Summer's not the best time to exercise your green thumb unless you particularly enjoy sweating to near-drowning proportions or passing out from heat stroke in the compost heap.
Summer is, however, the best time to plan your gardening and landscaping activities for the rest of the year. If you do it right this summer, you can spend next summer sipping lemonade (or slamming iced vodka shots) and watching butterflies and birds in the cool, green shade you spent the rest of the year creating.
By far the best resource for neophytes and old hands is your county extension service. The extension service was created by an act of Congress to disseminate information from land-grant universities (in our case, University of Florida in Gainesville) to the community through county programs.
The extension services offer free workshops in composting, butterfly gardening, growing exotic tropical fruit, landscape design, xeriscape, water conservation, rain barrels, and many more topics of interest to green freaks.
Many of the programs are taught by state-certified, volunteer master gardeners at neighborhood libraries throughout the year. I recently attended a highly entertaining tropical fruit workshop at New Tampa library taught by James Lee, who is originally from southern China, which, he said, has a climate similar to Florida's. He talked about growing guava, passion fruit, pineapple, blackberries, Surinam cherries, figs, pomegranates, macadamia nuts persimmons, jujubes, peaches, lychee, bananas and exotics I'd never heard of. Like dorian fruit, which he said is known as an aphrodisiac but smells so foul that bus drivers in Asia refuse to stop near them. Or the joboticaba, the national fruit of Brazil, which looks like a black grape but grows directly on the trunk of the tree. Or the jackfruit, which at a record 120 pounds (recorded in India) is the largest fruit in the world. He also told us that the leaves of the loquat, which grows bounteously here, are used to make cough syrup and tea in China.
One of the coolest programs of the extension service is the backyard habitat program, which teaches very simple ways to make your yard a habitat for wildlife at a time when dwindling habitat is threatening the existence of increasing numbers of species.
The extension service will also test your soil and tell you how to enrich it and give you all sorts of advice on pest control and other stuff. Some extension services also have demonstration gardens. Hillsborough County's has a butterfly garden, organic vegetable and herb plots, a fruit and spice park, native plantings, compost demos and native plant species.
The University of Florida Extension Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences website (www.ifas.ufl.edu) has links to extension service sites for all 67 of Florida's counties. Hillsborough County's demonstration garden is at 5339 C.R. 579 in Seffner (813-744-5776). Sarasota County service has four community gardens and can be reached at 941-861-9800. Pinellas County Extension Service and Florida Botanical Gardens are located at 12175 125th St. N., Largo (727-582-2100). Manatee County extension service can be reached at 941-722-4524.
This article appears in May 14-20, 2003.