Trellis Wall for Shade

What is going on guys. Today is my favorite day of the year. Forth of July baby! Birthday of the beautiful USA!!!

But before I get too drunk, I wanted to show you guys how I made an all natural shade wall. 

You know I hate long intros so let's get right into it.

Here is the before and after picture:

Shade wall wasn't the only improvement. Look at that luscious green grass!!!

It all started with some measurements and drawings:

And with the help of my friend Chinchilla, the wood-work begun:

Box is 2 feet tall

We added a bench.

I lined the inside of the box with aluminum to keep it from rusting. I didn't get a picture, but I drilled holes at the bottom of the box for draining. 

Putting rocks at the bottom of the pot help with draining. Doing this will also save you some dirt..

I used well draining soil (mixture of coir-fiber, bark, dirt, and vermiculite)

I planted Mandevillas ( white, pink, and red varieties)

You probably want to stain the wood before putting plants in the pot. Take it from me.

And now Kat Williams is going to show you the growth after 3 months:

2 more months:

It's awesome hanging out in the patio now since there is constant shade. I think it looks pretty good too.

Went from this:

To this:

That is all folks...

My Tomato Harvest- The Number Game

So tomatoes are one of those crops that every gardener seems to want on their garden. I did too.

I had one hiccup only really... The neighborhood birds. Every time a couple would ripen..the feathery thieves  would come in and sample them. Behaving as fine tomato samplers, they only sample a piece out of each fruit, as if looking for the perfect one.

perfectly good tomato ruined by birds.

So I came up with a plan. I wanted to overwhelm the wild life with more tomatoes than it could handle. Hopefully after they had their fill there would be some left for me . Seeds are cheap anyways...

It worked..

Space wasn't a big problem for me. I don't have a huge backyard, but Tomatoes seem to like a wide array of soils. So go ahead and plant them around the perimeter of your property. Preferable if they are by a chailink fence that they can lean to for some support.





 I planted my seeds around October to give my plants time to grow during the colder South Florida weather. They don't seem to like the hotter  Florida months as much.

At this point I'm going to let the pictures speak for themselves. I think it is safe to say that my local birds are ultra sick of tomatoes. The best part is that they have spread the seeds around so now I find that tomato plants are coming up virtually all over my property like weeds. Whenever they end up in a good spot I let them stay,.Bird assisted crop rotation!

oh yeah!

folks at my office were love my cherry tomatoes!

Haha now I'm just showing off.

So what's the lesson? Don't be so greedy dude...

Advertise Your Garden to Bees with Sunflowers

You need carpenter bees to cross pollinate your passion fruit...Carpenter bees are very attracted to sunflowers....so why not plant some sunflowers by your passion vines? Of course you can apply the same concept to any other crop that needs bee pollination. The thing about sunflowers is that they are huge and can "bee" spotted from a greater distance than more traditional flowers.

Fun fact: The sunflower is actually a large inflorescence. That means that the flower head is actually made of many tiny flowers called florets. Central florets look like the center of a normal flower while the outer florets look like yellow petals and together they make up a "false flower".

Sunflowers doing their thing by my passion vines

Keep on learning!

Taking Inventory

So today my buddy Andy and I went ahead and tagged most of the edibles around my yard.


Labels help you identify different varieties when plants are not in bloom or fruiting. They also add a nice touch to your garden when your friends can easily recognize each resident in your backyard.

It was a pretty easy garden upgrade. You can get the tags from most garden centers for less than 10 cents each (a pack of 100 cost me $8.59)

Finding someone with nicer handwriting than me was essential to the plan. Thanks babe!

We came up with 24 edibles and made labels for them:

To bad we missed a bunch as you will see in the upcoming pictures ...Take if from me, if you have a lot of stuff out there, make an inventory of everything before writing the labels. Also take note of how many tags you need to make of each variety. That will save you the back and forth from your house to the garden or worse, back to the store!

Take a look below for some examples of the stuff we labeled:

You might not need to label everything in your vegetable bed, but sometimes different varieties of the same crop can be hard to tell apart. The peppers above are a good example..

It can be really hard to tell apart different types of bananas and plantains. Another plus for the labeling system!

Use the name you remember the plant by. Although technically a Sapindus Saponaria, I like to call the tree above Soapberry!

Doing inventory was a great opportunity to document how every plant was doing. Check out the pictures I took from each edible in my yard:

Tomatoes

Bananas

Plantains

Sugar Cane

Oregano

Strawberries

Bell Peppers

Jalapeño Peppers

Yucca (Cassava)

Carrots

Chive Onions

Mango

Avocado

Lychee

Guava

Pineapple Guava

Sweet Corn

Luffa Sponges

Passion Fruit

Coffee Plant

Sunflowers

Figs

Hog Plums (Spondias purpurea)

Pinneaple

Chirimoya

Nopal Cactus

Papaya

Are you labeling a different way? Let me know in the comments below.

Keep on learning!