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Carianna

Feb 5, 2004, 3:13 PM

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Any Yucatan coastal area Gardeners out there?

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Would love to get in touch with other people who live in the coastal areas of the Yucatan and are trying to make gardens. We are doing this on Cozumel and have some suprising sucesses and some failures as well. Interestingly, for example, the African Merenge tree does fabulously here growing to 25 feet and producing blossoms in one year. But the white flies are getting the grape tomatoes we're trying to grow from seed. Anyone else out there into this kind of thing?

Jim in Cancun / Moderator

Feb 5, 2004, 5:06 PM

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Re: [Carianna] Any Yucatan coastal area Gardeners out there?

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Hi there!!

As a matter of fact I am interested in growing things--flowers, plants, fruit trees and vegetables. I have a home in Cancun and a little piece of dirt outside Cancun. Lots of tropical plants grow well here and I have a Framboyan and a Lluvia de oro tree in the front yard. We like roses but the only place we have had luck is with putting them on the roof of the house where sunlight is constant.

Out at the "ranchito"--which is more inland--we have "played" with apricot, orange, lime, grapefruit, avocado, 2 varieties of mango, chico zapote, 3 varieties of banana and papaya fruit trees and evergreen, Ceiba and Primavera trees as well as almost every vegetable you can think of. The most luck we have had in that area is with chiles (almost any variety), papaya, squash and the bananas. Most problems are from lack of sunlight in some areas and the poor quality of the earth. I do however have about 50 "fertilizer factories" in the form of pigs, goats, sheep, ducks, geese, pigs, dogs, rabbits, chickens and turkeys. We are in the process of mixing the fertilizer with the dirt and hope this will help.

As far a varmints and bugs, ants are the biggest although there was a hoard of locusts that came through for a couple of months a couple of years ago.

Nice to meet you.

jim

AJSutton

Feb 21, 2004, 8:46 AM

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Re: [Jim in Cancun] Any Yucatan coastal area Gardeners out there?

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I'm Carey's husband- the actual gardener. Thanks for your post. You have got me thinking again about buying a small piece of land in the jungle to mess around with useful and local large plants. I assume I would have to fence it to keep the critters like wild pigs and escaped cattle out, but maybe I could find a small place somewhere.

I'm starting a form specifically for gardening at CozumelMyCozumel.Com, because I can't find much about it anywhere. Our nurseries here are very limited, and mostly have exotics- the usual bougainvilleas, copa de oros and tropical foliage plants. What I'm trying to find is sources of local plants, and I do have a few leads for that from some of our Mexican friends.

We live right in the center of downtown San Miguel, so we just have a small garden (maybe 20 x 14 meters- actually huge by downtown standards), but it is surprising what you can cram in there given the intense sunlight. And of course many plants want the shade anyway here (and so do I). Our "soil," which,being generous was basically a thin (1/2") coating of tierra (what they call the organic powder on the top of the ground). Under that is broken limestone that gets bigger and bigger until it hits cracked bedrock at about 2 feet. We then added grava fina (like 1'4" gravel) over it from a couple inches to 6" or so as fill, as the lot was low. This turned out great as the mosquitoes stay away (grass seems very stupid here) and there is no weed problem and it is a clean all-weather surface as it drains instantly.

So the soil is not very promising on the face of it but a lot of things grow pretty well in it. I use a little (not much) tierra when I plant something new and have some large planters filled with limestone sand, limestone gravel, and tierra in about equal portions. I am going to try to grow some U.S. type tomatoes there.

We had a cayumito tree and a guanavana tree on the propery but the rest is new. The cayumito particularly is a great tree with nice glossy leaves and is loaded with about 200 pounds of fruit this year. It flowers continuously in the summer and then the fruit is ready starting around January 15, ripening over a month or so. The guanavana tree has had fruit but seems to flower a lot and not set fruit. I may need pollination from another tree, and there are few around us so maybe that is the problem. From seeds I have moringa trees, which are about 25' tall now although only a year old. These flower more or less continuously and draw hummingbirds. You can eat the leaves, young pods, and flowers of it (and they're not bad). It is big in Africa and India, where they coppice it and make it bushy.

From seed I have a couple Bauhinia monandra (pink orchid plant). This is a bush/small tree that is now about 10' tall in a year, so like the moringa, it likes it here. No flowers yet, which is the point of the plant, but it is young, so... I have a couple limes from plants which are doing poorly. They may want some actual soil to grow. They just aren't thriving, but have grown slowly from a couple feet when planted to about 6' now, with a few limes. Another thing that grows well here is datura, which has night-blooming flowers more or less continuously. Very nice, but very poisonous. And four o'clocks, which I knew from the U.S.- I like the fragrance, and they put out seeds like mad, so I am planting them around the edges of spaces. They seem to be going dormant now, but they have a root like a sweet potato and are perrenial so should come back strong.

As for smaller stuff for which the results are out, I planted some plumeria (frangipani) cuttings last summer and they rooted but then we hit their dormant season so they are leafless now. One of them put out a flower so I am hoping for leaves, as that is the sequence they usually follow according to my book information. I also planted an avocado from a seed a couple years ago- it is now a 7' tree but is in some shade so may go nowhere as far as fruit. Also from seeds gotten locally, yellow mango, which is very slow growing and only 6" or so high after a year in the ground. Likewise a sugar apple and cherimoya from fruits I bought locally. And then a lot of ornamentals- a few orchids, a few bromeliads, and the usual bunch of ornamentals you can get at the nurseries.

I don't have any room for anything larger than a small bush any more, but I am going to get into orchids and bromeliads, as I have a nice shady wall with plenty of space, and as time goes on and the trees get bigger, will have plenty of shady spaces. So shade plants are going to be the thing.

At any rate post if you feel like on the new forum. I did notice that there are a bunch of nurseries on the road from Cancun to Valladolid. I was on the bus so I didn't stop but they may have some odd stuff. Also, we are going on a trip to Sian Ka'an shortly and I have heard there is a nursery with orchids and bromeliads on the road from Tulum south. And, there is supposed to be a place in Playa del Carmen that has orchids and bromeliads. I will post here and on the new forum at CozumelMyCozumel.Com what I find out.