Next issue: # 21 (1) 2013

Nature’s Food and Pharmacy

The King of Spices: black pepper

There are many pepper plants in many regions all over the world, but there is only one black pepper plant. It originated in India, where it still grows wild in the mountains.

Growing Black pepper

Growers of beauty

Getaway

...The man is Brendon Grimshaw, now 86 years of age. And his love, is his island. What so many would call the ultimate nature lover, Mr. Grimshaw has single handedly preserved a piece of our world until its end. It took, however, a fearless leap of faith and strength into a new, and unknown existence. He had to leave everything in the world he had known behind him, and dedicate himself to a life of nearly total isolation. With his act, he unknowingly pioneered a new level of nature preservation that has set the highest boundaries for what a single man is capable of accomplishing...

Growing outdoors

Top Tropicals guide to late-season plants (Fall through Early Spring) in SOUTH Florida

...Living in South Florida, you soon take notice that the people who reside here are as diverse as our plants themselves— and boy, are we known for our snowbirds! Many Floridians that live here only do so for some of the year. They will live up north during our hot summer months, then start to migrate back down south starting at around late September, and returning home by about Mother’s Day in May. Many original northerners that have found their home away from home here have really come to appreciate and admire our plants, becoming southern garden enthusiasts themselves! However, even at Top Tropicals we have seen a high demand for plants that will really explode with life during their stay here which they can fully enjoy...

Ask the pros: Tropical treasures Q&A

Transplanting plants from pots into ground and from ground into pots.

...Planting instructions for mail order plants suggest to pot a newly arrived plant and give it time to establish before planting in the ground. There is a reason for it...

...Most of plants go from container into the ground. However, sometimes it works the other way around; a plant must leave the place where it was growing and find its new home in a container...

Cold protection tips

...Q: My plants were killed during record freeze last winter and I would like to replace them, but do not want to risk the same mistake. For cold protection, I would like to install a small greenhouse, but have found that they are very expensive. What should I do?..

A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

Looking at the Green

...My friend told me how, though he had asked his father several times why they would spend so much time looking at the green, he never quite understood the purpose of the exercise— only that his father would simply say, “It’s good for your eyes...”

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