We lived in the Midwest before we moved to Cancun. Springtime would come along each year and we would make our annual pilgrimage to the local nursery and buy flats of new plants to reestablish our garden. This usually cost several hundred dollars each year. Growing our garden was always a fight against time and the unpredictable Midwest weather.

Growing a garden in a sub-tropical climate was a revelation to us. First of all the cost of the plants and trees are much more reasonable and you don’t have to buy them over again when Spring comes around. Secondly, you just stick them in the ground and make sure they have plenty of water and they will grow like nothing you’ve ever experienced before! This is amazing to me because the soil here is terrible. We only have about 4″ of topsoil and then you have this white, sandy, limestone like dirt that you wouldn’t think anything could grown in. The soil drains so fast that it will be dry an hour after a storm. Whenever we have a deluge that lasts for several days, in the next few weeks the plants take off as if they will grow until they hit the sun. Now we have to prune constantly to prevent our garden from turning into jungle. We started this garden from dirt in late July of 2008 so it is only 22 months old at this point.

We started with a plain flat grassy walled lot. We added a swimming pool and then the sod. We added some containment walls around the existing palms and shrubs and then started with 110 plants. As time went by we added more plants to create an entry way garden. Then more plants to fill in the areas along the wall.

Lets start at the entry way

Our entrance gate area  BEFORE…….

Entrance area after initial planting…………..

Entrance area today…………….

Our wishing well BEFORE……..

Our wishing well after the initial plantings…………

This is what it looked like about 8 months later……….

and now today………

We have a long wall that reaches from the front to the rear of our property. Our garden area initially looked like a prison yard with just 3 corner areas that had some palm trees in them.
BEFORE:

We started by laying sod  after the pool was finished and then bought 110 starter plants. This was in late June 2008 and you can see the plants are still in their pots…….

DURING:  This is a few months later…………..and they are only half way up the wall…..

AFTER: Now we have to  prune every two weeks to keep the plants from growing over the wall and arcing our neighbors electric security fence……

We also had some walls built around 3 existing palm tree areas to provide containment for the plants and seating for parties……

BEFORE:

DURING:

AFTER: The finished seating and plant containment wall……….

This is how it looks today with the surrounding plants having matured…….

At the far end of the garden is a corner where we have some beautiful palms that looked like this before building the containment wall and planting a few additional decorative species….

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Along our house we didn’t neglect anything……

From these little starters……….

to this in a year……..

A view from the patio towards the front of our little slice a paradise…….

From our roof top  …………Our sub-tropical garden

Gardening is a joy here because it’s so easy. The most important thing is to provide a lot of water. I built a above ground PVC  sprinkler system that is hidden behind the plants and attached to the walls. It doesn’t ever freeze here so it doesn’t need to be in-ground. There is a submersible pump in the well that provides the water controlled by a timer twice a night for 2 hours each cycle.

Hope you enjoyed looking at our gardens progress.