Prepare For Landing

I would prefer to always be on vacation.

But that's not gonna happen so I'm back home from West Virginia and looking with freshly weary eyes at all the things that need to be done on my croft.

Take the above photo.  

I finally got the ladder out of the shed and trimmed back the big cactus that was threatening to shred the shade cloth for the orchids.  Too bad I put the ladder away before dealing with...

The monster papaya tree!

Word to the wise: don't let your papaya tree grow so tall that you can't access the fruit 

until it falls to the ground in a funky mush.  

Last year I allowed two side shoots to start maturing and now it's time to saw the top off of this thing before it get into the power lines.  

I've tried and tried and tried to grow another one from seed and always failed so I was extremely grateful when a friend gave me a healthy young tree.

The day after she gave it to me, I spotted this little guy growing next to the compost bin...

So I will soon have stacks of papayas to consume.  

Two words: SMOOTH! EE!

Speaking of the compost pile,

what on earth is this ethereal creature?!

It's a native Florida lily. Don't know how it got there but it can stay.

  Back to the papaya situation.

The only thing standing between me and a beautiful papaya tree in my front yard was this tenacious shrub:

Once upon a time it was a sweet almond bush and the flying insects loved it but before too long, it became an over-achieving, weedy bastard that had to be cut to the ground TWICE a year merely to keep it in bounds.  Time to die!   It took a couple of visits with different tools to finally extricate it.  

Gone!  Papaya in place!

And if Thomas Jefferson can have figs, why can't I?

Different climate and soil?  Pshaw!

I have one fig tree that was growing in a pot and now it is, hopefully, growing in the ground.

I won't stock up on brie just yet, but I have my fingers crossed.

While working in the front yard

I noticed this possibly concerning development with one of my painful plants:

The "cowboy cactus" that I bought for $5 at the flea market in the spring is happy...

Maybe TOO happy.

I just noticed 3 pups growing around the base.

I'm gonna keep my eye on you!

I thinned some bromeliads, 

only scratching the crap out of my arms from my elbows to my shoulders because now,

I wear welding gloves.

The most gratifying part of the process was that the people who wanted the starts were there to get them within a couple of hours and had them all planted before nightfall.  

OCD's after my own heart.

In some cases, I have to choose my battles.

Take these persimmons, for instance.

A friend brought them to me and I was very excited.  

I like persimmons!  Right?  Don't I?

To be honest, I don't really understand persimmons.  They seemed to go from rock hard with an alum aftertaste to complete goo, overnight.  I was not put off because that's what NurtiBullets are for: turning unwieldy produce into nutritious sustenance that doesn't require teeth.

Still, I had that moment of thinking I needed a dwarf persimmon tree...until I studied how these things are connected to said tree.  Look at the stems. Geez!  They're not coming off without pruning shears!

Pass!