Pastures and House Lawn
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Rhinoceros Beetle
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What We’ve Been Tending this Week
And what a week it has been. With this heat it’s a good thing the watermelon is plentiful because we’ve been sucking it down to stay hydrated and fueled while caring for everything here. The birds have been working hard too, so their share of the melon crop has been earned. I think they’ve figured out that leaving some juice in the eaten out melon halves attracts a week’s worth of bugs, therefore extending the buffet. Farm and homestead plants need daily monitoring, watering, fertilization and repositioning. Mom’s orchids are flowering for an unexpected bonus round since December, and her Gasteria succulent has divided into a handsome clump on The…
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Cactus Island blog begins!
It has been just over eleven months since we moved here in rural Williston, Fl from down South in Estero, and what a monumental restorative effort it has been. My mother named the 8.21 acre property on a sub-tropically wooded sand hill “Cactus Island”, as old time Florida settlers once called such highground areas “islands”. It is also a reference to the abundant yellow-flowering prickly pear cacti found throughout the property and to the enormous numbers of Florida-compatible cacti I’ve grown from seed in the ever-expanding nursery. We completely hand-renovated the house, built food garden enclosures, created permaculture mounds for orchards and restored the land by manually weeding it of…
