Cluster of Figs

Figs like so many other fruits grow in stages.  Here you have a fig just about ready to eat next to four others in different stages of development.

At this point if you want the fig to continue to develop on the tree but speed up a little, you can nick it with a knife or other pointy object and it will ripen a lot faster. Typically you wouldn't want to do this with a lot of fruit, like apples, because they would not just ripen but also start to rot.

I went ahead and picked this one though so as not to attract too many birds to the tree.  I know they will eventually see this as a good source of food but I wanted to get first crack at it.  Some birds will nick the fruit themselves once they get used to the fig tree fruiting.  They know that this will ripen the fruit and give them a treat for their troubles.

Talking with Amber we thought of some other fruits that have to be picked individually because they don't ripen at the same times.  To name a few: Figs, Coffee, Cacao, Strawberries, Cherries, Apples, Oranges, Pears, and Grapes.  These last few might be a little surprising but they too ripen at different times.  Some of them are picked by machines though but this lets in less ripe fruit along with the ones that are ready to pick so you don't always get the best quality fruit in that case.

What is your favorite fruit to eat?

Plumeria Sprout

So, my wife had the chance to go to Hawaii recently and took a couple friends with her to cat sit for another friend.

One of the things that was brought back was this plumeria stick.  This is the easiest way for you to get a plumeria from Hawaii since they don't have any leaves to bruise and they are more or less dormant until you get it planted.

This one seems to think it's already planted and ready to go.  Unfortunately it's still in the bag and stored in a drawer.  It's for one of our friends but in asking what to do with it came to find out that it's for her mom.  So I still have no answer as to what to do with it.  So what do I do now?  Part of me says to go ahead and plant it and see how long it takes for it to get picked up.  I don't think I should charge a babysitting fee though.

The other thing she left to get later are sticks for hibiscus.  I've never heard of those being propagated that way but I don't know everything.

I'm almost hoping that I can plant and get a stick from it myself before it ever gets picked up.  What would you do if someone left you a plant with no real timeline when it was going home?

Lovely New Fig

My new fig tree is doing well.  It originally came with figs already on it.  A couple of them have fallen off but for the most part the figs have hung on.

To plant it I of course dug a hole.  I've done work with landscapers so I have a good idea of how big.  Typically you want a hole at least twice as big as the pot it came in.  I dug out a little more than that because our soil is clay.  If you don't know anything about clay, it doesn't do well with water and drainage.  It's also hard to dig in.  So, the dirt (mostly clay) I dug out, I mixed with a bag of potting soil.  In the end it was still a bit hard since clay will dominate a mixture down to around 20 percent.

Then I put it back in the hole until it was about deep enough for the plant with the soil ball to sit a little above the previous ground elevation.  Then I back filled the rest of the dirt mixture on top making a mound and watered it for nearly an hour, saturating the dirt so it would settle in.

I have since added even more dirt from an old pot to further give it nutrients and ability to absorb water and retain it.  I water it daily dissolving the bits of clay that I wasn't patient enough to mix in.  The resulting water slurry I'm sure it filling in the gaps that remained in the hole.

After visiting some friends a little south of us we got some mint that I planted on top of the dirt around the fig tree.  At first it was still wilting but now there are new leaves popping in on some of the stems.