/nos/ - Nostalgia

>>1112
Another picture to show you don't need a big yard to grow fruit trees in big pots.

>>1112
Sick thread. You remind me of another internet man I've met in my travels. He liked to garden as well. Anyway, whenever I leave my current apartment the wife and I will be doing some gardening. I plan to grow the standard north east us veggies and pot. Excited to make things grow from the earth, as a kid I tried growing potatoes but I was unsuccessful

>1112
Good thread.
I am interisting in the garden topic but i have zero experience about that, what would you recommend me to start?

>>1129
It 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.

Once you find something you want, try to sample that kind of fruit to see if you would even like it. You can usually find processed versions of things like Lucuma powder or weird berry jams from Scandinavia that will give you some sense of whether you like the fruit. You can also buy fresh fruit at grossly inflated prices on etsy and then keep the seeds, and you can research when a fruit comes in season in your area and then check the farmers' market for it. You can also Google for local farmers that blog about growing unusual fruit and then message them before you go and they will sometimes agree to bring you what they grew, which is how I got someone to sell me Ice-cream bean fruit.

I am sure there are also many similar nurseries and arboretums closer to you, and clubs, and that you can also get free scions. You can simply pay attention to any fruit trees in your neighborhood and then ask your neighbors to keep some of their branches for you when they prune them in the fall, or cut little branches at public arboretum. The trees quickly grow back anyway, and arboretums were built in part to preserve genetic diversity for the public. Then you can either root the branches or stick them on trees and make a Frankentree.

Picture is of the tree of 40 which has 40 kinds of related fruit on growing on one tree.

(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.)

(*Obsessive autism continues*)

>>1126
Well, 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.)

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.

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.

/end