Overwintering Plants Indoors/Year End Wrap Up

I have a lot of tropical plants that wouldn’t make it if I left them outside during our few freezes. I have all kinds of one year old plants in this single, twenty inch pot. (BTW I got this pot, and many more, in the trash my neighbors put out. Don’t pass up free pots! Especially the older ones that are made with outdoor rated materials. Good pots are always expensive. I vote for free ones!)

Anyway, I have a light on these and my blinds are open. There’s just enough light to keep these plants happy. The pot in the picture also has a bunch of amaryllis that I didn’t have time to put outside before our Colorado trip. So, I’m enjoying their beauty indoors. I love that I can grow amaryllis outside! The only issue in south Texas is that deer and rabbits eat them to the ground. That’s why I employ my whippet! He kills all of the rodents and opossums that try and clean out my garden.

I found a “binge buying” tropical plant place. I don’t think I’m going to buy from them anymore. I spent a lot of money on their site last year and lost a bunch of plants, when I went out of town multiple times this year. That company was pretty rude when I contacted them about ideas for their website, that I would really like to see. I often run into people who don’t want any new ideas. I think that’s weird. I assume if you are selling me plants, if I tell you what would make me buy more plants that would be received well. Eh, what do I know. Maybe they were having a bad day. I also don’t need a bunch of needy, specialized plants to worry about. I am a collector of plants, but it drastically reduces my collection, if they all have radically different needs that take up all my time.

Raintree nursery has shut down their plant ambassador program, so I won’t be running around like a crazy person trying to find room for free trees. I’m happy. It was fun while it lasted, and I’m proud of the advice I gave.

Anyway, lots of stuff to repot in a few weeks. I have a “Christmas” early fruiting loquat (a replacement for the pear that died) and some cane fruits from Florida coming (these are from “just fruits and exotics”.) Loquat can catch fireblight, but it blooms over-winter when there’s no bees or flies to spread that disease.

Lots of people grow loquat here and don’t realize the fruit is edible. (They taste like apricots but less flesh. Some fruits have a single seed and there can be up to ten but four to six is about average. This is a pome fruit. There’s no single pit, like apricots, which are drupes. ) The flowers will draw you to the tree. The whole loquat tree is blooming at a time when nothing else is even green. They smell fantastic. Like orange blossoms or other white fragrant flowers, like: jasmine, tea olive or tuberose. Most perfume flowers are white flowers that attract moths in the dark. I guess we like the same scents as moths do.

On another random note: The perfume “Poison” from the 90s is mainly tuberose and I always thought it smelled like my idea of the color purple.

Tea olive or Osmanthus fragrans is another fantastic plant to grow down here, but alas, no edible fruit. I’m waiting to see how stinky my pawpaws are. They are fly attractors and smell like rotting meat. There is definitely going to be a scent for each season in my garden!

This is a babaco papaya (Vasconcellea × heilbornii). It’s a year old and has fruit. It’s supposed to taste very different from your average papaya variety. I am excited to see if I like it. I usually avoid papaya (they are just OK, with lime juice) and the only reason I am trying this was because I couldn’t think of any other plant to order from Raintree for payment.

I’m always really happy with everything I get from Raintree (and I was buying, all the way back to twenty years ago, with different owners. The current owners are doing a great job, although they stopped their paper catalogs and I am a plant catalog fanatic.)

Raintree is a great nursery. However, I specialize in fruit in zone 9a and there are more compatible nurseries out there. I love just fruits and exotics but their shipping is really high and they are always sold out by the time I’m checking for plants. However I got my pear from them about twelve years ago and it was a great pear for a place that doesn’t support pears very well!

Back to my indoor jungle: My family patiently deals with my gardening addiction. My two teenage boys are tolerant, when I get seeds from plants in parking lots or run across the street to take pictures of mushrooms. I spend a whole lot more time with them, than my goofy garden, and I am so proud of where they are going.

My eldest boy is focusing in on a college choice. There was a college we discarded out of hand because my husband and I know Houston, and it has some crazy and rough areas. Now it may be our number one. The University seems interested. It’s Rice University. I never thought about my kids, attending a super prestigious college. But they have both worked their butts off over the years, becoming men I’m super proud of. Guess we’ll see. There’s a lot of choices and we qualify for scholarships.

As my mothering time draws closer to the end, I sit back and see nothing but pride and amazement, at how all of this played out. Don’t skip parenting. It’s amazing!

See you out in the garden, with experience under our belts, and little tears of pride and joy, as our little ones wander off as men.

Crazy Green Thumbs