Greetings Growers & Lovers of Green Things

The Tropical Grower welcomes you to the online version of Our Garden. Check out our What’s Bloomn’ slideshow featuring last week’s flowers, cruz the latest topics at the Blog Page for information, enjoy the Photos, or just check out what’s happening this week in Garden Dirt. While we are Growing Tropical, growing is for everyone, and we’re here to share the green.

Garden Dirt

September 21, 2026

HELLO FALL!

LOL.  We don’t actually have Fall or traditional seasons at all.  There’s the Rainy Season and the Dry Season.  We do, however, have shorter days, just like everyone else, and Pumpkin Spice.  Woo-Hoo!  The mornings are cooler, mostly due to rain after dark or in the evenings.  Everything sits wet all night, helping to create that distinct Fall smell in the mornings.  LOL.  The Fungi love it.  So, it feels like Fall and smells like Fall.  All the Fall planting doesn’t hurt either, or our Orange and Black decorations.  LOL!  But, it’s still hot and rainy here, and the only leaf shed we get is from storms.  We’re still lush and green.

The good news for us, and our Fall Crop, is we’ll get about an hour more sunlight a day than the rest of the US through the winter.  Perks of Growing Tropical.  Woo-Hoo!  Funny fact: we still complain mercilessly about the reduced daylight hours.  LOL.

The truth is we only need about 6 hrs of sunlight for a great crop.  There are only 2 traditional vegetables we can easily plant in direct sun and not kill: Corn and Broccoli.  Everything else, even our light lovers like Tomatoes and Cabbage, do better if we give them a bit of shade, especially during the hottest part of the day.  In fact, most of the Veggies prefer partial shade or only morning light.  We tend to go heavy on the shade now and open up more light as the winter progresses.  The planting beds were made that way, in areas that get more light in the Fall/Winter months when the days are shorter.  Some of that was trial and error.  We burnt a number of crops.  LOL!

Seeds

Speaking of shade, we tried a new shade cloth over some areas where we dropped seeds.  Mostly, because we want Cucumbers.  While we had lovely Cucumbers in the Traditional Vegetable & Herb Garden before the trees collapsed on it, we haven’t quite got the micro-climate reestablished.  And, we’ve tried to grow them everywhere else with no luck.  The problem is they need deep roots, lots of not too hot light, shelter from the rain washing the pollen away or damaging the flowers, and soil that leans more towards compost.  LOL!  And, you should be wondering how many plants I had to kill to learn all that.  The answer is many.  Our solution, drop the seeds in the compost heavy portion of the Raised Crop Beds with shade cloth.  They’ve sprouted.  We’ll see.

The Beans also popped up as usual, with few duds.  There’s a reason kids often use Beans for their 1st grows.  They’re pretty successful sprouters.  Also, a single Butternut Squash seed sprouted, and nothing else.  Yet.  Well, there might be some tiny Lettuce sprouts, or it might be weeds.  Too small to tell.  Yet.  The rest we’re still in wait mode, except the Carrots.

Sadly, none of the Carrot seeds came up.  Since we only dropped the new seeds gathered from the Spring crop, the Seeds may not be good.  Dang.  I would have fed that whole plant to the Butterfly House, hosting the Eastern Black Swallowtails, if I’d known.  Or, the seeds might have gotten washed out from the rain.  We sprinkled some seeds from another pack to check.  We’re waiting.  

The Corn looks lovely.  It’s about a foot tall.  We dropped the final seed last week in the empty mound.  As a reminder, 1 didn’t sprout.  We left the mound empty to plant late.  If there’s a problem with early tassels and they drop their pollen before the silks are fully formed, we’ll hopefully have another later plant with pollen.  Woo-Hoo!   

Around Our Garden

With all the new sprouts, Mulch was a priority.  It’s still hot, and we had at least one day of misty rain last week instead of the heavy downpour.  We don’t usually add Mulch until a seed has sprouted.  Even then, you have to make sure your Mulch doesn’t damage the delicate sprouts.  Even the fine chip we make ourselves can bite into newly emerged stems, or worse, keep them from coming up out of the ground at all.  So, we hold on the Mulch until they are up and growing, which some were.  The empty holes we checked for sprouts and added new seeds where empty.

We also dropped some plugs of Bok Choy and Celery.  While I would like to have called them starter plants, they probably weren’t big enough to qualify.  They were dropped under the shade cloth and didn’t need to be large.  Unfortunately, that required us to cut the little ‘x’s in the weed mat to open up the planting holes.  Perhaps it’s my perfectionist tendencies, but this always takes me forever, way past the time in the morning where the sun comes up and blasts the whole area.  LOL.  Then, we’re just leaned over trying to keep the sweat from dripping in our eyes.  Boo-Hiss!

There was also a whole day of weeding.  Yup, that happens when it rains, everyday.  LOL.  The front walk was a mess.  Yes, that was partially from the Wildflowers in the pots seeding because we didn’t get to all the dead flower heads, but the other part was grass and yard weeds.  Some super tall.  Oops.  I thought we just did that.

Harvest

The Key Limes looked nice last week.  We wished there were more.  While we have a steady supply for drinks, we usually have some sweets too.  Stupid drought and hard freezes.  No Key Lime pies or Chiller Cookies.  Dang.

We’re watching both the Banana and Plantain plants.  They’re starting to get big enough for flowers.  Both bloom only once, produce a large single bunch of fruit, and die.  The ‘area’ of each sends up several individual plants, each growing big enough to start the cycle.  You have to designate an area because they do move around, and they grow whole trees.

Flowers

We’re Featuring the Wild Monk Orchid, Oeceoclades Maculata from last week.  Make no mistake, this grows as a weed in Our Garden and whole area.  It looks like a small Snake Plant or Mother-in-law Tongue growing especially in drainage areas like swales and along streams.  Water and Birds carry the tiny bulbs around.  They’re not very noticeable until they spike.  Then, it’s all you can see.  The tiny white orchids with bright pink centers climb the spikes.  So delicate and lovely.

We also have whole fences filled with White Dendrobium Orchid spikes.  So many it’s hard to photograph, but we try.   The Barbatos Cherry bush filled with tiny pink flowers last week.  Woo-Hoo!  So pretty.  We’ve had a few blooms, here and there, but this was full-on bloom.  No fruit.  Since it’s our 1st year with one, we need more research.  LOL.  And, the Flaming Torch Bromeliads are starting their 3rd round of blooms.  Woo-Hoo!  Enjoy!  

Check out What’s Bloomn’ slideshow for more flowers or visit Garden Dirt Diary to catch up on what’s been going on around Our Garden.