Garden Club of Cape Coral | Building a Florida-Friendly garden: Part 7
By MERYL O’ROURKE
news@breezenewspapers.com
Hello fellow gardener, welcome back! I thought it would be fun to take you back to the area that I wrote about in my second column to see how it’s progressed.
It was a small, scrappy plot right next to my garage that had quite a bit of pea gravel from 47 years of accumulation! Amendments to the soil were made, and I planted crotons (Codiaeum variegatum “Mammy”), dwarf ginger (Costus woodsonii) and curcuma (Curcuma caesia). The planting was done in early February, so this is a seven-month check-in.
The crotons, unfortunately, wound up being potted and are awaiting a new home. Probably in the backyard area or maybe near the mailbox, depending on where I think they’ll thrive the best. In their place, there’s now a wonderful chenille plant (Acalypha hispida), also known as red-hot cattail. It flowers year-round, producing fuzzy red droopy blooms that work well with the taller purple and white curcuma in the foreground. The curcuma has performed exceedingly well! It’s already starting to multiply and fill in, which is exactly what I had hoped for!
The ginger hasn’t done as well as I had hoped for, but I believe it’s because I left it in the bucket too long before I planted it. It was given to me by a fellow Master Gardener. I brought it home and put it on the side of the garage and just didn’t get to it in a timely fashion. Lesson learned. I’m fortunate to have access to several more to fill in the area and plan to do that within the next several weeks.
It’s always good to check your plants periodically, especially with the heat we’ve been enduring — and the periodic rainfall. Speaking of rainfall, how are you watering your plants when there’s no rain? I have three rain barrels set up around my house. One is on my lanai, which I use for both my houseplants and lanai plants. There’s also one rain barrel on each side of my house, just off the front.