Thanks, Kathy for the translation.
Welcome Vasyl.
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I am late to this thread, but I agree Alan.
I loved GW, best form out there, nice laid back posters.
Then Hozz came into mess things up, keep asking about remodeling my Kitchen or buying a new home.
I still answer threads, but about half are spam posting, trying to sale junk I do not need or want.
Scott(???) done a great job & this site is full of informed, friendly persons. It is great.
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Hello, I am new to this forum. I live just north of Seattle and love to grow figs, plums, pears and citrus. I want to start growing persimmons, but I have to start making space decisions. Been browsing this forum for a long time because of the great information and knowledgeable people, but decided itās time to finally sign up!
Thank you,
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Welcome, @Helmer! There are quite a few of us around the Seattle area on here, but itās always nice to add to our ranks.
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Thank you! And I wish you best of luck with your super interesting avocado trials!
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Iād also like to thank Scott for starting this new forum. I know it took a lot of work and will continue to be a work in process. When the activity on houzz slows to a standstill, every one else will migrate too. Then we can get back to our lively and very informative discussions I for one, canāt wait. I feel like Iāve been released from prison.
Ray
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Oooo so this is where we go to introduce ourselves 
how did i miss thisā¦
Iām Meilyn, or Melon if you say it fast enough. Been lurking on here for about 2 years before finally joining. Really thankful for the no ads on this website.
Lived in Colorado until recently and just moved back to Washington state (Olympia area). I was really active in the Colorado Springs gardeners group on fb but have since made my own for Western Washington Gardeners.
Iām hoping to start a u-pick -almost everything from the produce aisle of the grocery store- farm 
Iām in the process of looking for decent land (near fort Lewis) and building a home on it to start it as a backyard farm thing since i know some things need almost every day care. I got veggies and stuff down but Iām still learning about trees and how to not kill blackberries. (I love blackberries to death 
.)
My idea is if i start now, by the time we have a house and some land, all or most of my fruit trees and things will be producing already. I could either wait 2-3 years and buy everything then, then wait 2-3 years for them to start producing. Or i could buy everything now, pot them up, and have them producing by the time i get my farmlands, greenhouses, and house built. So Iām growing everything in pots until we can all find our forever homes .
I love pushing limits on things and one of my goals as well, is to become the PNWās main tropical fruit supplier.
I specialize in nothing but know a teeny bit about everything 
Iām a proud ding-dong-ditcher of zucchinis 
and 
tomatoes.
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Hello! Iām Lily. I have a small lot and an (new to me) old house in Indiana (6b). I grew up gardening with my mom, who is a professionally trained horticulturist, and a lot of my good childhood memories are of gardening.
I Iove growing native perennials and cut flowers, but have also been getting really into fruit. At the moment I have a few apple trees, gooseberry bushes, and a blackberry. I dabble in peppers, onions, beans, kale, tomatoes, but most of my garden is for the pollinators and the vase.
Happy to have found this little forum. Thereās some great information here! :- )
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Dear all yāall,
Thanks for keeping this forum active, for giving those of us who are fruit-n-nut nuts a superb alternative to the Fb platform. I hope to prove worthy and useful.
My husband and I have relocated from Austin, TX (Zone 8b, zoned residential with all the suburban restrictive covenants typically associated) to the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. We appear to be Zone 7a after the 2023 USDA revised map.
We consider ourselves climate refugees. In the year leading up to our exit, we wore ice vests (for the record and after much first-hand experience, I prefer the FlexiFreeze Proāget extra inserts if you plan on being outside in the worst heat for longer than an hour) esp. for beekeeping chores and rescues. We wore wide brimmed hats (I sometimes slipped an ice pack under my straw hat), SPF shirts, drank electrolyte stuff, tried doing as much as possible in the early hours of the day, collected rainwater off our roof into a big tank, and more. Ongoing droughts, temperatures of 100Ā°F+ for 3 months/year, crashed soil biology where the mulch ran out, a periodically dry well (our ~100 resident communityās sole source), Winter Storm Uri, Winter Storm Mara, and a long string of years of spiraling property taxes simply outmatched us.
Blah blah sunk costs blah blah blah.
It was time to go.
Frankly, we probably waited a few years too many.
I digress.
Back in Texas, we had half an acre with some very unforgiving soil (Edwards Plateau, thanks) where we raised with varying success:
- pecans
- pomegranates
- peaches
- pears (both European and Asian)
- apricots
- plums
- native mulberry
- figs
- grapes
- Texas persimmon
- jujube
- and foolishly, olives (toast, courtesy of Uri)
Plant varieties and spp list furnished upon request.
We did a lot of grafting. We learned to love paraffin grafting tape. We saved scion wood and handed it out freely. We hosted and went to scion exchanges courtesy of the āTexas Rare Fruit Growersā Fb group which my better half belongs to. He also belongs to the Central Texas Beekeeping Association and would go out on swarm calls and rescues, which is A Thing and in light of the very feisty Africanized genetics of most of the rescues, not for the faint-hearted.
Itās 2024. I am 60. I am starting over. Ish. I grew up in the American Midwest. But. After over 30 years in 8b, I am in 7a now. We have nearly an acre (zoned ag) of former apple orchard (only one tree surviving) with a fixer-upper house built in the 1950s. We have an ag field to one side of us, where the 90-something year old farmer does spray a pre-emergent IIUC, and the other side of us has some neighbors on smaller lots. I am about to do a few perc tests and the olā ādig up some soil, put it in a jar with water, shake it up well, let it settle, and stare at the results the next dayā version of first-approximation soil analysis. I am casting about for a reputable soil lab so I can get real data.
I have a dear friend who just graduated from Dr. Elaine Inghamās Soil Food Web School, so I have a major leg up now on growing my soil here properly. Thank goodness she spent that steep tuition money so I didnāt have to.
In the interest of full disclosure, Iām employed in an Austin environmental engineering office (still working for them, remotely). Over my 3+ decades there, and some time spent with the earliest version of the Austin Green Building program, I have learned a fair bit about these applied practices, as well as having personally actually done most of these:
- graywater re-use (starting with the Art Ludwig books)
- humanure per the Joseph Jenkins book, including composting toilets (aka ādryā toilets)
- berms and swales, per Brad Lancasterās several books
- permaculture (various influences including Mollison, Lawton, Hemenway)
- bioremediation (more phyto- than myco-) (too many primary sources to mention)
- soil biota and compost tea (Elaine Ingham, again)
- vermiculture (lots of reliable sources on the web these days)
- rainwater catchment / collection (the state of Texas even has its own handbook on that, but Iād go with Brad Lancasterās excellent web site first)
(sorry I canāt link to all these but I donāt think my set of privs as a new user on this forum allows to contextual hyperlinks yet) (hang on lemme try a direct URL for the latest on Lancaster from The Guardian in an article dated 13 Aug 2024ā¦)
Yep, I got a message saying I canāt include links.
Ok. Maybe I can circle back with URLs for that second set of bullet points later, when I pass the tests for being a legit subscriber.
Thanks for reading this far. Iāll be trying to read as much of the GrowingFruit older posts as possible, in my quest to drink from the firehose without losing my mind. My goal in joining here is to shorten my learning curve as much as feasible. Iāve already been to Edible Landscaping, the cool nursery in Afton, VA. Strong recommend if you are ever able to go!
Off to go fill out my user profileā¦
EDIT: I just changed my avatar from the Rosa āSouvenir de la Malmaisonā I grew in Austin, to a raspberry (from public domain Wikipedia) in order to avoid confusion, since I see at least one community member with a similar-looking pink flower avatar. 
EDIT2: grammar
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Hi! I am Margarita from Uruguay, 58 years old. I have been growing plants, food and landscaping for clients for the past 20 years, heavily influenced by Permaculture and by a love of native flora.
My thing is to include edible plants in my landscaping projects, whether client knows it or not.
My property is currently 25 acres of which about 8 acres somewhat intensively landscaped and planted with vegetables, fruit bearing trees and other service plants and trees. I am proud to produce a lot of mulch onsite (pampas grass! It makes a buttery soil! And lots of acacias for chipping and leaf litter.).
I try to promote food gardening and to promote how to eat what we grow and to eat seasonlly. Mostly on IG as lahortelanauy.
I came across this forum while reading up on campomanesia guazumifolia, a tree native to Uruguay which is quite unknown here ironically.
This year we got a record cold winter, with -6C as the worst but with a whole stretch of days where the wake up temperature was -4C. Psidium and eugenias were toast, and they are native.
Anyway, happy to be accepted here.
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Hi! My name is Trey. I live in the northern hemisphere and have peach, apple, pear, and fig trees. Just wanting to
Improve my knowledge and grow successfully.
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Hi everyone,
Iām GT, Iām retired, I have recently bought a house with a quarter acre of land, and I love trees. And I like my trees to produce food. Iām growing some mulberry trees from seed (whole berries) and I want to put in some blueberry and blackberry, and raspberry bushes, and some fig and plum trees as well. I want to be able to add another tree or bush at least once every season until I run out of room. Found this forum while searching on info about my mulberrys.
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Hey GT. Welcome to the forum. I am also in East Texas just north of Athens. Have you always been in this area? And yeah, I started out with some berries and it just grows from there. Good luck with the raspberries unless youāve got some shade for them. I didnāt have much luck in this heat.
I havenāt researched the raspberries yet, but I have a good shady place on the east side of my house. Thatās all the shade I have though, thatās the problem with this property, not enough trees! I grew up in the Dallas area, moved from Garland a year ago, Iām close to Emory, south of Greenville. I bought this house to retire in, I wanted out of the city, and out of Dallas or Collin or Tarrant counties, where property taxes are too high. I am also fighting awful soil, grey clay, I looked up my county on the State and US geological survey and the soil is rated as āmineral soilā which means NO organic content. I learned the hard way by killing a couple of pecan trees, they died from root rot. I am now digging much deeper than needed to transplant trees and putting some sand and perlite in the bottom and backfill with cow manure, compost, potting soil, and 20% crushed biochar(charcoal) it helps break up the clay along with the compost and cow manure. The heat Iām used to, been in TX all my life, you just got to not care about a lawn. I water my trees every day or so, but Iām not going to spend the money to water grass. The only green grass I have by this time of year is around my trees and pots with trees in them. I like it when there is no grass because of the shade from the trees.
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Very familiar with Emory. I went to school at Alba, just up the road. Grew up in wood county. You must be right on the verge of the change from loamy soil to blackland. We always had loam however much was over red clay and thatās where I am now. I live on a clay hill with shallow soils over most but some areas close by are complete sand. Check the pH of your soil before planting Blueberries as they really depend on acid soil. (Iām really not trying to be a spoil sport on the berries). Black berries do fantastic as a rule. As far as raspberries I had the best luck with what I think was called Anne which was a golden raspberry. It tolerated the heat the best and had the best taste. I ended up using shade cloth to keep them from burning up.
Iām in Rains county, and yes, I am close to the border on the General Soil Map of Texas. Section 43 Texas Claypan area and 59 Blackland Prairie, Iām in 43, close to 59. No topsoil to speak of, but at one point they dug up the septic tank and a city sewer system was put in, and a bunch of sand was used on the back fill, and I have a spot in my back yard that must have been where the truck put the big pile of sand for the project, but I got plenty of beach sand to mix in with the clay when I need to. I want to stay organic. They also put down a lot of sand when my house was moved to this spot, it is a prefab home, sitting on concrete blocks, and close to the house there is some sand in with the clay. I also have crawdads that in the spring like to dig burrows in the clay. So I am starting with things that I only have to dig one hole to plant it, and am digging deeper and bigger holes than I would have in other soil, so I can backfill with lots of good soil and compost and cow manure so the plant can get established. Once itās stable, they can send roots out into the dead clay. Blackberries will be my first shrub type to put down, I will have to buy one blackberry bush and get it established in a pot, and take clippings and root those and start in pots then when they are ready plant in the ground. From what you are telling me about your experience with raspberries, Iāll make sure when I do those to always keep one in a pot I can move around as weather makes me, and take cuttings from it.
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When planting in clay make sure not to create a basin to drown trees nor use too much foreign organic matter in hole. Top dress instead. I have heavy clay (MI) but at least its elevated and drains, but do have some low soft spots. Good growing!
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My experience in former home for 12 years was that all you have to do with heavy clay is to garden on top of it and then it is extremely productive and fertile. No digging, only piling mulch on top of it and planting. The critters do the rest in no time.
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Hi there. I am a tropical fruit lover in the SF Bay Area. Building my plant collection. Part of many forums on the subject and local groups of enthusiasts.
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Hey everybody, my name is Mason Iāve been gardening the last 3 years. Just this year I made the plunge and finally planted 20 fruit trees in my garden after reading through this forum a lot. Excited to see how this journey goes with the success and failure. I live in south east Kansas. Itās great to live so close to some very smart people in this forum that have been growing their trees for a long time in Kansas learning from their knowledge. My garden is on the edge of the town on a vacant city block, so the one thing Iām happy of is no deer pressure on my trees.
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