Gardening in the tropics
Return to Discussionsi am heading south in a couple weeks and will tending my half acre tropical garden. Hope my avocado, mango, papaya, coconut etc are coming along.
Any tips from others who have experience in gardening in the tropics?
Will post pics when I get down there. Meanwhile I have a few from last June when some planting was done but it was going to be too hot and dry for many things.
Dave
Where's your garden? We have volunteer avos, doing well, which we had to prune basically by stumping them; our varietal is languishing badly. A lot of the volunteers are of good quality. We planted Samoan dwarf coconuts, that don't get dangerously tall before they begin to bear; they're twelve years old and have yet to fruit. Do you harvest your own, hire it done, or wait for them to fall? Our varietal mango has done better than the avo in the same period of years, and we do get good flushes of fruit from the volunteers, although the fruit is much smaller. Papaya just carries on, until it gets too tall to harvest. Rarely, you can cut them back and they'll branch, but that usually kills them. We had papayas growing up among other plants, which is convenient, but discovered that seedling plants require full sun to come up - so the lower plantings have to be done after they papayas are up.