Our property smells so good this time of year with all of the mango trees flowering.
🌺We encourage everyone to plant native and edible plants - it’s good for your health and the health of the environment.
Our Valencia Pride mango tree. The first mango tree we planted. We had purchased the tree while still living in an apartment near Bradenton Beach, and planted it fall of 2011 at the property we purchased in Sarasota, before we moved in to the old fixer upper on the property. Every evening in summer includes picking mangos, labeling mangos, and updating our availability list. While some varieties are done for the year, we still have many mangos on the Sweet Tart, Peach Cobbler, Fruit Punch, Sugar Loaf, Cac, Orange Sherbet, Dot, Pina Colada, Maha Chanok, Cotton Candy, and Valencia Pride.
Craig made some bamboo supports for the Big Jim Longan tree. This variety of Longan is a very heavy producer and the fruit has a bit of a nutty flavor. Craig grows 5 varieties of clumping bamboo and makes use of all varieties in building projects around our farm.
Busy honeybees enjoying the dragonfruit flowers this morning. Craig’s five hives are located just in front of our dragon fruit stands.
Honey bees enjoying nectar from the first row of female flowers on this banana plant. While bananas do not require pollination to fruit, our bees love visiting the female and later emerging male flowers, so we leave the terminal male bud attached to all of our bananas while the fruit is developing.
Two rounds of blooms on the Maha Chanok mango this year. First round is loaded with fruits! We have found this variety to be best when eaten slightly under ripe, but everyone enjoys their mangos differently. It’s one of the most beautiful mangos we grow when ripe.
It finally rained! I think we had 4-6” yesterday. This is my favorite mango tree in our yard - our super productive, Coconut Cream mango. I love the flavor of these mangos - so sweet and creamy. A very distinctive tasting mango which is delicious fresh, blended into popsicles, or dehydrated. Our main motivation in one day purchasing a freeze dryer, is to have freeze dried coconut cream mangos throughout the year. The tree had a small early bloom which left some larger interior fruits. Thankfully, it bloomed a second time and we have this most recent round of fruits developing too. We have been watering most of the mango trees during the drought, so we didn’t have a lot of issue with mangos splitting from all of the rain, so far. The Dot mango that we didn’t water much, ended up with about 1/3 of the fruits split this morning.
Our shortest banana plants are growing right beside our tallest - the fruiting plants pictured are Raja Puri, Dwarf Namwa, and then 2 bunches of Saba. It’s been a great year for bananas.
It only takes a minute of walking through the yard to wonder why I ever leave. So grateful for what our little piece of land has become and inspired by seeing what others are growing. Now that the weather is cooling off a bit, Craig has plans to improve the chicken fencing and our oldest daughter’s pond - and maybe add a second pond for some cute ducks. I have plans for a larger herb/tea garden and possibly a couple of new butterfly gardens.
We have many varieties of banana plants for sale - local pickup only right now. We also have grafted avocados, mangos, black sapotes, and sapodilla.
Ponderosa Lemon almost ready. This poor tree just keeps spreading further along the ground - only 12” high - but loaded with huge lemons.
Sweet Tart mango set so many fruits this year. This was our favorite mango three years ago when tasted side by side with 15 other top tier varieties.
Lemon Meringue Mango -Po Pyu Kalay. Loaded with set fruit. We planted this around 18 months ago as a 3 gallon tree. This is Craig’s favorite mango. We have six grafted PPK mango trees available right now.
Valerie bringing in the Blue Java bananas
Now is the time to keep the lychee trees well watered.
The honeybees are loving the flowers on the Sweetheart Lychee.
Coconut Cream mango tree this morning
Ice Cream Bean - this one, we think, is Inga vera. One of the fruits we picked prior to heavily pruning the tree. Interesting how the flavor is slightly different at different times of the year. Earlier this year, the fruits from this tree had a hint of orange blossom flavor. Still not as good as the over 3' long Inga edulis pods we would buy for 10 cents in Ecuador. Brings back enough of the nostalgia though and fun to eat. These last up to 2 weeks in the refrigerator. We have several species of Inga trees available right now including this one and Inga edulis.
Hauling mulch with a wheelbarrow and pitchfork became too exhausting. Our friends at XUMA Equipment in Sarasota rented this loader to us. Craig moved four mountains of mulch along with some debris from Irma. Xuma also rents stump grinders and much more.
