Growing Tropical Fruit Trees in Your Yard
You live in Florida and you have a space where you could be planting much more delicious local food than you currently do. Why plant a garden of annuals when perennial fruit trees can be grown so easily in your yard? Take advantage of the fact that you live in Florida, where you can grow all kinds of delicious tropical fruit that can feed you throughout the year. You might complain about the heat and humidity in summer, but the fruit trees love it. Imagine fresh mangoes, jackfruit, coconuts, sugar apples, avocadoes, citrus, sapote, starfruit, papayas, mulberries, lychees, bananas, plantains, loquats, longans, and many others you may never have heard of. Depending on your location in the Tampa Bay area, you may be able to grow many of these fruits.
Join Lev Pasikov, Founder of Florida Fruit Cooperative, for a delicious adventure into the exotic world of Tropical Fruit. Borrowing from both permaculture and syntropic farming principles, Lev will teach you how to produce tropical fruit in your yard within a year, and a beautiful maturing fruit forest within just 3 years. Learn about propagation, soil building, watering requirements, and other maintenance, with the goal being as little maintenance and as much produce as possible.
Lev will take you on a tour of the Sweetwater Farm grounds to see many examples of fruit trees you can grow. A few varieties of fruit trees will be available for purchase to get you started.
General Admission: $35
Low Income/Senior: $15 (limited number)
Although our base price for this course is $35, Sweetwater is a nonprofit that puts on educational programs for elementary schools in the neighborhood and teaches them about food systems and basically where their food comes from. We also host community volunteer days and a farmer’s market every Sunday from November through May. You can donate to Sweetwater in addition to your course fee if you’d like to help us continue our programs. And if you want to get your hands dirty in our gardens you can contribute your time by volunteering Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday mornings from 9-12.
