Forest Garden

Now that it's finally spring, here is a short tour of some of the trees in the young forest garden.

Seriously!?

I took a picture of this sign that is in Publix today. I saw it a long time ago but never had my camera with me before.

Why are fruits and vegetables COATED with wax, resin, or shellac? (Shellac is made from a secretion that comes from the lac bug used for finishing furniture.)

The answer is, because they are trying to fool you. Their belief is that your food must be doctored for you to buy it.

The quality of the food is completely irrelevant. It only has to look good, it doesn't have to be nutritious.

Is it any wonder there is so much cancer today? Even the so-called "healthy" food is airbrushed with chemicals.

Don't eat this crap, just don't.

With the exception of avocados and citrus, everything listed on the sign can be grown in your own yard. It won't look like the stuff in the grocery store but it'll taste a hundred percent better and it won't give you cancer.

Mid-winter update

Two eggs per day now...usually. It's easy to tell who's egg is who's since they are such different colors. The light colored one is Cleo's and the darker one is Blondie's. Blondie's eggshells are very thick and kind of hard to break. Cleo's crack very easily and it's mostly yolk. I think she is a Jersey Giant. Hopefully they will all be laying very soon.

Fall Elderberry cuttings 

Elderberry cutting in 10"pot

The elderberry cuttings I took in the summer have done well. They are indoors and continue to put on new growth. It's basically a bullet proof plant to propagate.

Most of the goji berry cuttings have done well also. I have at least a dozen of them growing in pots indoors now. I believe that I paid around $15 for the one that I bought and it was about the same size as the ones I have potted.

Propagated goji

The goji's are just ridiculously easy to propagate. I don't remember having a single one not strike.

I cut up a long branch that fell off into little pieces and nearly all of them are now growing. Only the green section of the limb didn't take, all of the woody pieces are living in a couple of coffee cups filled with rain water.

Probably 10 or 12 4" long cuttings.

A few of the fig cuttings are now growing in pots. But I didn't have one hundred percent success with them.

I have a few of the raspberry root cuttings that are still going but they haven't been very vigorous. I think they are dormant.

Most of the comfrey root cuttings survived but the cats were eating the leaves and they got set back some, they are starting to rebound now. I put several goji, elderberry and comfrey plants from cuttings into the yard in the fall. The elderberry I put into a raised bed is going good but the cold hurt the goji a bit. The others in the yard got hammered by the chickens so it remains to be seen if they will come back up in the spring. I think there is a good chance they will.

Persimmon seedling

Seedlings
There are a few seedlings coming along quite well at the moment as well. Back in the summer I put about thirty wild persimmon seeds in a flat and of those two germinated. I put them in pots in the fall and they are indoors now. Persimmons grow very slowly. The tap root goes way down before the above ground growth shows itself. Both of them still have the seeds attached.

Lately, I've started a few citrus seeds from some fruit from the market. I've got four grapefruits growing from seeds I started with the damp paper towel method.

I also saved ten quince seeds and put them in a damp paper towel inside a zip bag and one of them germinated. It's now in a pot.

Quince seedling

Five tangerines germinated using the same method as well. I transplanted those over the weekend.  They are yet to break the soil.

I saved a lot of Bosc pear seeds and they are in the refrigerator until spring because they need to be stratified before they will germinate.

Grapefruit

Although the fruit trees in the yard are said to be dormant over the winter, that isn't exactly the case. Buds have been forming on a lot of the trees and also some of the shrubs have them too. So they aren't totally "asleep". The apricot has by far the most but the peaches also have a lot too. The last frost date for us is the last week of March, so it's just around the corner.

The Market

Baby turnip, daikon, water chestnut,
galangal, quince, tangerine, turmeric

I like to go to Asian markets and buy things, especially fruit, that I've never seen before.

When you go to the grocery store you always see the same stuff, no matter what month it is. That's nuts!

They rarely, or never have much in the way of root vegetables. So when you start seeing turnips, kohlrabi, parsnips, rutabagas and the like at the farmers market but the grocery store has the exact same produce it had in May, you know something is out of whack. Out of season produce is just weird.

Here's what I found lately in the photo. In the picture the yellowish-green fruits are quince. They are a lot like an apple but definitely not an apple. Almost like a pineapple crossed with an apple. Fantastic aroma.

I've known about quince for a while , but I've never come face to face with one before. The french know them very well and they make 'pate de coing' out of them. (pa-tay  day  kwa). But they think that we don't grow them here because they don't go to the Asian markets. In Spain they make something similar called "membrillo". (mem-bree-yo) or if you're Argentinian (mem-bree-show).

Goji Berries

This is the time of the year when goji berries start to produce. They are also called wolfberries. (Lycium chinense)

If you look closely you can see the red berries in the center of the picture. To me they taste like peppers, but not hot. They come from the same family Solanaceae.

The plant is a bush with long skinny stems. I used a wire cage to help mine stand up more vertically otherwise it would be growing along the ground.

Last year it was only when the weather hit the single digits that the plant seemed to have any ill effects.

The berries are small and red like little peppers, they start out green. They are native to Asia. They are suppose to be full of anti-oxidants. They are labeled as "super fruit" these days.

I've just seen them selling for $25/lb on the internet. So far we haven't really figured out how to use them. I've seen them dried a lot. The taste isn't that great to me, but I don't think I've let the fruit ripen enough yet.

The plant is loaded with them this season so hopefully we can figure out what to do with them. They are super easy to propagate, every single cutting I've made has taken root.