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!

Want a Banana Plant? Just Take A Pup!

I was watering my banana trees today (actually, bananas trees are not really trees at all, they are in fact the World's largest flowering herb!).

So...I was watering my banana PLANTS today when I noticed something. See, my original plan for the banana field was for it to grow along the fence that divides me from my neighbors property. Yes, bananas are awesome, but I also loved the fact that they do such a good job as a privacy fence.

Truth is...my neighbors backyard at the moment is less than favorable to look at so I'm really counting on those bananas to do a good job covering that view.

This is how the banana strip looks right now:

Notice my poor attempt at covering the view to my neighbors hideous yard

However is not all bad news...take a closer look and you will notice something. My bananas are propagating like crazy:

This is one of my smallest banana plants and its got, one..two..three...four pups!!!!!

So with every single banana plant shooting up pups like crazy, why don't I take some out and spread them to the sides to cover up my fence faster??

But before you go digging up your pups, it will probably help if you understand their anatomy. New shoots look something like this (line shows cutting angle):

So out came the shovel:

And one single cutting motion at the right angle...

And your pup is yours to do as you please bwahahaha!!

Now I have sped up their lateral spread, and everybody looks happy!

That's a proud mom in the left watching one of  her pups move out on it's own!

Kat Williams scoping out the "new" resident

I hope that if you learn anything from this post is just how easy it is to propagate bananas, so if you have a neighbor with some plants, go ahead and nag him for a pup. Better yet, tell your neighbor you know how to dig it up yourself!

Update: It is been two months and the banana plants are getting huge. I have decided against transplanting any more pups in between the mounds. I did a bit more research and it is recommended that a spacing of about 8 feet is kept in between each mound. I say it will probably be another two months before I get the banana privacy fence that I want.

My original point still stands. Bananas are very easy to transplant =)

Here is a picture of the progress:

Have a good one, and keep learning!

Catching up with the progress

Ok so with this post I am going to bring you guys up to date with everything I've done before starting the blog so sit back!                                                       

On to the yard, some grass was installed: ( Yes the Robellinis were there, just needed a haircut to show their full potential)

Look at all that wasted space in between each palm!

Looked around Craigslist until I found someone trying to get rid of a pile of dirt. Sweeet find! 

It all started with a pile of dirt

So the beds came about..

and some more beds...

and moreeeee!!

Future watermelon pods

I then fenced a section of the garden:

And planted some peppers on there ( I now start everything I can from seed, I will do an entry about that later on)

I also bird proofed it:

Girlfriend appearance so rare on the garden that I posted this pic even if it was blurry

My watermelon pods are producing, can you see the yellow flowers?

And of course my nick name would not be Banana Nick if I didn't have a set of bananas on deck:

The bananas are all different types but I didn't label them so as I get fruit I will do so.

Now for an update on the front of the house, as you can see some smurf blue went on the walls and I decorated the tree bases with some flowers.

I used rocks that were laying around my property to keep the soil from eroding away:

If you can find rocks around your property, use them! They are free and look pretty nice arranged.

And I wanted to finish this post with a little project I started right around the time I bought the house. It is called a pond-on-a-pot!

This is how is started

And is now looking great:!!

The fish keep mosquitoes at bay.  It is definitely one of my favorites projects so far.

I have lots more to share with you guys but I wont make this post any longer! 

Until next post, keep on learning!