Florida's Best Fruiting Plants
Florida's Best Fruiting Plants Turn your Florida yard into a beautiful cornucopia of delicious fruit. You can grow many of the worldÂ's best-tasting fruits in FloridaÂ's subtropical environment.
Complete profiles of 80 native and non-native fruiting plants, ranging from the familiar, such as the strawberry and orange, to the obscure, such as the grumichama and jaboticaba.
Up-to-date information about the attributes, care, and use of each species.
Range maps, fruiting calendars, and selection criteria are presented in a highly accessible format.
More than 160 color illustrations and almost 200 color photographs.
Customer Review: A Handy Guide
This book reads like a guide put out by the Agricultural Extension Service. It has enough information on culture and new varieties for you to make an intelligent choice for planting in your yard. Covers the common to the exotic. I would definitely read it before I went to a nursery to buy a tree so you can sort the facts from the sales pitches.
Customer Review: A Beautiful Book, Beautifully Organized and Presented
This is a visually stunning and imminently usable reference book. The author presents some eighty varieties of fruit that grow well in Florida. Most varieties are presented in two-page spreads which include all the basic information one would need (other than an actual taste test) to decide what fruit to include in plans for dooryard gardens, including but not limited to: a full-color illustration of the fruit and how it grows on the plant (most grow on trees); a calendar bar depicting when the fruit is ready to harvest, a map showing where in Florida the fruit will grow (dark green for where it should grow well, light green for where it may grow although conditions are not optimal, and yellow in borderline areas); a silhouette depicting the tree or plant with a scale to indicate the mature size; known hazards (e.g. spines, thorns, pollen, toxic seeds, and so on); soil types and conditions, and much more. There are also many photographs and illustrations showing the fruit cut open.
Of the varieties of fruit presented, I found a total of forty possibilities for growing on my property (central west coast of Florida, on the Nature Coast): thirteen in the dark green area, thirteen in the light green area, and fourteen in the yellow area.
Those totally committed to growing only Florida native plants may be bothered to find fruit like loquat (Japanese plum) presented in this book as it is sometimes considered invasive or a threat to become invasive. Any time a non-native species is planted, there is a risk of its seeds being carried into the wild, including by birds and wildlife. There are advantages to growing plants, including fruit, native to an area; in Florida, the list of native fruit that grows well might be a short list.
In many cases, the author presents representative varieties of the fruit, when in fact there may be hundreds of varieties. The book includes a disappointingly short list of nurseries and could be improved by including more information about where to purchase fruit trees and plants.
Nevertheless, I find no trouble in highly recommending this book. I was considering buying a copy and found it at my local library and decided to check it out and review it first. Now that I have done so, I believe this book would be a bargain at full price.