Looks like you are well on your way to an excellent fruit orchard. You have some nice choices in your collection. I am amazed to see mamey blooms on such a small tree. On a related note, Jeff Hagen and his wife stopped by tonight to drop off some more mango trees and Jeff spotted some of what looks like blooms on my 15 year old grafted magana mamey. So...at long last I may get some fruit. Anyway, thanks for posting your yard update.

Harry

Very very nice!! The yard is looking good and can only get better. A good way to start would be to remove the soursop for a good fruit tree!! Kidding...well...not really. Keep the pics coming. Would like to see how the blooms on your mamey progress. Thanks, J

Nice shape on the Sweetsop!

Looks like the Mamey is about to take off with buds!!

Brad

Thanks! 5-10 years from now, it will probably look like a rain forest. haha

Cool. What other mango cultivars did you get?

Glad to hear the good news about your magana mamey.

It's my pleasure.

Thanks for the positive feedback ohiojay and bradflorida!

ohiojay- I'll make a new update in February. The mamey would have even more blooms by then and more new growth. Honestly, I like the sweetsop. It's just like vanilla custard. The only drawback is the amount of seeds.

bradflorida- Yes it is. :-)

Alexi:

Against my better judgment which became outweighed by my obsession I got Harvest Moon, Ladies Choice and Sweet Tart. Please, don't aks me why. I need more mangoes like I need a couple more holes in my head. LOL....I just can't help myself. I think that now makes my mango collection check in at about 115 trees.....100 different cultivars/seedlings. Crazy, crazy, crazy.

Harry

hahaha I know how you feel. My original plan was having three types of mango. This weekend coming up, I will officially have seven types of mango trees. lol

Harry that is not crazy that is diversity, diversity, diversity as far as mangoes you have your own UDSA test station

Very nice collection, Alexi. All your trees are looking nice and healthy. The older pace mamey is especially nice looking.

Harry, you need to start 'culling the herd'. Time to start top working the cultivars of lesser value ;-).

Jeff

Thanks Jeff!

TG89---
Your fruit trees look good but........
Your lawn and hedge are struggling and lawn has bare sandy patches. As you drive around, when you see a crew trimming and chipping trees see if you can get them to dump a load in your driveway. Have a wheelbarrow ready for you to bring them to your back yard. Heap them up into three ft high compost piles where you have bare sandy lawn patches. After 6-12 months remove that compost pile and use that black compost where you need it such as in scraggly parts of your lawn, fruit trees, hedges. After removing that wood chip compost pile you will be left with nice black soil underneath to plant grass, sod or perennial peanut. St Augustine grass is purchased as sod, it is a machine that creates and maintains black soil underneath once it it is established but it must be fertilized (chemical lawn fertilizers are OK) or it weakens. But also look into perennial peanut, I am planting some this week to see how it does.

Aside from those compost piles, Take some of that wood chip load and put around your fruit trees and into your hedges. Your hedges need humus. They are dry because your soil is dry because little humus. My neighbor's ficus hedge (nasty invasive roots hedge it's actually a tree) recovered when mulched. If you get too much wood chips you can really heap them up into your hedges. Store them in your hedges then remove and use elsewhere as needed. Your hedges can be your wood chip mulch bank that you make withdrawals from

If your driveway is not available then spread out a tarp and drop the chips load there onto that tarp.

You can wait until spring when as it it gets hotter the chips decay into humus quicker. Plus more tree trimming crews are out. Or do it now and get a head start. Plus sprinkling some 6-6-6 or 10-10-10 on top will accelerate the composting process but don't use too much or the worms etc will be affected

Additionally-- You can also take an electric drill and/or a circular saw and scoop out a pint/quart size hole in the center of those tree stumps I see. Put some 6-6-6 or 10-10-10 in there. Add water then seal with plastic so rains don't wash it away. This will eat through the stump and rot it into black humus
My summation is your backyard is dry but rotted wood chips can make it hold moisture
Just my 2 cents Worth

Thanks Zands.

The stump is from a norfolk pine that used to be there. I am planning to use a circular saw and bust the roots that are near the surface close to the stump. Thanks for the advice. I'll make a hole/bowl in the center of each stump and use the 6-6-6 or 10-10-10 fertilizer like you've mentioned. It was a triplet.
I might just add the peanut perennials to my back yard instead of planting sod, cause I've read that sod like st. augustine grass harbors bugs that can harm the fruit trees.
Also, the hedges look kinda bald because they were huge before we trimmed them. Overall, the reason why the lawn and other parts of the yard look crappy is because my house was a foreclosure that we bought. The lawn and hedges were practically abondoned. Some parts of the hedges were up to 11 ft tall. They will eventually fill in again and I honestly don't care much for them since we are planning to yank them out and install a 6ft tall wood fence. That will give me more privacy and the roots won't be growing into the area where my banana trees and my soursop tree is located.

The front lawn was also abandoned an the weeds took over the whole yard. They are ground-cover type weeds. It looks pretty nice after I mow the lawn since it looks like a dark-green carpet. I'm probably going to use Scott's turf builder and weed killer. That will probably kill everything and leave the front yard bare so we can lay down some sod. Little by little, the yard will take shape.

The "weeds" are really pioneer type plants. They can help draw nutrients up and rebuild the health of the soil. They're fine IMO and healthier than spraying herbicides and petroleum based fertilizers like "turf builder" into the ground. I don't know why people like the "mono culture" look of grass with nothing else in it. Nice for baseball fields but not for yards I say. To each his own, nice looking Mango trees!

Keeping the front yard with decent looking sod helps keep the neighbors, city code enforcers, and home owner's associations happy. But you can mulch over the backyard quite happily. The mulch actually has a neat "forest" look to it and has many, many benefits such as increased beneficial insect activity, fewer cuban may beetles, better soil, less water loss, etc. The painful part is laying it down. You need it to be several inches thick - plan on an entire weekend worth of work hauling it to the back for a normal sized backyard.

City officials really like to see the green carpet in the front. A few of my rare-fruiter friends have had issues with city code enforcement. One friend in Boynton Beach was told that he needed to have a certain number of square feet of grass in his front yard (~200 sq ft?). So, he planted a patch of sod of the required size and now uses it as a parking space for his truck :-).

Jeff

tropicalgrower89--
Thanks for explaining your future plans. Looks like you have some work ahead but that's why you got a good deal on the foreclosure. So more power to ya!

Not all hedges have invasive roots. Ficus sure does. The roots will travel to seek out water so they say. My neighbor planted ficus. So far it has not sent out roots to my Glenn mango planted 10ft from the hedge and I do water that mango sometimes. I will waste any intruding ficus roots

beautiful trees Tropicalgrower89,

They look to be growing fast you'll have a edible forest in acouple of years.....BTW, I love that flowering Mamey. My Maganha is also flowering out here in Socal.

JF

Tropicalgrower,

Beautiful trees, everything looks very healthy.

melikeeatplants: Thanks! Yeah, weeds do create nutrients, especially after you mow them over and leave lots of weed pieces on the ground to decompose and create more soil. Sometimes, I use lawn debris such as pieces of grass and weeds as tree mulch for the fruit trees and they rot into black compost and harbor lots of insects that are good for the soil.

Jeff: Thanks for the advice! I'd rather put a thick layer of mulch in a 8ft diameter around each tree because I don't have space in the front yard for a huge pile of mulch. I'm pretty much exposed to all of the neighbors on the block and I don't have a big driveway. I might just plant the perennial peanuts on all over the back yard after most of the weeds are dead after winter, during spring.

I also don't live in a HOA neighborhood. :-) Also, it seems that pembroke pines is not that strict on lawn maintenance unless it's really horrible like having a completely dead lawn or weeds that are 4-5ft tall. haha I might just plant the peanut perennials in the front and back yards. It will need water and require less maintenance while not allowing any weeds to grow. There's a neighbor down the block who just has river pebbles in his front yard like if it was the desert with zero grass, so I'm pretty sure the city won't have any problems with me having a peanut perennial lawn.

Zands- thanks for your advice!

jfernandez- Thanks! Hopefully you'll enjoy fruit from your magana mamey next year.

nullzero- Thanks!

Yah a mulch pile will take up the entire driveway. I usually pay a guy to truck it into the back. It seems like it would take him about a day and a half for a full load.

Jeff

Wow. That's a lot of mulch.
I'm thinking about buying pine bark mulch for the fruit trees.