I grow mine in pots in my south facing bedroom window. Since it is an old farmhouse it is a little drafty but it doesn’t seem to mind the temperature variability. In the winter it can get down in the 50s but generally the room is 60-75. The keylime is in the kitchen window with roughly the same conditions.
The starfruit is on my potting bench in a spare room and gets some south and west light. It probably has less temperature variability since it is further away from the window.
I haven’t had a lot of luck with the pomegranates. Sometimes they bloom but don’t produce. They make interesting houseplants though.
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Your place sounds neat. I have an image in my head of a midwestern farmhouse, alone on a windswept prairie. I was going to say there are some super hardy pomegranates, but then I noticed you are in a zone 5 and I don’t think they can endure that cold. I’d have to agree that pomegranates make a nice house plant. I have a pomegranate bonsai that I keep in the garden window during the winter. It’s very interesting. So you have no problem getting them to bloom as house plants? I place the bonsái outside once it breaks dormancy so it blooms on the back deck. I have a couple Russian varieties planted in ground that are supposed to produce fruit in this region. So far I’ve only gotten blooms, but they are still young plants. .
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You aren’t far off the mark with that description. The new neighbor bulldozed all the trees in the fencerows, then heavily sprayed and plowed the prairie. There is still a little pasture nearby but the high wind and cornfields do make my organic regenerative farmstead more challenging. I have planted a bunch of wild plum, high bush cranberry, Juneberry and fruit trees to try to slow the wind down.
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Why’d the neighbor do that? Hopefully they had a good reason that made such measures unavoidable. We all have to make alterations to the land to accommodate ourselves, so that’s understandable. Luckily nothing in nature is absolutely without regenerative power. Irrespective of the happy horseshit one of us imposes on nature, eventually she will make the necessary corrections. Your native garden sounds fantastic. I like to plant lots of natives myself. My favorites are manzanita and also the bay laurel and madrone. But I definitely augment with non natives. Are you familiar with the type of madrone called a strawberry tree? I plant it here even though it’s native to Europe. At least it’s closely related to the American west coast madrone species.
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