GARDENING

January 2001 Table of Contents

GARDENING
Jack Hardy

A Happy New Year to all readers! Now let's get down to work. If you started your vegetables in September or October you will have to ensure that you have successive crops to carry you through the growing season. Peppers should last into the summer but tomatoes will need further sowing. Ditto for members of the cabbage clan, spinach, lettuce and other fast-growing plants.

If you didn't get started earlier, it's time to go to Pine Woods Nursery in Marsh Harbour near the Airport and buy young plants. You know the price of vegetables in the stores. A few dollars invested in young plants will save you dozens of dollars later, and give you that immense feeling of satisfaction when you eat your own (old cannibal proverb).

Are your potted Poinsettias beginning to look ragged? Time to transfer them to the garden. You will find two or three plants in the pot and they need to be separated. Plant them where you want them to grow (in full sunshine and away from street lights) then cut them to within two inches of soil level. It doesn't sound like a promising start but by next New Year you will have a four foot tall plant. Poinsettias usually bloom from January through to Easter on Abaco.

If you are a winter resident, you can now go outside and pick fruit from your Carambola tree. Don't have one? Why not? It bears prolifically during December and January and it's a fruit that everyone seems to like. It can be sliced and tossed into salads and is a transforming ingredient in tropical fruit salads.

If space is a problem,the Carambola tree can be pruned to stay compact. You can even grow it in a large planter. The amount of fruit you get from a single tree is staggering, and it produces another harvest in late summer.

If you have sandy soil you may consider growing your own potatoes. The 'seeds', of course, are at your local grocery store. If you get potatoes with developing 'eyes', dry cut sections for a few days and then plant them. The technique is to dig over, mulch and fertilize an area about one square foot in and one foot deep. Scoop out a hole five inches deep and push your seed potato in, cut side down. As the eyes grow into stems, push in the soil you have removed.

Roots will grow from the cut end of the seed potato and new potatoes will develop between the seed potato and the surface of the soil. You may have to heap soil around the base of the plant if you have a bumper crop. Although potatoes are not an expensive item on the weekly food bill, those creamy new potatoes you can harvest are gourmet items. Well worth the trouble.

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