps to explain why it only took me a few minutes after a 10-day absence to fill a large bowl with red orbs.

Life is a bowl of cherry tomatoes

"I'm surprised the birds haven't eaten them," I muttered to myself while Ralph was in the parking lot unloading more supplies from the car.

Cardinals in particular, seem to enjoy eating cherry tomatoes as much as I do.  On many occasions at the beach and at our Groveland home I've watched male and female cardinals pluck off and eat small round fruit one at a time.

Cardinals prefer to pilfer unripe tomatoes

Cherry tomatoes are actually classified as fruit, not vegetables.  But cardinals aren't greedy. One or two tomatoes is all they seem to want before flying off elsewhere in search of seeds and other edibles.

Cardinals make sharing easy.  "There's plenty for all of us," their behavior seems to say, which is how it has always been.

Until this morning.

This morning, while standing at my computer checking Facebook (yes, I know I'm addicted 😏), I noticed a different critter munching away - a squirrel!

A gray squirrel enjoying a feast

More precisely, an Eastern gray squirrel, Sciurus carolinensis, which I call a bushy-tailed rat.  Gray squirrels are members of the rodent family and while these common seen backyard visitors are undeniably cute - all big-eyed and fluffy-tailed - gray squirrels are not known for their abstemious nature.  Once these robust-appetited rodents discover a food source, they feed until the crop is decimated.

With this in mind you might think I'd have rushed outside immediately to chase the varmint away, which is what Ralph started to do until I called him back.

"Wait!" I insisted.  "Let me take a few pictures first."

Oops!
Looks like I've been noticed!

So that's what I did.  As the squirrel remained in place - no fear of humans emanating from this critter - I stepped closer and closer until there were only a few bushy-tail lengths between us and snapped off several shots. Eventually, the hungry nibbler had all he could take of me disrupting his dining experience, and mosied on down the fenceline as if to say, "Okay, I'm moving on for now, but make no mistake - I'll be coming back later for more."

Squirrel with 'take out' food

And I'm sure he will.  Squirrels are resourceful, clever and determined animals but I'd like to think there's a gracious side to their nature as well. There are plenty cherry tomatoes to go around.  For birds, gray squirrels and people to enjoy. All it takes is a little willingness to share. I know that.  The question is, "Does the squirrel?"

Hey, squirrel!
Save some for me!