Brad's Tropical Paradise

If you're like me, and you live in the Phoenix area, you get all excited when the weather cools down from, like crazy hot to actually feeling pretty good early in the morning, and you want to plant annuals. In past years as soon as it's September I've gone crazy and planted a lot of annuals, like petunias, just to see them die in the afternoon heat, which continues all through September. That is, cool weather annuals need to wait to be planted until it's cool all day, not just feeling coolish in the morning. So this year I planted moss roses, and they're great. The petunias will have to wait for October, or November. Moss rose, or portulaca, really does look like nothing until it blooms. If you pass over it at your local Home Depot, I can't blame you. But when it does start blooming, it's a knock-out. And it loves heat! I planted some portulaca along the southern exposure of my garden, and it's doing fine. There were no blooms for about a week, an...

I like my garden. I feel better around plants, around trees, around foliage, around flowers. I spend a lot of time in my backyard, and when I visit places I go sit outside. As I ease into the age where "everyone is about the same age" - from 50 to 100, it seems very natural for me. Gardening is a gentle thing to do, it's not hang-gliding, or motorcycle racing (neither of which I ever did!). I've been gardening since I was about 23. For me, it started when I moved into a little converted garage in Tempe, where I lived for two years while I went to ASU. And I really don't know why, but it bothered me that everything around me was either dead, or weeds out of control. So I started puttering around. I got permission from my landlord to turn on the irrigation system, I bought a lawnmower at a garage sale. And I transformed the place. My basic education of how to grow things came from, believe it or not, an article in "High Times" (I have no idea why ...

If you live where tropical plants can be planted outdoors, such as in the Phoenix area, you will need to fertilize them. All of the beautiful weather in the world won't be enough if they're "starving to death" for want of fertilizer. Of course, you could pay a lot of money for fertilizer, you could discuss the different fertilizers on discussions on the web, but in the meantime if your tropical plants are out there starving to death, you should give them something. And believe it or not (sorry, Marketing people), all-purpose fertilizer spikes are great. And you can usually find them at Dollar stores, or Walmart. What I've discovered over the years is that the medium size is the right kind to use outside. I've used the little narrow ones (that are meant to be pushed into a pot indoors) and I've tried the big ones that need to be pounded in with a hammer. What I really like is the medium ones - they're just the right size - not so narrow that they...

If you're new to the world of cycads, and have just started hanging around cycad people (who tend to be middle-aged guys like me), you will see a lot of excitement about flushes. A flush is when a cycad grows. Now, you may be saying "big deal, don't all plants grow?" Yes, but most plants grow all of the time, or at least most of the time. Cycads tend to do absolutely nothing for eleven months out of the year, and then they suddenly start growing. That's a flush. Most of them, like my cycad dioon spinulousum in the photo at the top of this post, grow only once a year. Once. So, if you don't know about flushes, it just looks like what a palm tree does every day, growing new leaves. But cycads aren't palms, they aren't even related. They just look like palms. They're a completely different, and weird, kind of plant. And they're much more ancient. They were on the planet long before flowering plants (and that includes palm trees) appeared. Y...

If you have a garden like mine, you're always pruning something. That is, you're always using your clippers. I've gone through a lot of them in the past twenty years and I decided a long time ago to buy 'em cheap, and replace them regularly. I'm talking about hand pruners here. I started with some expensive old-fashioned "secateurs" - you can still get the classic kind that can be resharpened, and cost a lot of money. My experience with these was poor as they tended to lose their ability to stay locked shut because of the little metal piece in the middle not quite catching. I'm sure it was the latest thing 100 years ago, but technology has changed. Old-fashioned secateurs. Very expensive, can be resharpened, and I hate them. The little metal catch is a major pain to try to use. Still, they look nice, and would make a nice expensive gift for your gardening friend. Don't get one for me, please. The reason I like the new ones is that they ...

It's the first week of September here at the Tropical Paradise (which is in the Phoenix, Arizona area) and I just saw the first Cape Honeysuckle flower yesterday. And that means that cooler weather is (finally!) on its way. Because Cape Honeysuckle blooms in cool weather. If you know what to do for the plant, it will give you outrageous blooms all winter. But you have a decision to make. If you want full, dense foliage, then you won't have many flowers. That is, if you want to trim it to look like a bush, you will be, naturally, trimming the flower buds off. Compare it to a rose bush. If you trimmed a rose bush with hedge trimmer, you'd get a nice, neat bush with plenty of foliage and few flowers. It's the same with Cape Honeysuckle. Since I'd like flowers this winter, I started some drastic trimming today. But not with hedge trimmers! I clipped by hand, inspecting very carefully as I went along. If I saw a flower bud, I left it. And that means that the plant...

If you're new to the world of cycads, you may not be familiar with how exciting it is to see a cycad flush. A flush, by the way, is when the leaves of cycad suddenly start growing. And cycads only do this once a year (rarely twice and very rarely more). That is, for eleven months of the year, they just sit there. Then in summer (which in the Phoenix area is from April to September), they flush. So every day in the heat of the summer I wander around my garden and look at the middle of my cycads. Most of the time the center is tight - but when they start to spread out and you can start to see something, well, it's pretty darned exciting. A flush is beginning! Once it starts, it will change, dramatically, every day until the new leaves have finished growing. By the way, don't touch them! The new leaves are soft, and if they get damaged while in that state, they will stay damaged when they harden off. So leave them alone! Stop throwing that football around! I have a flushi...

If you've just discovered the world of cycads, and are ready to start your collection, that's great. I've had a wonderful "addiction" to these plants for about twenty years now, and as addictions go, it's pretty healthy. However, like any addiction, it can get expensive, and it can get overwhelming. So my recommendation is to start out slowly. I started with "sago palms" (cycas revoluta ), which are very common here in the Phoenix area. They're much cheaper than the more exotic types of cycads, but they're still not cheap compared to, say, an ordinary little palm tree. But cycads aren't ordinary little palm trees, and you already know that. So go get a sago palm. Yes, you should call it a sago palm, that's what the people at Home Depot call it. At some point you're gonna have to speak Latin, but not quite yet. Plant it in the most shade you can find on your property (yes, sagos can take sun, but we're just starting out ...