Cordylines in bloom

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A lovely spray of flowers cascades from the crown of the cordyline plant.

Think of cordylines and you’ll envision pretty leaves the shade of green to maroon to black, depending on the species. What you likely won’t think of are flowers – least of all, pretty pink clusters cascading from the crown of the plant – but those are indeed the flowers produced by our cordylines. It happens rarely, and usually at the top of our 2+ metre plants. I was thrilled that one of the shorter plants produced the blooms this time and allowed a closer look at the flowers. Pretty, aren’t they?

Up close and personal with the cordyline flowers. Sweet!

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How to get a mango tree to flower

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Mango tree in bloom. Can't say I've ever seen it flower so prolifically!

I didn’t start out trying to do anything for our mango trees, but something happened, and I thought it would be of interest some of you…

We have two mango trees in our back garden – one that’s almost 30 years old, and the other, over 6 years old. The younger one was grown from a seed from the older tree that sprouted on its own, and my dad decided to let it grow to see if it could produce fruits as nice as the older tree’s. Several years passed and the younger tree grew to about 2 stories high. A year ago, considering that the tree had shown no sign of flowers after so long, my dad wanted to cut it down. We protested because at the time there were some birds nesting there, so the tree stayed.

Fast forward to the present, and here I am scouting for a location for a bigger trellis. I didn’t mention that between the two mango trees is an old, abandoned metal frame that used to be for drying clothes. A lower branch of the older mango tree had woven over and through it, using it as a convenient armrest. I figured that the frame would be better served as a trellis than a support for a dying mango branch, and that a bit of pruning would be in order.

Yes, the tree is very old and a few of the branches are getting rotten. Those branches house insects, and a Sunda woodpecker comes almost every day to tap away at the wood and get some grub. Since there are other branches higher up that the bird can feed at, I cut away that branch to free the frame and give myself a sturdy trellis with much less effort.

A Sunda woodpecker industriously searching for insects in our old mango tree.

Since the younger mango tree was still unproductive, I also decided to give my dad his wish and started cutting the lower branches away. I figured it would take a few weekends to work my way to the top of the tree, and disposal would be easier, doing it bit by bit.

Interestingly enough, cutting mango branches isn’t that difficult – the wood is fairly soft, and thinner branches can be cut with heavy duty cutters while a good wood saw can handle the thicker branches easily – if you have the stamina for it…

So after handling the older tree,  I’ve been pruning the younger one gradually, and one day, suddenly realized that the older tree was flowering like crazy! Think cherry blossoms in spring kind of crazy. It has never, in my memory, flowered so profusely. I’ve heard how people slash the trunks of unproductive fruit trees to shock them to induce flowering, and I believe our tree started flowering so much because that one, fairly major branch had been cut away and it was frightened into flowering like there was no tomorrow.

And it’s not just the older tree that was affected – the younger tree also produced a few clusters of flowers! I had cut away about a third of its branches before this happened, and now we’ll have to wait and see if the fruit are as good as the original tree’s before we decide its fate.

This was a very unexpected development. But, stumbling onto this piece of information is, as always, interesting to me. So, folks, if you have a fruit tree that’s unproductive, and fertilizers haven’t been working, you can try some massive pruning as another way to startle your tree into flowering…

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Charge of the “White Brigade”

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Mealy bug infestation on a hibiscus bud.

Last year, just before I decided to start growing edible plants, I realized that a somewhat neglected and overgrown part of our garden was infested with what I eventually came to call “The White Brigade”.

There were all kinds of white pests clustered under that nice thick canopy of plants – tiny white flea-like insects that flew off in a flash, diamond-shaped segmented fluffy-looking things that could also jump and seemingly float away, round white ball-like things, clusters of cottony white stuff, oval white cocoon-like things stuck firmly to stems… it seemed never-ending.

Since then, I’ve learned that these were whiteflies, aphids and mealy bugs – pests that are essentially vampiric in that they suck the sap from leaves and stems, thus weakening plants, making them prone to diseases and eventually killing them. All I knew at that time was that they were infesting my plants, so I did a lot of massive pruning, followed by a few rounds of spraying insecticide before they finally diminished.

I think these are aphids on the Peacock tree stem. There are so many of them that it looks like it's snowing. Also note how unhealthy the leaves on the tree have become.

I thought that was it, but I was wrong.

You’ve already heard my rants about the whiteflies infesting the tomato plants so much so that I finally got rid of the tomato plants to get rid of the pests. They disappeared, but have now shown up again around a chilli plant that’s getting bigger.

Aphids, I think, are now attacking my established Peacock trees. They are clustered so thickly along many of the more woody stems that you can see the white from a few metres away. Like mealy bugs, aphids also secrete a kind of nectar that attracts ants, so there are ants on the trees as well. The ants also discovered they could make a home within the woody stems, and this further weakened the plants. Pruning those are not fun, firstly because Peacock trees are very thorny, and secondly because of the ants that emerge from the pruned branches, not happy at being disturbed – and they are biting ants, I might add, too. I only do a few branches at a time because of the unpleasant nature of the job, and I still can’t tell if I have to get rid of the trees completely or not. Drat those pests.

The mealy bugs, too, have returned with a vengeance. They went first for our hibiscus plant, then appeared on my kangkong plants, sucking them dry until they were weak and dying.

Growing colonies of mealy bugs under a papaya leaf. Also see the horrid black mould at the leaf junctures :(

Now they have infested my biggest Red Lady papaya tree, causing all the flowers to abort because they were so infested. Looking at the underside of the leaves horrified me because of the sheer clusters of cottony mealy bug bodies colonizing the area. I cleaned by hand and even, in desperation, sprayed the plant a few times, but they wouldn’t disappear. Black mould also developed because of the nectar secretions, and I couldn’t clean it away completely. There are just too many inviting nooks and crannies for the mealy bugs to congregate on a papaya tree that I’ve given up on that plant. Making that decision was heartbreaking, but it just was not salvageable. I hope my other papaya trees are not as unlucky. :(

My latest nemesis - mealy bugs.

So, these days I am on a prune-and-destroy mission – removing whole parts of infested plants and bagging and trashing them as fast as possible. If I could, I’d burn the plants immediately, but we can’t do that here any more. So it’s straight into the trash bag and out the gate with my fingers crossed that the pests don’t escape and return to the garden. Did the rainy weather bring on the White Brigade infestation? I don’t know …but I’ll be watching carefully so I can try to circumvent them in future. It will be a tough fight…

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Sunflowers: Phase 1

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More sunflower seeds sprouting in a ziplock bag.

With better weather beaming down on us, I finally got my sunflower seeds out with the confidence that they would not get drowned by excessive rain. I took a few of this and a few of that, then a few more of these and some of those, and ended up with seven different ziplock baggies with several sunflower seeds in each.

48 hours later, I held the bags up to the light to see if anything had happened, and gosh, things had happened! The majority of the seeds had germinated, giving me a mixture of healthy, green sprouts with seeds that had only roots growing out, looking oddly sperm-like when looked at with the light as a background.

Thought this was cute because this sunflower sprout looks like it's wearing a beret! Oui?

A major potting exercise had to be executed immediately, and the sprouting seeds were put into their new temporary homes – individual little pots – where they can grow a little stronger while I have a few days to prepare their permanent homes in the garden.

This is just the first phase of my experiment growing sunflowers. So far, I’ve only grown the “regular” sunflowers, with a fair success rate. This time, I’m trying the smaller varieties, just to see how they grow. The bigger ones will follow soon.

Piece of sunflower heaven, here I come! Snails, caterpillars and rampaging dogs had better stay away…

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