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Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences said:TropicSweet is released by the Florida Agricultural Experiment Station and patent rights assigned to Florida Foundation Seed Producers, Inc. for distribution. This variety originated as [(N.J.38 x Anna) polycross]. TropicSweet blooms with Anna, but ripens five to seven days before during early June at Gainesville, Florida. Trees of TropicSweet are not self-fruitful, but this variety is cross-pollinated with either Anna or Dorsett Golden. Fruit are less red, firmer, and taste sweeter than Anna. Fruit sugar levels are 14 to 15 brix, but acidity in fruit is low resulting in a very sweet taste. Fruit size are similar to Anna with comparable crop loads. Fruit are round-conic. Trees are semi-spreading and semi-spur type bearing habit. TropicSweet is recommended for trial in areas where Anna is grown successfully (North central to central Florida has proven most reliable for Anna).

Local apple selections also are planted in Florida. These have been grown, selected, and propagated in different geographic locations in the north Florida area. Their quality often is good, but production is erratic and fruit are generally small.

If I had a top 10 list of my favorite plants that I can't live without, this one is definitely on that list, and high up on the list at that.

It's hardy.
Fast growing.
Tolerant of nearly any soil.
Handles drought and heat without complaint.
Blooms repeatedly all summer long (if properly deadheaded).
If this weren't enough, it has highly fragrant blooms!
The blue color is striking in the landscape.
Astoundingly, it can handle poor drainage, too.
It's perfect for those hot, dry and difficult areas of your yard.

All this, plus the plant attracts beneficial insects, especially bees and butterflies. It's a bee magnet, which is a good thing.

To encourage repeated growth, deadhead the shrub. After it's done blooming it will start making little peppercorn sized seeds. Cut those all off and it'll prompt the plant to rebloom again. You can repeat this all summer long.

The plant responds well to heavy pruning. In fact, it is encouraged to prune it back deeply in order to promote a new flush of growth. Think "Crepe Murder" here. It's actually a good thing for this particular kind of plant.

Love love love it! Don't delay, act now! Add this amazing plant to your southern garden!

I grew this from seeds ordered from Franchi Semente via Seeds from Italy and I've been very pleased with this variety. The leaves are indeed very large with a very nice mellow sweet basil aroma and flavor. I haven't tried drying it yet but I'm sure it will dry well. It has been very popular with the customers at our farmers market.

Definitely recommended for basil lovers.

As its name implies, this is indeed an early garlic. The bulbs are smaller than normal but the flavor is very sweet with no aftertaste. One of my favorites.

This matured fairly early for us. It's a porcelain type that is highly attractive with a pure white covering. We found the taste to be very pleasant with the right balance of heat, pungency and sweetness. Definitely would like to grow more of this one.

We grew this from a garlic sampler ordered from Filaree Farms. It was the earliest maturing garlic of them all and they were huge cloves. The flavor was to us very intense, perhaps even stronger than we like our garlic. Very, very hot when raw and leaves a long-lasting taste in the mouth.

This is one "weed" we have a lot of, and I'm glad for it. It's edible (the young tips are especially good eaten out of hand in the garden) and it's a nutrient accumulator.

I let them grow along the verges and when they get big enough (3 to 4 feet tall) I cut them down and throw them into the chicken yard, where the poultry relish them. We also use them as a free mulch in the vegetable garden.

Georgia Rattlesnake is our standard watermelon that we grow each year. It's super easy to grow, requires absolutely no care on our part. It volunteers easily for us so we always have it growing in various unusual places. Wherever the children eat a melon, we are sure to get some plants come up later.

Georgia Rattlesnake is prolific, very sweet and juicy with nice red meat. It loves heat and can handle poor sandy soil without complaint. I highly recommend it for southern gardeners.

The foliage has the blackest leaves I've ever seen on a plant, and the blooms on this one are red like Dynamite or Red Rocket.

I think this is going to be a very popular crepe myrtle. Mildew tolerance, cold resistance and general vigor are yet to be determined.

-- Edited on July 26, 2013 to add that the breeder of this cultivar contacted me to let me know that the Black Diamond cultivars are in fact the Ebony series bred by Dr. Cecil Pounders of the USDA-ARS. For more information, see this thread: The thread "Black Diamond Crape Mytrle" in Ask a Question forum

Grows up to 50 feet tall and is an excellent shade tree. Highly attractive cinnamon bark peels. The flowers are fragrant.

I grow this just as much as an ornamental annual as I do for its other uses. The large and plentiful yellow blooms are stunning and attractive to my bees. The fruit is edible when young and once ripened can be used for all the purposes that luffas are known for. Everyone should grow this wonderful plant.

This canna is well-named, as the flowers really are a true lemon color. They also repeatedly bloom through the entire summer, making this an excellent canna for the landscape.

This plant is beautiful and works very well with tropical plants, but can be invasive. We grow it in an old galvanized washtub that's been half-buried, and that contains it just fine.

A beautiful large vase shape crepe myrtle.

This is a good variety of southern pea. I bought the seeds from our local Southland feed store. The pods are supposed to be more exposed to the top of the plant (thus the name "Top Pick") and I admit that harvesting is indeed very easy.

The taste is excellent. The ripe but not yet dried seed is green with a pink eye that is fantastic eating out of hand, raw in the garden, or cooked traditionally with bacon.

I think I prefer the purple hull peas but these pinkeyes are certainly worth growing.

This was the first brug I ever grew and it's always been one of my favorites.

I got these seeds from the "Seeds from Italy" company. The plants were highly vigorous, surviving sitting in the full sun in 6 pack cell with no water for over a month. I finally installed them into our herb spiral and a few other places and they quickly took off. You can't ask for better than that. The fruits are gorgeous and very cute, about the size of cherries. I'm not planning on eating them anytime soon - just growing them for their ornamental value.

We'll dry a bunch and maybe use them later for salsas and things like that.

These are football shapes melons that ripen to an attractive yellow color. The flesh is whitish. We didn't think it was very tasty at all and won't grow them again.

Hands down, this is my favorite of all tomatoes. It handles our East Texas climate perfectly and gives us excellent tasting, gigantic slicing tomatoes that are also excellent for salsa.

We sell these as seedlings at the local master gardener plant sale each spring and we never have enough. We have become famous around East Texas for the Kellogg's Breakfast fruits that we offer for sale at the local farmers' market.

This tree is one of the few nitrogen fixing trees available in temperate climates.