This Week at the Farm: Edible Landscaping Class, Tricks on Planting Tomatoes, Butterfly Plants

This Week at the Farm: Edible Landscaping Class, Tricks on Planting Tomatoes, and Butterfly Plants!

Edible Landscape Class

Color Your Landscape with Citrus Trees
Color Your Landscape with Citrus Trees

Mark your calendars for Betsy Smith’s upcoming Edible Landscaping class on March 21st.  Betsy is a talented landscape designer, well versed in the use if edibles in landscapes. Betsy will talk about correct choice of edibles for sunny or shady sites. What types of fruits makes the great hedges, ground covers or colorful specimen trees. She’ll cover how to incorporate fruit into existing landscapes. This is a good in-depth talk you won’t want to miss. This is a free class. Follow this link to register and remember to bring a chair, we often don’t have enough of them.

Time to Plant Tomato and Peppers

Tomato Varieties
So many Great Tomatoes to Choose from!

Most good tomato growers know the key to getting success with tomatoes in the north Florida area is early planting. With the ten day forecast showing no signs of frost, so now is the time to plant your tomatoes and peppers.We’ve got a great selection of tomatoes on the benches now, Cherokee Purple, Arkansas Traveler, Sungold, Mr Stripey and much more 4 inch pots $1.99 each.  BIG PEPPER PLANTS Orange, Red and Golden bells, Ancho Publano, Thai hot, Carmen Bull Horn, Habenero and so many more 4 inch pots $1.99 each.

*Use enough compost when planting. Mix in a couple of gallons of mushroom or homemade compost in each planting hole.

*Buy the tallest plant you can. Trim all but the top 3 inches of leaves off the plant and bury the stem to that point.  The plant will root out along the buried stem, giving you an extra large root system, to fuel your plant into a larger harvest. Our plants are 12-14” long.

*Mix ½ cup of Calcium Sulfate (gypsum) in each planting hole, to eliminate blossom end rot. Blossom end rot occurs when the plant doesn’t get enough calcium, an element a lot of soils in this area are lacking.

*If you’ve had poor luck growing tomatoes in ground, grow them in pots. Make sure your pots are large enough, it takes a 20 24 inch pot to grow a plant that will produce a good crop of tomatoes.

 

So many Peppers to choose from...
So many Great Peppers to Choose from…..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Butterfly Plants are Arriving!

Monarch Butterfly
Tropical Milkweed is a good larval food source to build you Monarch butterfly population up.

Spring is here and so are the butterfly plants. We’re getting is new shipments every week of nectar and larval plants. This weeks new additions are:

Tropical Milkweed
Tropical Milkweed

Milkweed – Larval food source for the  monarch butterflies, a favite nectar source for all the butterflies

Yarrow Paprika – Thick evergreen carpet , yarrow is a great plant to use as a tough flowering ground cover. Blooms throughout the year. Important larval food source for the painted Lady butterflys

athens_rose_lantana
So many lantanas to Choose from…

Lantana – Anna Maria, New Gold, Dallas Red, so many colors to choose from and a height range to fit ant spot in the garden. Lantanas are food source for the Hairstreak butterflys, their nectar feeds a wide range of pollinators.  

Candy Cane Verbena
Verbena’s like this variety called Candy Cane, bloom all summer.

Verbenas are one of the best low growing flowering ground covers. They bloom throughout the year and are a favorite of humming birds, butterflies and native pollinators?

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