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 15, 2026

Tropical Farming

We’re not talking about Coconuts, Bananas, Oranges, or even Dragon Fruit.  While we do grow those, it’s actually planting time for Veggies and Fruit, the traditional kind, here in the tropical growing zones.  You know, Tomatoes, Broccoli, Cabbage, Carrots, and all those yummies.  Woo-Hoo!  Tropical Farming at its finest.

Yup, during the heaviest part of our tropical storm season, the best time to drop the Fall Crop arrives.  We had sprouts hiding under pots and buried in mulch for both Hurricanes Ian and Irma where we got walloped.  LOL.  Yes, they survived, and produced lovely produce for our table, eventually.  Most plants dropped this week will start producing somewhere around Thanksgiving or Christmas, gotta love that, and will continue to produce until next May or June when the Rains start.  It needs irrigation, but there are few things we can’t grow for a Dry Season.  They just won’t survive the Rains or if it needs a cold dormant period.  That’s good news if you want short lived Veggie and Fruit plants producing food, and we do.

So, as the middle of September approaches, we get busy preparing beds and boosting the starter plants in the nursery.  Any and everything we can to be ready for last week and this week, the best time for planting.  If you’re not planning a Fall Crop but are still itching to get your hands in the dirt, try prepping your Spring beds.  After you’ve Harvested the last of your food, turn your beds and add thin layers of brown and green compost, finishing with lots of brown.  Then, let them sit through the winter.  When you’re ready to plant, turn them again with all the fresh compost you’ve made.  Woo-Hoo!  Check out:How to Compost at Home.   

Around Our Garden

We started with the weed mats last week.  If you don’t recall, the turning and adding fresh compost to our beds happened over the last several weeks.  You can check out those here: Past Garden Dirt.  There’s a great deal of area in the Raised Crop Beds, and the mats help keep weeds to a minimum around the plants, especially with fresh soil.  Obviously, we reuse the mats until they disintegrate.  LOL!  Who wants to cut all those little ‘X’s every year?  And, we probably should have replaced at least 2 lengths, but I staked all the ones we didn’t previously throw away back to the ground.  I’m personally not a fan of wasteful, and I’m hoping for another year.  That left the 2 new lengths and a shade cloth, which we are trying new this year.  Those went in easily, but we only cut enough ‘X’s for what we seeded.  The rest still needs to be done.  LOL!

With the beds ready, we dropped seeds.  Plant in waves, weeks apart, you can get a steady crop through the growing season.  But the 1st plant is usually our biggest.  And, we run out of areas to plant in October which is fine.  The days get shorter, and growth slows.  We’ll do a new round of planting in Feb., our Spring Crop from everywhere Harvested between now and then.  It all starts with the seeds.

Seeds

They told me it wasn’t possible, but it is.  Carrots grow beautifully in our basic Yard Sand, the sandy soils they fill lots with down here in the tropical zones.  There isn’t much else if you don’t make your own compost or buy it.  There is soil called muck, a bit of limestone rock, and some clays, but mostly its silty sands.  Think beach sand with lots of fine dust mixed-in to make it look grey-brown dirty.  They grow better if we mix some non-chunky Compost in to make Black Sand, but Carrots grow beautifully here from seeds in our soil.  We’ve had a big crop every year we’ve tried. Check out: How to Grow Common Root Crops, Part 1.

No surprise, we dropped Carrots, Black & Garden Beans, Watermelon, Butternut Squash, a variety of Lettuces, and Cucumbers.  Woo-Hoo!  The new shade cloth was for the Cucumbers and Lettuces.  It’s still very hot for them, and we’re getting heavy daily rains.  Pounding delicate sprouts isn’t good.  Next, the starter plants in the nursery   Woo-Hoo!  We grew all of them from seeds.         

Harvest

There were Key Limes last week.  Not many, but some.  If we run out, we can always pick them, but it’s a good stop on Grumpy Old Man Buc Dog’s morning walk.  We don’t mind grabbing the freshly fallen ones as long as we have enough.  They’re sweeter fully ripe.  You can tell by the lighter more yellow color.  We also took a Leek.  It was a bit spindly but tasty.  Woo-Hoo!  Grown in the Rainy Season and everything.

All the Corn sprouted, but one.  Woo-Hoo!!!  We love seeing all the rows of little sprouts in the morning with big drops of dew.  Like Spring hope in the Fall.  LOL.  We had a terrible Spring Crop with the drought and hard freezes.  Some years are like that.  The good news is we did get a couple ears of Corn which we dried into fresh seeds.  So, the seeds sprouted right up.  We left the one in case we had early tassels.  Having at least one tassel a bit later makes sure we have plenty of pollen for any late silks that need to be pollinated.  For more try: How to Successfully Plant Corn

Flowers

Last week, the Candlestick Plant’s spikes of golden yellow balls grabbed the Feature.  There are a number of flowers with petals that curve inward to form balls, but they usually are not tropical.  So, it’s a treat, and so golden.  The Candlestick or Senna plant grows very large quickly and blooms until we get cold.  Our big one died back in the Hard Freeze, but it’s towering now filled with golden balls.  We spent some time watching the Bees move inside the little balls and crawl around collecting pollen.  So fun.  

We are super amazed by the White Dendrobiums filling the fence lines.  You’d think it doesn’t happen all the time.  Doesn’t make it any less amazing.  We have a new round of Orange Cosmos.  Woo-Hoo!  The Purple Laelia Orchids have lightened into a pale lavender, and Purple Water Lilies are popping up in numbers to glow happily in the fountain.  Lovely.  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.