Here in Naples, Florida (Zone 10b), where the climate is always mild, my wife Suzanne and I are lucky to be able to grow a wide variety of fruits all year long. In our half-acre garden, we set aside a small portion for a grove of fruit trees, both temperate and tropical, along with a 60-foot-long raised bed for a little pineapple "plantation." These photos show some of the trees as they were first planted, and as they started bearing fruit in very generous quantities.

We harvest some fruits every day, providing us with smaller grocery bills while also giving us fresh-picked nutrition in delicious form. Some of our trees are so excessively productive that we keep giving the extra fruit to our friends and neighbors, and to members of our Gardeners of Southwest Florida group. Our papaya tree has given us over a hundred large fruit so far this year. We're peeling, cutting and freezing some of the papayas while Suzanne searches the internet to find more recipes to use up the excess fruit.

Our grove includes various citrus trees, all of which provide wonderful aromas when they're in flower, and they're prolific when they bear fruit. We have several kinds of orange trees, a Meyer lemon (large fruit almost as sweet as an orange), a tangelo (similar to a tangerine), a Persian lime, and a Key lime (for Key lime pies). Our grapefruit tree succumbed to the disease called greening that affects citrus trees, and had to be removed. We're hoping the greening doesn't spread to the others. Additional productive trees include mango, avocado, banana, longan, and carambola (star fruit), all of which we eat out of hand or cut up to include in colorful fruit salads.

We recently picked 38 large pineapples from our little plantation, and are waiting for others to get big and ripe. We currently have 83 pineapple plants in the raised bed, after starting with just five. You can create your own plant by cutting the top inch or two off a store-bought pineapple, including the crown of leaves, and simply planting the top in a sunny spot in your garden. Two years later the plant will have grown enough to produce a large fruit atop a shirt stem coming out of the center of the crown. The plant will die after it fruits, but by then it would have already created a few baby plants next to it, so you can eventually plant them to start your own pineapple plantation as we did.

Growing fruit trees in this semi-tropical environment is just one of the subjects taught in the free gardening classes offered by our Gardeners of Southwest Florida group. Two-hour classes are given on weekends two or three times a month throughout the year. They take place in a different group member's garden every time, so that we can learn about each host's favorite plants and gardening techniques. Membership, classes, plant exchanges, snacks and drinks are always free, in order to encourage Floridians to become better gardeners. You can instantly join the group on its extensive and informative web site at www.meetup.com/FloridaGardeners, and then meet some of the over 1,300 current members with gardens around Naples and Fort Myers. Here are a few members (wearing their nametags) posing for a group photo after a recent class in our garden's screened patio: