Saturday, September 11, 2010

up all night



Hey Folk's

This is my blog on Native and exotic plants of Florida. Here I am sitting up all night. Let me tell you about my late fathers Carambola (Averrahoa carambola) Tree. My dad planted the tree right in the front yard near the driveway and it has flourished since. It bares fruit, called star fruit because of the shape, a couple times a year. They are messy at first but they break down in my fire pit fairly quickly. If you ever get a star fruit rest assured there are only two flavors. Sweet and sour. We have the sweet variety so they are pretty good. They are a very good source of vitamin C. You can bake them in bread with some raisins and nuts and that is pretty tasty. As an exotic plant of Florida they grow fairly tall. Right now mine is about 15' tall and still growing. It takes up a lot of space as it spreads, also it's not a good idea to plant it too close to the house. When the fruit is falling it attracts ants and fruit flies so it should be cleaned up regularly as the fruit drops and disposed of in your mulch bin or if you have a fire pit or burn area in your yard because it breaks down easily. I use the fire pit because I have a lot of debris due to having a large Oak and a Sable Palm as well that needs to be cleaned out once or twice a year. Well it's almost 5:00 am so I am calling it quits and I am ending this blog on Native and exotic plants. Leave a comment or a question and I will post your answer in the comment section whenever I can and thanks for reading my blogs. By the way that is my cat in the Carambola tree pictured at the bottom and my late father pictured at the top.

Monday, July 26, 2010

behind blue eyes by the who




Welcome back to Native and exotic plants of Florida. From time to time I will be posting a video of me playing the guitar even though it has nothing to do with Native or exotic plants. This is "Behind blue eyes" by "the who" one of my favorite bands. I first heard them in the 60's when I was 7 or 8. The song was "substitute" and I think the flip side was "whisky man" but I'm not positive. Thanks for reading my blog on Native and Exotic plants of Florida.Enjoy

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Palmetto for border plants


Hi Folks, and welcome to another post on Native and Exotic plants of Florida. The Saw Palmetto ( Seneroa repens) is an excellent plant to use as a border for your property because it can fill out your entire property line or just sections. You could use fellow native Florida speicies like slash pine trees and other ground cover taking up the rest of the sections to fill the space. Saw palmetto is very low maintenance and once it is established in very rarely needs watering. If you want variety and color, try the Silver Saw Palmetto with its bluish tint it will add a beautiful element to your yard or garden. These plants don't get very tall only about 4' high but they are a nice addition to any garden.Thanks again for reading my posts on Native and exotic plants of Florida

This is my first blog


Hey folks,
My name is Dwain and I am going to blog about native and exotic plants in the great state of Florida. I am a landscaper and a landscape designer in southwest Florida and I hope to help people with there decisions on what type of plants and shrubs to put in the yards. I was raised in the Southwest Florida area so I know about the climate which as someone once said "Florida has only two seasons, wet and dry". I also know about the native plants that we use a lot of to save on water and maintenance. Right now as I post we are in our rainy season and as a matter of fact we just had a tropical storm pass over yesterday that dumped a bunch of rain which we needed because it has been dry for the past couple of weeks. My experience in exotic plants comes from my 22 years working as a groundskeeper and manager at the Thomas Edison and Henry Ford Winter Estates in Fort Myers Florida. Mr. Edison had a wide variety of exotic trees, plants, and shrubs throughout the estates that I personally took care of for all those years. I also worked as a landscape designer with a landscape architech here in Fort Myers for about 4 years and now I am trying to start a lawn and landscape business with my brother. This blog is intended to be an introduction to me and my experience in this field and in future blogs I will talk about choosing plants for certain spaces and how to plant and maintain the plants and different types of problems occur with the plant such as damage from insects, fungus, over watering, and under watering. I will also talk about fertilizer and what type to use with which variety of plant.

Friday, July 23, 2010

Privacy Policy

This website/blog uses third-party advertising companies to serve ads when visiting this site. These third parties may collect and use information (but not your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, you can visit Google's Advertising and Privacy page.

If you wish to opt out of Advertising companies tracking and tailoring advertisements to your surfing patterns you may do so at Network Advertising Initiative.

Google uses the Doubleclick DART cookie to serve ads across it's Adsense network and you can get further information regarding the DART cookie at Doubleclick as well as opt out options at Google's Privacy Center



I respect your privacy and I am committed to safeguarding your privacy while online at this site nativeandexoticplantsofflorida.blogspot.com. The following discloses how I gather and disseminate information for this Blog.

RSS Feeds

If a user wishes to subscribe to my RSS Feeds, I ask for contact information such as name and email address. Users may opt-out of these communications at any time. Your personal information will never be sold or given to a third party. (You will never be spammed by me - ever)

Log Files and Stats

Like most blogging platforms I use log files. This stores information such as internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, internet service provider (ISP), referring, exit and visited pages, platform used, date/time stamp, track user’s movement in the whole, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use. IP addresses etc. are not linked to personally identifiable information.

Cookies

A cookie is a piece of data stored on the user’s computer tied to information about the user. This blog doesn't use cookies. However, some of my business partners use cookies on this site (for example - advertisers). I can't access or control these cookies once the advertisers have set them.

Links

This Blog contains links to other sites. Please be aware that I am not responsible for the privacy practices of these other sites. I suggest my users to be aware of this when they leave this blog and to read the privacy statements of each and every site that collects personally identifiable information. This privacy statement applies solely to information collected by this Blog.

Advertisers

I use outside ad companies to display ads on this blog. These ads may contain cookies and are collected by the advertising companies and I do not have access to this information. I work with the following advertising companies: Google Adsense, Please check the advertisers websites for respective privacy policies.

Contact Information

If you have any questions or concerns please contact Dwain Willis at Dwainw@comcast.net