2026-04-08

Food Forest Update #9

The freeze is well behind us now and almost everything is recovering. It is spring but still our dry season for another month or two. Many things are happening in the food forest and beyond.

Grafting

I have made a couple attempts at grafting before. Last year I tried grafting some Loquats and failed. A couple months ago I tried grafting a mulberry and a plum. The mulberry graft failed but the plum graft took! Last weekend I attended a grafting workshop at a kombucha shop. It was about a 3 hour long workshop and we learned about grafting, practiced and grafted a tree that we got to take home. On one hand I didn't feel like I learned much new to me information, but on the other hand it was nice to get some in person observation and reassurance of someone more experienced in grafting.

For our take home tree we got to choose from four different fruit trees. I ended up picking Carambola (starfruit). Now I just have to wait and see if my graft will be successful. The guy that did that workshop also brought extra scions (branch cuttings from a tree to be used for grafting are called scions) so I also was able to take some home. I got scions of a different cultivar of carambola and scions of a good cultivar of white sapote. I grafted those this week. Fingers crossed that at least some of my grafts are successful. I'd be happy with even one, haha!

If I can get good enough at grafting it will make acquiring more fruit trees that I desire a lot cheaper. Growing out your own seeds and then grafting cuttings onto them yourself is way less expensive than buying already grafted trees. It is also a skill I would like to have if I ever start selling plants as a little side nursery business, which is something I've been kicking around as a possibility for a while.

Recovery

It has been long enough since the freeze that I know for sure what is really dead and what is going to grow back. The things that didn't make it were unsurprising and expected either because they were too young to handle it or are too tropical to survive even brief freezes. The only things that are truly goners are the achacha, one very young papaya, one very young grafted white sapote, one starfruit, a mamey sapote, an inca peanut vine and the one smallest mango died above the graft but is regrowing from the rootstock. Everything else is in varying states of recovery. Many things died back somewhat but have been pruned and are putting out new growth. Many other things died down to the roots or near the base of the trunk but are starting to regrow. Considering how ridiculously cold (for this area) it got I'm pretty impressed with how resilient a lot of these plants are. Many of the things I'm growing are subtropical or tropical and really do not like anything more than brief barely sub-freezing temps. We are a subtropical climate so the subtropical plants can generally recover even from the lowest temps in 30+ years because it was still relatively brief. In a few months I think you'll have a hard time telling the food forest had such a hard time if you hadn't seen it before the freeze.

Rain

We have been in a very severe drought and are on pretty tight water restrictions currently. As I write this we are getting some relief thankfully as a low pressure system has stalled out over us. It has rained about 2 inches in the last 48 hours and the forecast has us getting additonal rain for the next two days as well. The food forest is loving it I'm sure.

New Plantings

Oh gosh, I've been planting SO many things it's going to be hard to remember them all. With the freeze damage I have been replacing or planting additional things and moving things. Plus, with the rain we've been getting the last couple days it makes for great planting weather. The soil is wet and easy to dig and it's raining consistently enough that I don't even need to water things in after planting. I've just been going out in between the bouts of rain to plant and letting the rain water them in for me.

• 4 more native blueberry bushes in the front porch bed
• 2 wolfberry plants in front native bed
• 2 bird peppers in front native bed
• 4 new papayas (started from seed)
• Black Sapote
• Geffner Atemoya
• Moved 2 peanut butter fruits to the back and planted 3 other that I started from seed
• Several more lemondrop mangosteens
• 2 Pineapple Ground Cherries
• Red Spicata Coconut
• Seminole Pumpkin seeds
• Ice Cream Bean
• Ginger
• 2 Pawpaws
• Jackfruit
• Started a lot of seeds (kumquat, okra, basil, cranberry hibiscus, roselle, sugar apple, cherimoya)

Exciting Tidbits

The dwarf orinoco banana has handled the cold extremely well. As soon as it warmed back up it started growing like nothing happened and is now pushing out a flower. The black sapote I recently planted is already flowering. I won't let it fruit because it's too small but that's a good sign. We've been getting small handfuls of strawberries every few days, although the birds have been pecking holes in some of them lately. The mulberries are growing very well and fruiting. We have also discovered a fruiting mulberry just a block away at the end of our alley. They don't taste as good as our mulberries but they are alright. There are thousands of fruits on this tree though and they are free! Oh yes, also, the avocado that has been in the ground for not quite 2 years started flowering like crazy right after the freeze and now has a number of little fruits forming. We might get some avocados this year!

Baby avocados forming on the tree

That's all for now. I'll be back soon with more food forest updates.

ABP

back to gemlog index