GROWING & HARVESTING BELLPEPPERS IN MIDDLE OF JANUARY👍

Growing Kale Fall/Winter

I've been reading about which Kale grows well in central Florida, and I've decided to try Red Russian Kale.  It supposedly does very well here over the fall/winter months.

I'm going to plant the seeds Sunday 9/1, and it takes 50-60 days to mature.  So, I should be able to pick kale 10/20 to 11/1 and on.

Kale Links:
https://www.flgardening.com/how-to-grow-kale-in-florida/

Banana Count

This post is all about answering the question "how many bananas"?  But first a few things....

This week was an epic milestone... I got my first offer to buy some P2 bananas!

Plus our friend Bruce asked Mark "how many banana plants do you have"?  Mark's answer was "I have no idea" LOL.  I actually had no idea either!

On Thursday Brock of Florida Fields to Forks brought my delivery of produce share and fruit share, and asked me if I have extra bananas to sell.  I'll have to admit, I have been struggling for years to get past hobby banana grower and to a point where I could reliably have fruit to eat all year.  With the warm winter we had 2018/2019, the bananas at P2 are doing AMAZING.  We had some high winds in a storm yesterday, bringing a banana bunch to the ground so I had to go harvest this morning.  When I went to pick up the banana bunch, it was VERY HEAVY.  I used all my strength to lift it up into LEM's trailer and get it back to the screened in porch so it can ripen safely away from the deer and squirrels.  Once I got in back, Mark and I weighed it... 35 lbs!  Weeeeeeeeeeee.  This bunch is from Swamp Baby, which is an offspring from Swamp King.  Swamp King was once of my first bananas that I bought online.  I put the bananas in several different locations at P2 as kind of a science experiment to see how they did.  Poor Swampy got stuck in 100% water in a very wet location.  When I rescued him a year later, he was just fine, and spent some time in the pool cage before he got a place of honor in Palm Beach.  Anyhow, Swamp King's baby (Swamp Baby) has made some incredible bananas.  35 lbs!

So, how many bananas?  I did a walkabout and counted this morning.  Every pup counts as one.  We have 200 banana plants!  So yep, I think it's highly likely that I'll have some extra bananas to sell or barter very soon.  The banana log will help me to know when it's time to harvest them.

I did a bit of research this morning, and wholesale prices for specialty organic bananas are about $1 a pound.  Not bad!  

P2 Food - Update on Tropical Tuesday 7-8-2019

I'm very excited about food here at P2, and how what is available evolves over time.  True, Mark and I couldn't survive right now on only P2 food, so Tropical Tuesday hasn't begun yet.  But we're getting closer!

The big challenge is protein, but I'm pretty confident that we could get our hands on some chickens if we absolutely had to and survive from eggs and chicken as our protein source.   Oh yeah, and tilapia!  In the meantime (pre-apocalypse LOL) I'm thrilled to have harvestbox.com providing us amazing beef, chicken and salmon.

Other than protein, we have gobs of great veg and fruit here at P2.  I am especially excited about figs right now, since the front drive fig tree has given me about 20 figs over the past few weeks.  This is the "breba" crop late spring/early summer.  There is another crop coming, much bigger, late summer/early fall.

Also, the food forest fig trees are excelling, and I expect them to be making fruit starting in 2020.  We have Ischia and LSU doing amazing, with the others like Celeste and Turkey right behind.

I have been studying when to propagate figs, and which trees can be propagated.  It turns out that new trees (like all of my figs except front drive fig tree) need another year before I start lopping off branches and propagating them.  However, this was the right year to find three non-productive pencil thick+ branches off of front drive fig and cut them off to propagate.  I did that Sunday... and I'm very excited to see how long it takes for those three cuttings to make roots.  I also bought a few cuttings on eBay which I'll get this week and plant.  If ALL of these fig trees make 20-50 figs 2x a year, I will be rolling in figs soon enough.

The sweet potatoes are doing great.  The sweet potato cage (see post in June) is stunning... the vines are rich and green and prolific, and I'm certain that the cloth pots are filled with young sweet potatoes.  If the regular sweet potatoes take 100 days to mature, I should be able to start pulling sweet potatoes out at the end of July, which OMG is only a few weeks away.  How time flies... it feels like yesterday when I got the first Gurney's sweet potato delivery on 4/24/19.  Those went right into the pots in the sweet potato cage.

I added new aluminum hanging tags to the flourishing fruit trees, as the wood stakes are kind of rotting over the last 2 years.  So hopefully the plain aluminum tags will last longer.  The dwarf mulberry didn't produce a lot of fruit this year, but the berries it did produce were SO good I ordered a Pakistan mulberry tree and got it delivered today.  The pictures for Pakistan Mulberries are amazing - the berries are long and sweet and are considered the world's longest mulberries (4" long).  I'm going to plant that beast (25' wide AND tall) away from the house, but not too far away so that the deer get all the good fruit.  "These ruby red-purple mulberries have sweet, raspberry-like flavor with low acidity that is good for fresh eating or making cobblers."  Can't wait!

So - that's the update.   As of today, here's what we have to eat on a regular basis.

• Okinawa spinach (delicious and readily available)
• Cranberry hibiscus
• Malabar spinach
• Bananas (LOTS)
• Papaya (occasional)
• Figs (2x a year)
• Sweet potatoes (Purple now, all varieties in a few weeks)
• Tangerine (the west tree is still prolific with about 200 baby green tangerines right now)
• Star Fruit (Yum - ready to produce in a few weeks)

 

Sweet Potato Cage 6-28-19

Here it is.... the "2018 tomato cage" repurposed as the new 2019 Sweet Potato Cage.  Much better I think!  Whereas the tomatoes were frail, picky, and prone to rotty, fungally things, the sweet potatoes are exuberant and glad to be here in HOT humid Florida.  The sweet potato cage features the six varieties from Gurneys:

• Beauregard
• Bush Porto Rico
• Georgia Jet
• O'Henry
• Covington
• Vardaman

There's a sad ending to sweet potato south - the deer won, the sweet potatoes were snacked on and decimated, and bunny was exonerated from his false accusation.  I gave up...  it's not worth putting up a wall to keep the deer out when I can have a gorgeous sweet potato cage closer to the house where I can keep an eye on it and deer tend not to lurk.  BUT just to be sure, the sweet potato cage has a netting around it to deter Bambi, Ginger, and Ginormous (our deer family).  It's too magical to see the deer in the night eating from Corn Mountain - why would we want them to go away?  I just hope the netting below keeps Sweet Potato Cage safe from deer snacking.

The glorious sweet potato cage complete with vines climbing the strings secured with plastic clamps.

The vines love climbing the strings with the plastic clamps.

It's nice to see the sweet potatoes happy.

Sweet Potato Cage - More - 6-28-19

I added the pots in front of the grow bags on the ground to provide "extra" sweet potatoes.  There are three large pots on the ground with Oriental sweet potato, and three pots of Jewel Yam.  The Oriental and Jewel were each started from a single organic sweet potato from the health food store.

The grow bags are a great solution.  They're lighterweight than pots even with dirt, and they have handles so they are actually moveable (with help).

They look so happy - and this is after 10 days of drought and temperatures over 100.

Another happy shot of the long vine up the string trellis using clamps.

More Sweet Potatoes

In addition to the sweet potato cage, I've got six half whiskey barrels filled with sweet potatoes:  Oriental sweet potatoes, jewel yam, and purple sweet potatoes.  They're doing great and starting to flower already.

Yes there are six whiskey barrels under the mountain of vines :D

Star Fruit 6-28-19

I have been ready for some delicious starfruit smoothies now that it's summer, but I couldn't remember from last year when the starfruit are ripe and ready.  When you walk past the starfruit tree, there doesn't appear to be any starfruit growing, but rather only a few flowers.  Once you get under the canopy of the tree and look up, THEN you can see the plethora of fruits growing happily.  Wow, I expected to find a few, but I was thrilled to see the same crazy numbers as we had last year.  There are HUNDREDS already.  Mark and I are going to come up with a net of some sort to catch the ones that fall, rather than letting them fall to the ground and get wasted.

Papaya Trees 6-28-19

 The back papaya trees, Pip and Pop, have a new "Peep" companion.  Original Peep was done, so I planted a new 3rd back papaya tree. I circled them in the picture so you can see new Peep.  Pip's papayas are too high now, so she's purely a "statement papaya" and not a food source.  The prolific papaya tree is in Palm Island, and she produces fruit every month or so.  But Pip and Peep are still amazing, beautiful, and fragrant, and the original star papaya trees.

Pip, Pop, and new Peep.

The papaya canopy by the pole barn.  I planted a few extra papayas in the ground, and they "accidentally" took off and became a beautiful papaya forest.

Food Forest Update 6-28-19

 It's about time for an update to the food forest progress.  I'd love to say that it's producing loads of fruit, but it's only been about a year so it's too soon for a huge harvest.  I'm happy to say that I have been eating fruit from the overall P2 garden, but the total 2019 fruit count is about 15 tangerines, 5 figs, 10 bananas, and 2 papayas.  And none of this is from the official "Food Forest", which I really got going only last year in the pictures below.

Part 2 of the food forest is the "main" part, with 2 mango trees, 2 avocado trees, 2 fig trees, 1 dwarf mulberry, a banana tree and lots of sweet potato plants.

Part 1 of the food forest has loquat, guava, barbados cherry, and several figs.

The newly added western wall has papayas, lots of bananas, and a few figs.

The cranberry hibiscus grows strongly in the summer... the leaves are edible and very tangy, not my first salad choice but nice if I'm ever real hungry.

Tropical Tuesday - Update

I had one of those "aha" moments last week whilst I was perusing the internet...  Some fruits make a delicious chutney, India style.  One of those fruits that is commonly used for chutney because it's so delicious with spices is starfruit (or carambola).

I skimmed about 10 different recipes and came up with my own.  It's AMAZING.  I now put a spoonful of starfruit chutney on my salad and vegetables... so delicious.

With that addition to Tropical Tuesday, I'm going to update my current and future Tropical Tuesday lists.  If you'll recall, Tropical Tuesday is that mythical future Tuesday when I eat only what grows at P2.  I could start now, but it would be a lean day to say the least!  I'll hold out for sweet potatoes this fall before I start...

CURRENT (as of 1/26/19):

• Okinawa spinach
• Malabar spinach
• Tangerines
• Calmondin
• Katuk
• Cranberry hibiscus
• Starfruit Chutney
• Bananas
• Papaya

FUTURE:

• Sweet potato
• Seminole Pumpkin
• Fruit trees (avocado, mango, loquat, lychee, guava, strawberry guava, fig)

Lunch!

Fresh from the P2 garden:  Cranberry Hibiscus, Okinawa Spinach, and Malabar Spinach (plus a few Cherry Tomatoes).  Mark and I are eating "leaves" now, chopped into a salad for a delicious lunch.

Planning for Tropical Tuesday

I read on a blog (I'll add the reference some day....) about a lady who once a week on a particular day only eats what she grows in her garden.  I am planning now to do that soon.  Lets just say its motivation to grow some type of delicious food variety that's harvestable all year, every day of every month!

I'm waiting for the tomatoes to start to ripen before I start...  but I'll be doing Tropical Tuesday.

I'm going to keep this post updated with the foods available on P2; when the list is big enough, I'll start Tropical Tuesday.

As of 5/4/2018, foods available are:

• Okinawa spinach (daily)
• Malabar spinach (daily)
• Katuk (daily)
• Calamondin (one a day)
• Bean sprouts (daily)

• Seminole Pumpkin (rarely)
• Bananas (rarely)
• Papaya (rarely)

Not enough food quite yet!

Future foods:  Sweet potato, and all of the fruit from the fruit trees