Brad's Tropical Paradise

Natal plums are wonderful. They have a wonderful green color, grow very slowly, and require very little maintenance. I've had one here by the patio for years and years, and recently I realized that, after all these years, it was finally growing out of its space, so I trimmed it back, and afterwards it looked terrible. So I kept trimming, wondering what to do, until it was very close to being small enough for me to just take out. I put some rocks along the flagstone, which is where it had originally been overlapping. And as I kept trimming it back, it started to look like a tiny tree. I decided to keep going, and prune it as if it were a tree, down to a main trunk, with just a few branches. I've pruned trees before, and the idea is to just create a nice canopy, allowing room so that people can walk underneath it without bonking their head, in this case a person about the size of Stuart Little. Here, I'll zoom in on the trunk. There ya go, a good four inches of clearance for ...

One thing that I've known for a very long time, and yet never seemed to be able to do, was to let the leaves of your daffodils to die back naturally, in order to put energy back into the bulb for next year's bloom. That is, if you trim off the leaves, which I've too often done, you mess up the plant's chances for having wonderful blooms the next year. Yeh, I know that, but every year at this time I've kept snipping, just because I hated looking at the leaves flopping over and turning brown. But this year I think that I've finally got it right, and it's done with rubber bands, and annual flowers. After you've cut off the blooms, and when the leaves start flopping over, gently roll them up and put a rubber band around them. Then your annual flowers will cover that up, and you don't have to look at the fading daffodil foliage. It will turn brown, and then all you gotta do is remember to go pick up the rubber bands. Or you can leave them there, they'...

It's April 11th, and here in the Phoenix, Arizona area, the blooms of the bulbs, and the annuals will be fading away fairly quickly. When the heat comes on (and it's already in the 90s), the season is over.  But I'm expecting the daffodils to return next year, and even multiply, so I'm being very careful not to cut the leaves off, and being sure to allow them to die back naturally (you can see that they're tied up with rubber bands), and I just took this photo as a visual reference for next year. Sadly, I planted the annuals too late in the season for them to be large enough at this point to cover up the rubber-banded daffodil leaves. But there's always next year, and I'll be planting the annuals much earlier so that when the daffodils are finished blooming next year, the coverage will be much better. And in order to do that properly, I'll need to know where the bulbs are so I don't accidentally plant an annual right on top of it. I plant annuals ver...

If you want your daffodils to bloom again the next year, you have to let the foliage die back normally. If you cut the foliage, you cut your chances for next year's bloom. And for a neat gardener, that's hard to do, and it's been mostly impossible for me over the years. But this year I'm trying a trick that I've read about. The blooming is about over for my daffodils, and the foliage is starting to wilt, which looks kinda sad. And it gets worse, because the foliage will start to turn brown. And that's when I've always cut it off way too early. Can you blame me? Well, maybe you can. So this year I planted some annuals around the daffodils, and as they grow they'll hide the foliage, which I will roll up (see the rubber band?) and tuck underneath. From what I've read this will help the daffodils get the energy they next for next year's blooms back into the bulbs, and will cover up the unsightliness. I'll let you know how it goes. Gotta go water ...