Brad's Tropical Paradise

Some time ago, a young idiot (me) forgot where the misting system trunk line was, and started digging a hole for some plants. Unfortunately, this nicked the line, which caused it to fail yesterday. So I will do the repairs, and be sure to put rocks on top to clearly indicate to the older me not to dig there in the future! Anyway, this is a high-pressure system, so there is no such thing as a *leak*. If any part fails, even a little bit, you will have a huge gusher of water spraying into the air. So it's important to do a solid repair. You can see where I had done a repair earlier, using brass connections. I will do the same here, and just need to get them at Sine Hardware at 54th Avenue and Myrtle here in Glendale. If I can't find them there, I will brave Home Depot for them. It's a standard brass connector, so somebody in town will have it. The last one I got at Sine, and hopefully it's not one of those kind of things that gets *discontinued*. I have taken a phot...

As a typical American, I am ignorant of Celsius. But unlike a typical American, I want to learn. And I thought that the best way to learn is to not do what they tried to teach us in school, conversions. I didn't learn the Fahrenheit system by using math. I learned to associate certain numbers with whether it was hot or cold. So, to learn Celsius, I am going to do the same thing. Luckily, I live in Arizona, and really only have to see from 0 to 50. Yeah, it can get a little below freezing, and a little above 120F here, but not often. So, the midrange, in the 20s is comfortable. We get a lot of days like that here in The Tropical Paradise! Right now, at the beginning of our summer season, which unfortunately starts in May, the temperature is moving into the *uncomfortable* zone, that is, the 30s. Luckily, I have good air conditioning in my house! As the summer progresses, it will go into the *ridiculously hot* zone, which will be the 40s. There is something nice about Celsi...

A blog just means a web log. That is, a journal. I've been writing in this journal for several years now, and find it very therapeutic. Like the other blogs I write, I hope that it helps me to communicate with people of similar interests to mine, and give my friends a break from having to listen to me talk about this stuff. Anyway, I won't go into details on how to create a blog technically, I will just recommend that you use Google Blogger (which is what this is), and then just follow their directions. Yeah, you gotta create a name, and set up a password and all of that stuff. It's annoying, but you just have to do it once. My background is as a Graphic Designer and teacher, and I do appreciate it when someone explains things in as concise a manner as they can. Many times I'll go back to try to remember something that I've done in the garden, and if I find the prose style annoying, I make a note to make it clearer the next time I write. Here is what I suggest...

The area that is south of where the artificial turf ends, I call The Outback. This is an area that gets some brutal afternoon sun in the summer, so delicate plants can't live there. I know, I've planted a lot of things there that are now in *plant heaven*. So, here is what seems to be doing well: • Agaves. The nice silver-blue one there on the left I got from a friend in Los Angeles many years ago. It's an agave Parryi, and unlike what most people imagine an agave to be, it has stayed very small, and pups very little. It's really a miniature plant, so this is a giant miniature. Is that like a jumbo shrimp? At this size, they are very expensive, so the ones I've purchased have been smaller. Speaking of miniature agaves, there are several here. The green ones with the yellow stripes I got at Home Depot. I've seen plenty of them around the neighborhood, and they also don't become giants. Same with the green ones, which were given to me by a plant expert fri...

It's May 23rd here at The Tropical Paradise and I have to admit that the cannas look great. Like everything else here, they started as an experiment, and unlike most things, they have been successful. I have a very good *selective memory*! Anyway, I've had them for several seasons now, and have learned a few things about keeping them at their best. Unfortunately, cannas are a lot of trouble to maintain, and can look ratty very quickly. This is what I have learned: • Cut them back hard. Be brave. After a stalk flowers, I get in there and cut it to the ground, or as low as I can reach. I have a small curved saw that I use for the larger stalks. These plants are grown for their beautiful tropical foliage, not the flowers, so I let the flowers bloom and then cut them back right away. I have access behind the plants - a space of a couple of feet between them and the wall, so I can get back there. Having this type of access is a gardening trick that I learned the hard way - by ...

One of the things that surprised me when I started learning about caring for a tropical garden was the cost of fertilizer. If you have a large property with a lot of tropical plants, it can cost you the big bucks every month just to keep those hungry mouths fed! The lesson that I took away from that was that tropical plants need a regular feeding of fertilizer. Personally, I like to call it plant food, but it really doesn't matter what you call it, and unless you have nothing but cactus and dirt in your garden, you need to feed. And, at the risk of sounding like I'm ranting (I've been doing this long enough, I have earned the right to rant!), you can go onto forums that discuss the correct fertilizer, you can read blog posts that talk about ratios of this and that in fertilizer, but if your plants are out there starving to death, you really are better off getting them some food and feeding them. Of course, I have tried everything. I have the expensive Osmocote that ...

Like so many things here at The Tropical Paradise, I don't really know if the misting system actually helps or not. I've had it here for over a decade, and I would like to think that it adds humidity and moisture to the plants, but I really don't know. The air is very dry here in the desert. And it's the dryness of the air that limits growth of most tropical plants. Of course, it makes living here very comfortable for human beings, who really don't care for humidity and heat, but it makes it uncomfortable for tropical plants. Anyway, the misting system here is simply the ordinary kind that you see along the edges of patios. I got it at Home Depot. I've added 3" brass risers (which I get online) because the line is lying just under the surface, and the mister heads get covered up pretty easily there. I also try to *disguise* the mister heads - you can see one there behind the rock. That also keeps me from accidentally stepping on them, or kicking them,...

All gardens have focal points. In fact, all spaces have them. It's simply a design term that means where the eye focuses right away. So, doing a focal point is not difficult, the trick to it is making the eye go where you want it to. As I was sitting outside yesterday, I was noticing that the area right in front of me, while it was coming together nicely with the new agaves, was missing a focal point. So I put that piece of petrified wood, that I got at The Top of the World a few months ago, there. The goal of a focal point is to draw the eye without being jarring. Since the petrified wood is a slightly different color, it does draw the eye. But it's not a plastic gnome or anything like that, that draws the eye and looks ridiculous. In fact, it looks even better up close.

I've been fiddling with the area just in front of one of my nicest cycads, a dioon edule. This past fall I planted some bulbs, which turned out to be a failure. In fact, this area just screamed out *failure!* for months. So I am doing some redesigning of this very visible area. It has a western exposure, so it gets hot, but it gets some shade from the olive tree, and shade from the house, in the late afternoon. So, it's not really the *fires of hell*, but it's pretty rough going for plants in the summer. As you can see, I have planted different species of miniature agaves. And that's a sansevieria (a type of *snake plant*) in the center. Right now I'm not convinced of the little agave that the Moai is frowning at. Hopefully I will be able to replace it with an aloe. This area will also need more pointy rocks, and river rocks, to help fill in the spaces as the plants grow in. By the way, be double-dog sure of the species of agave that you are planting. Only get...

I invested in a new cache pot for the Kentia palm yesterday. It's an urn style, made of plastic, which I got at Target, and I am hoping that it will take the plant *to the next level*. By the way, a *cache pot* just means a decorative pot that surrounds the actual pot that the plant is in. I've had this tree for a little over a year now, and it's still in its original pot, as specified by  Kentia palm expert  +Kevin Williams  , but I figure that in a year or so I'll actually need to repot it, and this larger cache pot will easily accommodate that. I'll see what Kevin says. In addition to putting it in its new home, I did some major surgery. I cut off the longest branch and the plant will look a bit lop-sided until that new spear (you can see it on the left) starts to fill out. It will! Inside of the pot are a couple of big pieces of flagstone, which I used to lift the plant up to its proper height and to insure that the trunk was straight. This plant originall...

Although a sunny area is usually seen as cheerful, here in the Phoenix area, where it gets REALLY hot in the summer, it's a hazard to your plants. It's May 9th, and as I was drinking my coffee this morning, I noticed something that will be happening from now until the after the summer solstice (mid June), the sun will be hitting the north-facing walls. You might say, *it's only morning sun!*, but in Phoenix the morning sun can be brutal. And an area that has been in shade up to now will have to deal with the harshest summer sun in the world. Luckily, this area is also along an east-facing wall, and has a patio cover, but I will need to bring that Kentia palm back into the house pretty soon, or it will sunburn. Yes, even in early morning. I really, really, hate the idea of setting up shade cloths, etc., but I may do something temporarily this year as this is the first time I've had plants on and around the Tiki bar. There are so many drawbacks to putting up shadi...

If this is going to be your first summer in Phoenix, Arizona, you will very quickly realize why prices are so much lower than in Southern California, and why it's less crowded. It gets hot. Really hot. I moved to Phoenix when I was 19, went to ASU, and then spent several years jostling the crowds and paying way too much for everything in Southern California, and returned to Phoenix in my thirties. After all this time I am still delighted by the lack of traffic, and the lower prices in Phoenix as compared to Los Angeles. However, I do miss the tropical vegetation of Southern California. The bad news is that it will be ridiculously hot from now (May) until September. Even in the shade, even at night, it's brutally hot. So, if you're used to planting in spring, you really shouldn't. It's kind of like facing a Minnesota winter - you just wait it out. There is no point in planting anything right now. Right now is the time to double-check that your automatic wat...