Steve Thorn

Hope you're apple tree recovered, did it end up making it?

The top and bottom photo look like burr knots.

It seems like they're especially common on trees with M111 rootstock.

I really enjoyed this video. He mentions a lot of great cucumber, polyculture, pollination, and permaculture info.

I think I finished bed number 1 near the start of 2020. It's a little hard to see at the very top. It currently has some grafted apple trees in it, some which grew over 7 feet over this past year.

Bed number 2 was finished a few months ago and has been planted out and has a good wild winter cover crop covering a lot of it now.

Bed number 3 was just dug and has been mulched.

Bed number 4 was literally just dug , before being mulched.

One more to dig.

These are my 4 current natural raised beds. I hope to add one last one very soon.

Sherifa El Alfy wrote:

Steve Thorn wrote:I bet figs and pomegranates would do really well for you. Probably mulberries, pineapple guava, and jujubes too.

I forgot about pineapple guavas, I've only seen them here once but not too far away!

Also, can you tell me a Latin name for jujubes? I'm getting a lot of different results in my search.


Thank you!

Glad too!

The Latin name is Ziziphus jujuba.

It's the only one I haven't grown that I mentioned above. I've grown all the others and they seem to thrive in the heat and can tolerate dry periods also. I've heard that jujubes are similar.

Peaches and cherries may be another two that could do well, if you have some local varieties of those available.

That's a neat list of plants that you are planning to grow,  excited to see how it turns out!

Goldenrod!

It attracts so many pollinators and beneficial insects. The stalks dry out and make really good habitat and can also be used as a mulch to provide lots of organic matter for the soil as well.

Here's a video of my goldenrod and all the insects it attracted. This year I had even more beneficial insects come than were in this video from the year before due to more plant diversity in my food forest.

We have a lot of fire ants here. They used to be everywhere, mainly in the grassy areas, and seemed to thrive in poor fertility areas in our very sandy soil.

Now that I have a lot more diversity in the food forest. I've noticed about a 90% decrease in their numbers just over the last year. I think the increase in predatory bugs has helped greatly reduce their numbers. Once the soil gets a lot of organic matter in it, that also seems to discourage them.

This is a Knobbed Russet that I had the pleasure of eating recently. I'm not positive it was one, but it seemed to fit both the physical and taste description.

Some call it the ugliest apple, but I think a lot of the "ugly" apples actually look really neat! It didn’t look that appetizing when I picked it off the tree, but once it was washed, it cleaned up really well.

I may have picked it a little late. The birds or insects seemed to really love the tree. I think it was the birds, as most of the apples looked like they had pecking damage. I didn’t look closely, but even the damaged ones still looked edible and weren’t rotting very bad due to the wound.

The birds have good taste in my opinion , as I really liked these apples as well. The first bite was kind of shocking, an intense sweet/tart and good flavor, as I hadn’t tasted such an intensely flavored apple before. The flesh was kind of dry but pleasant in a weird way. I think it is probably one of the best apples I’ve tasted, especially if you like your apples with a strong flavor kick!

I started eating a slice, then another, and before I knew it the whole apple was gone, I was chewing around the core, and wanted more! I'd rather have a delicious, "ugly", highly nutritious apple any day over the tasteless, "perfect", mostly mealy apple looking things sold in most stores today!

I've buried the grafts on a hundred or more fruit trees recently and seen no negative effects so far. In fact, I've only seen positive things from it, combining it with no or very minimal pruning.

I also like to wound the grafted variety to encourage it to send out its own roots. I feel like the trees will live longer that way, and be healthier, long lived trees, growing in a more natural way.

From my experience it's possible to convert a previously pruned tree into a naturally shaped tree, it just gets a lot harder as the tree gets bigger.