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No. 1112
Old trees can be pretty nostalgic. Is anyone inyerested in growing trees?
I had to cut down my Granny Smith apple tree some years back, but I'm trying to graft (clone) a new apple tree (so far so good.) This is the first time I've had a graft survive and I'm stoked.
I'm also growing a lot of exotic/tropical fruit trees in 25 gallon containers despite how I have a small yard. In my pots I have growing: Asian Pears, Loquats, Longans, Lychees, Rose/Malay Apples, Wax Apples, Mangoes, June Plums, Australian Finger Lime, Jaboticaba, Peanit Butter Fruit, Miracle Berry Fruit, Jackfruit, Feijoa, Eggfruit Mamey Sapote, Sapodilla, and White Sapote.
I also have some common apple, pear, nectarine, peaches, cherries, surinam cherries, oranges, lemons, jujube, cape gooseberries, jostaberries, black berries, lemonade-blueberries, red and green gooseberries, pomegranates, figs, and pink and white guava.
Depending on your climate you can grow different kinds of fruits and some of mine have died, but I want to taste as many of the weirder fruits that I can't simply buy at the supermarket.
No.1114
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>>1112Another picture to show you don't need a big yard to grow fruit trees in big pots.
No.1131
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>>1129It depends on what you really want to grow and I am still learning myself. You could start with simple things that grow extremely quickly like radishes and have instant gratification in about a month. Once you get into growing you tend to accidentally make friends when you are working in the front yard. Old people will notice your plants and come by to ask about them, to ask for seeds or vegetables, or to offer you what they have growing in their yards. Immigrants tend to have unusual things growing in their yards. The Indian neighbor lady now likes to come and ask for fresh vegetables and then give us curry. There is a lonely old Chinese neighbor
who has been greedy about asking for the kinds of vegetables she wants, but she has also given me many plants and fresh fruit. So far she has given me jujube trees, a goji berry plant, agaveplanf, fresh Chinese mulberries, fresh loquat, dried jujube, and frozen concord grapes.
Recently, I like to go to Craig's List to shop for cheap new varieties of fruit trees, but there are also forums for growing tropical fruit trees. Collecting new varieties is like an addictive game of Pokémon that triggers my instinct for collection. I gotta eat em all.
I like to prioritise growing the things you cannot easily buy. Though even if you grow the common things, they will still tend to will taste better because you can pick and eat them as soon as they are ripe, and the grocery store often picks them too early and their cultivars tend to select for fruit that take longer to spoil, or that look more attractive (like the disgusting red delicious apples instead of gala apples), etc.
No.1133
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(Opps , my picture didn't go through.)
Regardless, once you get into growing fruit trees you quickly start noticing fruit EVERYWHERE when you're just walking by houses. Like today I just noticed a huge lychee tree (see picture), which I saw growing in someone's front yard today. If you don't pay attention to fruit you tend to assume most of trees are decorative or only fit for the birds. Another example: I randomly noticed a beautiful strawberry fruit tree in front of a municipal building last summer, and I was willing to sample the fallen fruit only because I knew what it was because I had bought a tree like that from a nursery (which I accidentally killed, but it had lackluster fruit anyway.)
No.1134
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(*Obsessive autism continues*)
>>1126Well, I don't know as much about growing up north, one plus is that you basically get a free pesticide every winter when everything freezes over so it's easier to go organic. You have many kinds of old varieties of apples and stone fruit that do not produce as many fruit further south. I would definitely research cold hardy berries, (blueberries, gooseberries, cloud berries, service berries, salmon berries, etc.)
I would play around with grafting apples, and then branch out to more difficult to work with stone fruit. Cherries, peaches, apricots, hybrid fruit, etc. (Picture is of the tree of 40 that I mentioned.)
No.1135
Since it's cold I would also try to grow less useful novelty fruit like medlars and quince just for the fun of it. Grafted pawpaws are neat too, (they're supposed to be akin to cold hardy mangoes), though you have to read about pollination requirements.
Apples are one of the easiest fruit to successfully graft, and if you do that you can grow different kinds of apples on the same tree, and have them fruit at different times of the year. There are literally hundreds of varieties of apples that are grown in the northeast that were developed over the centuries and which have various differences in flavor, spice, texture, crispness, appearance, hardiness, etc. You could be surprised how much consumer preferences have changed for apples in 200 years. There are many good but forgotten older varieties. Like I really want to try the "snow apple."
If you wanted to dive into starting a little orchard of fruit trees, I know that Fruitwood nursery in Northern California can bulk ship a lot of kinds of scions across the US for about $5 each, which is less than if you bought rooted plants at a nursery. (I don't mean to shill for them, but they do have a lot of interesting kinds of fruit scions to browse that might intrigue you and give you ideas about what to shop for.) You can eventually start trading seeds and scions with people on the internet.
No.1136
I would also look up "Weird Fruit Explorer" on YouTube, because he has made a career out of traveling the world to review exotic fruit hardly anyone has heard of. He has hundreds of videos at this point.
If you have space I would also research and immediately plant unusual trees that would take a long time to grow, like the shipova pear which I've heard is divine by pear standards. I also like the crispness of Asian pears. I would then research unsual fruit trees that are frost resistant and that grow in the colder parts of other continents like Asia.
For instance, although most citrus can't stand the freezing cold, the Japanese Yuzu tree is a citrus that has slightly more resistance to the cold, and it lends great flavoring for soda or ramen. Pomegranates are even more cold tolerant. South American fruit trees that naturally grow in colder temperatures at higher elevations like the Lucuma can handle slightly cold temperatures in North America too, (although I don't think they could handle the especially frigid winters of the north-east.) Of course, if you've got money to build a greenhouse and monitor the weather then the sky is the limit and even rare tropicals would be possible. There is a university in Iceland that even grows tropical bananas inside an experimental greenhouses that is heated by geothermal pipes.
But you might as well grow cold weather stuff while you're there, because you might wind up moving south to Hawaii, PR, or Florida someday and want to have a new set of things to experience.
No.1137
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