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

June 23, 2026

Hello Summer Solstice!

It always seems strange, confusing even, that the longest day of the year is also the 1st day of Summer.  Does that seem wrong to anyone else?  Wouldn’t one expect the longest day of the year to fall in the middle of summer?  Because even though the days are long, they are only getting shorter.  Shouldn’t this be Mid-Summer?  Just saying.  We have plenty of time for philosophical ponderings.  It’s Summer.  The pool is open for after gardening plunges and floats.  LOL!  In this heat, it’s almost necessary.

The perfect time to catch Butterfly Fever.  As mentioned last week, Our Garden is full of the flying joyful beauties.  We posted a picture, along with many others, of an Eastern Black Swallowtail fluttering dill.  It wasn’t a particularly good picture because the lovely lady never stopped moving, most likely laying eggs.  While there, I noticed the dill had flower heads.  We snipped the flowers to preserve the plants a couple of days later and stuck them in water in the kitchen window.  It was just a couple of sprigs, the flower parts.  Then, we noticed the eggs.  It was a good thing I was in a hurry and decided to wash later.  LOL!     

So, completely by accident, we’re raising Butterflies, the Giant Eastern Black Swallowtails.  LOL!  It’s a happy accident.  We started by getting a pop-up Butterfly House, for the eggs that quickly hatched in the window.  Then, while getting a few more sprigs of dill, we realized the whole plant had eggs.  Luckily, the dill is in a pot.  We moved the whole pot, window sprigs and eggs included, into the Butterfly House.  So, now we’re raising a whole mess of Caterpillars happily munching on our dill.  Woo-Hoo!  We do hope the dill lasts because it’s the only thing we currently have growing in Our Garden they’ll eat.  Caterpillars, by type, are particular to certain plants.  These like the Carrot family, like dill.  

Around Our Garden

It was another week of trimming, weeding, and cleaning.  Up 1st, the Red Lobster Claw Heliconia.  Our big old area is a circle.  A big circle, and it wants to be bigger, and not a circle.  So, it not only has large log borders, it also has a strap confining the vegetation to its area.  Don’t get me wrong, we are so pleased it came back after the hard freeze, but it still needs to stay in its area.  It was finally big enough to take out all the dead stalks and re-confine all the new stuff popping up.  It’s a good thing we have a bunch of new logs from clearing the undeveloped area tunnel, because we’re going to need all new ones here.  LOL!  These things are vivacious growers.

While we were hoping to get the final 20 feet of the tunnel we’re clearing on the undeveloped area finished last week, we did not.  There’s still about 5 feet or so.  Dang.  

We did, however, get all the cuttings from the Avocado tree potted, and we pulled up all the sprouted Hong Kong Orchid Tree seeds.  Those were also stuck in pots.  While we did Harvest most of the seed pods from the tree, we never get them all.  Dang.  Trees are highly planned in Our Garden for spacing, shading, pleasing views, etc.  They’re not allowed to just grow wherever the seeds fall.  They can grow in pots.

Harvest

We had a 1st last week.  The Lima Bean pods we normally allow to dry on the plant before Harvesting, sprouted.  Yes, indeed, the beans sprouted inside the dried pods.  What?  Best guess, we left them on the plant too long.  Grower error.  Since there were several sprouted Beans, probably my fault.  Dang.  We planted the sprouts.  We’ll see what happens.  Since this was 1st time, feeling pretty good about my skills and/or interest.

Still looking good, the living Tomato plants.  Most of them.  Got more lovely fruit last week.  It’s good to focus on the positive things because most of the Veggies are dead.  A good portion of the weeding last week was in the empty Veggie beds.  The goal for the Rainy Season is to keep anything from seeding in the beds like weeds, grass, flowers, pretty much anything but the occasional Clover.  It can stay if it doesn’t get crazy.  Don’t judge.  We’ve never minded Clover, can’t tell you why.

Flowers

The Jasmine with its small white flowers and big scent, filling Our Garden, got the Feature.  One of the new bushes was covered in buds one week and filled with blooms  the next, last week.  Woo-Hoo!   Even the big one has started to recover from the hard freeze.  Summer mornings in Our Garden the faint scent of Jasmine carries on the wind.  You know the hot sticky mornings, there’s sometimes a little breeze.  LOL!  It does smell like Jasmine in the back.  Just lovely.  As are the small pure white flowers.  Their petals, only around for a night, maybe a morning, are layered goodness, and difficult to catch in the sun.  Which we did, covered in dew.  Woo-Hoo!

If you ask the Butterflies and Bees, they would rave about the Zinnias and Golden Dewdrops, maybe the Pickerelweed.  Because every time I went to photograph the flowers, the Butterflies and Bees were there.  Woo-Hoo!  We got another round of Pink Rain Lilies, it helps we’ve been clearing the grass out of the Bulb Garden.  With the Gold Coins Dendrobiums and Pink Blooming Ginger, it does feel like a tropical paradise.  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.