Brad's Tropical Paradise

I'm doing some rearranging of things in this corner of my garden, and will be moving a cycad over just a few feet. But there are a couple of things to do before moving day. The most important (which is already here) is that the soil temperature needs to be warm. Moving cycads in cold temperatures just encourages root rot, so this is the time - it's the last week of May, and the air temperatures are hitting the 90s, and the 100s, so the soil isn't hot yet, but it's certainly not cold. The next week or so will be perfect. Another vitally important thing to do is to wait until the plant has stopped flushing. That is, if there's new growth, to wait until the leaves harden off. This may only be a few days, because cycads flush quickly. Of course they do that only once a year, so you shouldn't disturb a cycad at that time, or the flush will stunt. I figure that I'm a couple of days away from it being safe. The inner leaves still feel softer than the outer lea...

Petunias are wonderful plants. They flower like crazy, and even the foliage is attractive, with a bit of a tropical shape. And they even smell good! So to me they're worth the trouble of planting them every year. And you have to do that, because petunias are annuals, and that means that they only grow for one season, and then they die. So don't panic if your petunias look like the ones in the photo - if they've been in the ground for several months. All of the water and fertilizer in the world won't keep an annual alive once it's done its thing. The only thing to do is to remove it, wait for the next season and plant a new one. In the meantime there's some cleanup that you have to do. Here in the Phoenix, Arizona area, annuals are planted at the beginning of winter (it never snows here) and they die when the heat starts coming back, which is does in May. A nice sunny location this past winter has turned into an area that is way too hot, and so the petunia...

I like palm trees. They really make a "tropical paradise" in my backyard. My problem, like many other people's, is that I have a small suburban lot. And full-sized palm trees here would just mean that I would be "looking at telephone poles" as I sat in my backyard. Scenic for people from a distance, but no so much for me. So I discovered the perfect palm tree - a miniature, called a dwarf date palm. You can get them anywhere, at nurseries, at Home Depot, just about anywhere that sells tropical plants, and they're very common, and inexpensive. Of course, they're miniatures, so they'll never grow to be as tall as full-sized palms. And that's the point. The ones I have here I planted over twenty years ago, and they're really looking their best. I paid $1.99 for them at K-Mart in 1995, and they've been growing steadily ever since. They're what you would call "big miniatures" now, kinda like jumbo shrimp. If you don't wa...