Sunday, September 28, 2008

Quick plant update!

I had some birthday money this year that I wanted to spend on new fruit trees, but I was thinking I would wait until January and get bare root trees...

Well, on Thursday I was at the Home Despot using some generous gift cards picking up some unrelated things and of course went through the garden center "just to look" I saw they had a Dorsett Golden Apple, which is the same variety we lost in that bad storm a few weeks back so I picked that up, they also had a great looking Kadota Fig (a white fig) that it seemed like we needed because two fig trees just aren't enough, a washington navel orange, which was a variety I had planned on planting anyway and a strawberry guava tree which after a long discussion with employees, references to garden books and calls to my husband to check the internet about whether it would do okay here or needed a pollinator etc. I decided to get that too.

On Saturday after the farmer's market I went to my friend Jennifer's house, and it just blew me away. Okra as tall as me and hundreds of eggplant, lots of melons and a whole bunch of other great stuff everywhere. If folks are reading this from the Phoenix Permaculture Guild and are on the fence about going to the tour at her house, GO! It's amazing. She told me that my favorite nursery (Baker's) had onion sets already, so on my way home I stopped by to get some of those. Long story short, I went home with 200 tiny onions, a 6-pack of broccoli and a sweet orange tree variety that I'd never heard of before called a pineapple orange.

Today I couldn't stop thinking about some of the other citrus that was at the nursery that I didn't have so I went back and got a meyer lemon, a bearss lime and a moro blood orange. I really want to go back for a kumquat...

So those 8 new trees bring the tiny farm fruit tree total up to 27. :) The baby chicks turn two weeks old tomorrow, expect pictures!

3 comments:

Chiot's Run said...

What zone are you in? I would so love to be able to grow guavas. I grew up in Colombia and I miss the local tropical fruits. As we try to eat locally here in NE Ohio, I'm stuck with plums, apples, pears & all the other fruits. They're good, but there's just something about a fresh mango.

I think I may be able to get a fig & overwinter it in the garage. That's probably as tropical as I can get, I do have a dwarf lemon in the house but it never produces fruit.

rachelbess said...

Susy- I am in zone 9b, so citrus and figs do really well here, but the tropicals are on the edge. From what I've read the strawberry guavas are a little hardier than some of the other varieties... I'm crossing my fingers about it. It doesn't really get cold enough here for us to plant pears at all, and only a limited number of varieties of plum, apple etc.

Joe said...

Very cool - congratulations on getting your new tree.

I love okra...it's so tasty in soups and stews.

Here's a link to a forum about growing tropical and subtropical plants in more borderline climates; it might be of interest to you.

http://www.cloudforest.com/cafe/