Continuous harvest...
Gains were made there when I focused more on (almost) bulletproof locally adapted crops. Examples being Seminole pumpkin, Everglades tomato, and sweet potato slips from a grower over in St. Augustine FL named martian potatoes. he's quite awesome and only about 6o miles from here.
https://martianpotatoes.com/about/
"Irish" potatoes will grow almost year round if I cover them with plastic for freezes. The extreme heat months are difficult but do-able. The "frames" for the plastic are the tomato cages opened up and stuck in the ground so they make a Quonset hut shape. Potatoes are inexpensive in the store, but there's nothing like the taste of a fresh one. I use grocery store potatoes for seed potato (they won't set seed here) but most of those come from
local potato growers on the way to St. Augustine anyway, so, sort of local. I've had better luck with them than seed potatoes. If diseases do crop up, the FL "fast flush" sands we're working with will carry them away after a year or two. I lost all my gardens years back to a load of
compost that was contaminated with Aminopyralid or similar herbicide and they were back in action after a couple years.
I also set up grow a lot of things in containers after the herbicide event, just in case of another surprise like that herbicide. You can test for all those lingering herbicides by growing a few peas or beans in any compost you might be putting on your gardens and then another sample of them in known good compost or soil. It will be obvious something is wrong.
Biggest gain was building a little
greenhouse from a 10' x 20' carport frame, IRAC
greenhouse plastic and billboard tarps. I used 10 black plastic 55 gallon drums to hold heat in the frosts and it did fine in an unusually bad frost that went down to 22 F. The IRAC plastic is something you definitely want. It prevents condensation on its interior surface so no jungle like nastiness, fungus and disease like greenhouses I remember. I accidentally put the greenhouse where it catches all the prevailing winds going north and south so it didn't need a fan either. Tomatoes, lettuce, peppers and some of the frost sensitive greens like Sissoo (Brazilian lettuce) and Okinawa spinach all winter were a treat. I was also able to overwinter some guava and Jamaican cherry
trees and shrubs.
Between growing tomatoes and other things the two traditional spring/summer seasons here and the greenhouse I'm almost there on year round. I was late getting the second season of tomatoes in this year so there may be a gap. Tomatoes here are a race to beat the mosaic virus so quick growing tomatoes that can hold off the virus until they fruit are what I look for.
I also trial everything that looks like it might do OK here. Mostly, they don't, but every now and then you get a winner and that makes it worth it. I'm studying Joseph Lofthouses'
landrace gardening ideas and plenty
should apply here. Particularly about growing locally acclimated home bred veggies. Joseph is doing incredibly valuable work for all of us.
The final leg is planting a food forest, which has been in full swing for about a year but food output is a few years into the future. Once again, trying to go for nearly bulletproof stuff like Elaeagnus family (Goumi, Autumn Olive, Silverberry) and trialing some marginal stuff for surviving here like Paw Paws and bush cherries.
Here's something that saved me from a number of major food forest mistakes on fruit trees and shrubs, more so than a lot of expensive
books on the subject. Here's a quick explanation by the author:
" Over the years, I have revised and expanded the pamphlet, and now it is a short book.
It has been free to the public, and many people have found it useful. My family is not wealthy. The link
for
Perennial Food is
http://conev.org/fruitbook.pdf Cut and paste that, and you can download the
book. Please consider a donation. A lot of work has gone into creating and maintaining that book for
your use. You can donate through paypay by sending money to
alex@paypal.com You could also send
a donation to Alexis Zeigler, 217 Fredericksburg Ave, Louisa VA, 23093
Another very useful resource for learning about orchard planning can be found at Edible Landscaping,
ediblelandscaping.com in a
video titled Planning a Home Orchard.
The link is
http://ediblelandscaping.com/buyPlants.php?func=view&id=1116
That is a 5 hour video, the result of a cooperative effort between Michael McConkey (owner of Edible
Landscaping) and Alexis Zeigler. That video is about orchard planning, not propagation. For a broad
approach to propagating fruit trees to food production, we know of no better resource than Perennial
Food. There are lots of good resources about commercial methods of propagation, but those are not
ideal for the home grower. Enjoy and eat well!"
This has me focusing on mulberries and persimmons for fruit trees, as well as the idea in Tree Crops:
https://archive.org/details/TreeCrops-J.RussellSmith
where he had southern farmers running spring pigs in orchards of persimmons and mulberries with no inputs necessary other than dropping off the pigs and picking them up later after they fattened up on the mulberry and persimmon drops.
Between the freezes and HLB disease on citrus here I'm still experimenting with putting citrus trees under oaks. That seems to prevent HLB and took most of what I have through that 22 F degree freeze without damage. Some of my 10 year old citrus planted further from the oaks before knowledge of freeze/HLB protection took a big hit but did survive. Here's more detail:
https://youtu.be/jtO0Pa6tD8s
I'm also attempting lots of raspberries (VERY marginal here) and Blackberries. Lots of interesting new thornless and double season cultivars out there now. The best plants came from Nourse farms in MA:
https://www.noursefarms.com
Also trying wineberries (Japanese wild raspberries) and they are absolutely thriving. I guessed they might because they're invasive further north of here. Got some truly beautiful bare
root plants for those here:
https://sharonsnaturalgardens.com/product/wine-berry-plants-5/
All the invasives I have,
native or imported, are set up for death by
lawn mower death around the fringes.
I am wary of ones like Jujubes that quickly get out of control here, and supposedly don't fruit well in the heat and humidity here anyway:
https://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/go/50048/#b
Starting to experiment with cover crops to cut down on the digging/compost hauling labor, if it works, and it certainly looks good at the moment. I got red ripper peas, sun hemp and giant radishes that germinated and grew incredibly well from here:
https://petcherseeds.com
Highly recommend them.
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