Open Greenhouse & Plant Swap, Saturday, Oct 4, 6, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., 602 Ronele Drive, Brandon, FL 33511
If you’ve never been to Open Greenhouse, it’s a great way to see what’s happening in my Florida-friendly yarden and meet other gardeners. The plant swaps are great fun – you never know who is going to bring what. (They’re not a tit-for-tat swap so you don’t need to bring anything if you don’t have plants you can share.)
Anybody who knows me knows that spring and summer are my favorite seasons, but fall and winter have two advantages: hummingbirds and fresh tomatoes. For most of us, hummingbirds are winter visitors – the original snowbirds. You can hang feeders for them, but they still prefer plants that bloom all winter.
The featured photo is Brazilian red cloak, which is growing in full shade in my yarden, a truly remarkable feat for a plant with such spectacular blooms. Around the corner, however, the same plant is growing in full sun, making this a bush that nearly everyone can grow. Its only drawback may be its size – it can easily grow to eight feet tall and just as wide – but it’s easy to trim and even easier to share cuttings with friends who admire it.
The Dombeya, aka Florida hydrangea and pinkball, is another large winter-blooming shrub that supports bees and hummingbirds when other plants have stopped blooming. Like the red cloak, it’s a large shrub but easily pruned – and the cuttings are easy to root.
We’re lucky enough to live around the corner from Steve Backes, who runs the Hummingbirds in Florida Facebook group and is incredibly generous with his cuttings. Some of the plants we got from him have grown so well here that we can share cuttings with our visitors.
Salmon Porterweed: Hot-pink blooms all year long attract hummingbirds in the winter as well as bees and butterflies nearly every day. Although it’s not native, it’s not as aggressive as the non-native purple Porterweed. (We still have native Porterweed that’s popping up in places we don’t want it.)
Native red salvia: A smaller short-lived perennial that’s a favorite for hummingbirds, bees and butterflies. It readily self-seeds.
Powder puff trees: Mine are growing near the Dombeya so hummingbirds have a choice.
Chinese hat plant: Cute little flowers that appear sporadically in the summer but become abundant when temperatures drop.
Firespike: Also primarily a winter bloomer, in red or lavender.
Flowering maple: Harder to root than most of the plants we grow, but several have ground-rooted in my front yard jungle.
Purple salvia: It’s not blooming just this minute but it will soon be covered in deep-purple flower spikes.
Firebush: Probably my all-around favorite plant for year-round blooms that attract bees, including bumble bees, butterflies and hummingbirds. Other birds, like mockingbirds and cardinals, love their fruit and spread seeds that pop up in surprising spots (and need to be transplanted).
Finally, I’ll tell you about my tomatoes. Last year, for the second time in nearly 70 years, I had all the fresh home-grown tomatoes I could eat. We grew a variety called Tough Boy, recommended by David Scanlon at Practical Plants. We’re at it again this year! We have a dozen growing in our hydroponic system but we had a few extra seedlings that are now in one-gallon pots and available for $10 each. There are some cuttings available too, along with some seedlings that popped up in the system – the Tough Boys are hybrids so there’s no telling what those volunteers will be, but I’m looking forward to finding out.
UPDATED TO ADD: My sister is here with a load of fresh plumeria cuttings, marked by color this time. And my friend Mike will be here with a nice selection of Indian plants and vegetables that we don’t carry, including tindora, many kinds of beans, moringa, mango, sapodillia, hummingbirds, jashmeen, cherry and more for sale.
I’ll take a different tack for this month’s blog to focus on native bees instead of just plants. Even though honey bees get most of the attention when people talk about declining populations, native bees are threatened too. They don’t live in hives that beekeepers ake care for, so it’s up to gardeners to create and maintain the habitat they need. My Facebook friend Laura Zurro wrote an article for Bay Soundings in 2021 that inspired me to rethink how I garden, and my native bee population – particularly bumble bees – has grown exponentially since then. I have so many bumble bees now that I don’t even get excited about them anymore.
Laura wrote another article this month on how to keep native bees happy over the winter. I’m sorry to say I don’t have as many of these plants as I’d like (or as I’ll have this time next year!) but I have lots and lots of native Porterweed and elderberry. It took a couple of years for them to naturalize well, but now they’re popping up in places where I don’t need them. They’re super-easy to transplant and do well in sun or shade, even though the literature says full sun.
And while it’s not on her most recent list, I think one of the reasons my native bee population has been doing so well is firebush. It not only attracts native bees, but the larger plants block so much sun that the ground underneath them is bare – which is exactly what bumble bees and other native bees need to nest. Laura’s Facebook page is Florida Native Bees – I highly recommend that you follow it too.
Some of the other native plants we’ll be giving away this month include:
Native Red Salvia isanother plant on Laura’s that keeps blooming through hot dry summers. It spreads easily by seed and is a favorite of bees and many butterflies.
Scorpiontail is a charming native groundcover with tiny flowers that are perfect for tiny bees and moths, which are often neglected when people are planting pollinator gardens.
Wild coffee is another Florida native that is spectacular in a shalocation.
Simpson stopper seems to be happy in either sun or shade.
Beautyberry is a kind of boring little bush until fall, when it bursts out with beautiful purple fruit. Some people make jelly with them; I usually leave them for the birds and squirrels to gorge on.
Dune sunflower is a native groundcover that laughs at dry heat and keeps on blooming. We have some seeds and lots of cuttings that are easy to root — ask for directions if you’re never done it before. (I bought five plants last spring and they’ve pretty much covered a 10 by 25 spot that gets full sun and isn’t easy to water.)
While we grow lots of natives, I’m not 100% committed to natives if I see wildlife value in Florida-friendly plants that don’t require lots of water and aren’t likely to escape into natural areas and harm ecosystems. At the top of the list this month are my sister’s spectacular plumeria. She’s in Stuart and has been growing them so long that she needs to trim them often – and then brings us the cuttings to share.
We also grow a lot of non-native plants specifically because they attract hummingbirds, which are winter visitors in our region. Lots of the natives are slowing down, but non-natives like salmon Porterweed, candlestick senna, pagoda plant, flowering maple, Crinium lily, Dombeya and purple salvia will bloom all winter long unless temperatures drop below freezing.(Many of the original pieces of these plants came from Steve Backes, who runs the Facebook page Hummingbirds of Florida.)
And, of course, we’ll have lots of neem and Ayurvedic herbs to sell, including some spectacular betel, tulsi, ashwagandha and rooted cuttings of Rangoon creeper.