Brad's Tropical Paradise

One of the things I love about living Phoenix, as compared to Minneapolis, is that there are no mosquitos, and it doesn't rain. Except for when it does rain (which is rare), and there are mosquitos. If you understand what I mean. My friends back in Minnesota would scoff at the tiny number of mosquitos that I get here, but I don't like them, so I deal with them. Now calm down here, my garden doesn't have standing water. Of course not! It's been a very rainy month, and after each rain I go out and double-check that there's no standing water for mosquitos to breed in. I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about adult mosquitos, who don't need standing water, but are searching for blood. My blood. Even the best-kept garden will have mosquitos after the kinds of rain we've had recently. At the risk of overstating the obvious, they can fly. They may have bred elsewhere, but they can hunt in my garden. And it's like dealing with flies, the best...

I was talking to one of my childhood friends who stayed in the old neighborhood in Minneapolis, and he asked me if it ever got to freezing in Phoenix. It was in the seventies when I was talking to him, and he was watching snow fall, so it seems a reasonable question. He was actually surprised when I told him that yes, it gets to freezing in Phoenix (32F) and I've even seen it in the twenties here in my backyard in Glendale (a suburb of Phoenix). And some of my gardening friends around the valley have reported below that, down to 17. If you're like me, from back east, even thinking about cold in Phoenix seems to be ridiculous. Compared to Minneapolis, Phoenix never gets cold. But as far as your plants are concerned, it does. The ability of a plant to withstand cold is called "Hardiness". You can Google how hardy a plant is, and you'd be wise to check that before you plant it in your garden. There are a lot of wonderful and beautiful plants that will do fine ...

If you understand germination and photosynthesis, you can prevent weeds and kill them in your garden. If you don't, you're really better off staying away from these techniques. So if you're just guessing, or trying to trust the "nice clerk at Home Depot", I recommend that you just wait until your weeds grow, and then go out there and dig them up. I've done a lot of research on this, and have been around a lot of plant people, so I'm comfortable using controls, which you can buy at any Garden Center. I've been doing the "one-two punch" for weeds here at the Tropical Paradise for over twenty years, and it's something that all of this rain reminded me that I needed to do, so I did it today. If you have an understanding of how all of this works, you start with a weed preventer, which comes in granules. Any brand will do, and all you do is sprinkle it all over the place, and water it in. Or if it's gonna rain, even better. No, it wo...

If you've seen palm trees without any leaves on the top in an area where otherwise plants are doing fine, chances are you're just seeing them die of old age. I see a few of them here in Phoenix, and this past summer I saw a lot of them in Los Angeles. It does seem strange, but yes palm trees die of old age. In fact all trees die eventually, even the ancient ones in California will die some day, and all trees are different. The typical palm trees that you see in Phoenix and in Los Angeles can live up to 100 years, which sounds like forever, but it's really not. So the ones that were planted, for example, in Beverly Hills in the 1920s are approaching the end of their lives. The neighborhood where I took the photo at the top of this post is only about thirty years old, so the palms trees probably aren't dying of old age, they really can't be that old. But that's what dead palm trees look like - just big trucks with no leaves on top. When the leaves stop grow...