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The Tropical Garden, Fall 2018 By Jennifer Possley

The Tropical Garden, Fall 2018

It’s baby squirrel season, and at the South Florida Wildlife Center in Fort Lauderdale, babies from one to three weeks old are being hand fed every three hours. Eyes shut, toes splayed and tiny tummies filling, the babies in the nursery are among the 13,000 animals taken to the Center every year. Each baby squirrel has a dot of toxin-free nail polish on his/her head so volunteers can keep track of who has eaten, who has burped or who has diarrhea. After being fed and stroked so…

Don’t you wish growing edibles was like growing weeds? It can be. What is a weed, really, but a plant growing where we don’t want it to grow? Many weeds, it turns out, are indeed edible. Here’s a weed you can eat, is fairly attractive, and has an interesting history: Purslane (Portulaca oleracea).

All those sad-looking plants that no one bought—now is the time for you to swoop in and rescue them at bargain prices. Holiday gift plants can provide you with beauty long past the winter celebrations. Here are some I recommend you take home from the hardware store sale area.

As published in the Miami Herald Although most places across the country have four seasons complete with changing leaves, snow days and the first robins of spring, South Florida has only two real seasons – wet and dry. You should have noticed a change recently, a little coolness in the air and very little humidity. That is the signal that we are leaving our wet months – usually late May to late October – and entering into our dry season. This coincides with the rest of the…

       If you have ever owned a garden, volunteered in one, or particpated in a volunteer work day, you may be an experienced weed-puller.  As you yanked weed after weed, did you wonder whether the sweat, sore muscles, and dirty jeans were all for nought?  Maybe you thought “This is impossible!!!”  Well

As a kid, I loved digging a hole during the summer, filling it with water and jumping in. I suppose I was easily amused. If you, too, do this, but without the jumping in, you will have begun to attract amphibians like toads and frogs to your garden.

John Muir and Henry David Thoreau knew it. The Japanese call it “forest bathing,” using exposure to nature to heal physical and emotional ailments. Research is backing up what we’ve known intuitively all along: Nature heals.

There’s been some information floating around social media and the Internet about the health benefits of turmeric, including its ability to fight anxiety and depression. While I can’t support or deny these benefits, I think we should all take a look at turmeric. It may be known to many as a spice in curry or an ingredient in mustard, but what actually is turmeric?