Re: Totally OT: stone fruit


"A L P" <hay_hell_pea@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:47BDD434.9010904@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Amy Blankenship wrote:


Will blueberries grow in your area? We've had fantastic luck with
blueberries and figs. We get tons of wild blackberries, the
occasional wild grape (muscadine), and elderberries. We also have
pecan trees, which showered us with our first real harvest last fall.
The chickens got fat on the pecans that were stepped on or run over!

-Amy

Lucky you! Wild blackberries are a weed so unfortunately the ones
closest to the road or publicly accessible areas tend to get sprayed.
Elderberries grow wild here to the annoyance of anyone whose
clothes-line gets "blessed" by birds!

Where are you? I'm in Dunedin, New Zealand - as distinct from Dunedin,
Florida! My fig tree is a twice-bearer. I have another, a once-a year
fruiter, but it's planted in a poor place and is growing very slowly. The
big one gets lots of figs now but the early ones too often fall off very
young or more annoyingly stay till they are quite well-grown and THEN fall
off, result of a late frost when they were forming. The second crop
catches the oncoming autumn and winter. In the right place it would be
OK. But my house being old (for NZ) was built to face the road and
definitely not to make best use of the sun so to plant something in the
shelter of a sunny wall also means the sun only hits it full-on or else
it's disappeared around the corner. The very few times I've had ripe
fruit off it - oh the delight!

I have blueberry plants but they too have been so-so. The soil is too
much clay, heavy and hard for roots to penetrate even when wet. It's a
long job building up the quality of the soil. It's a half acre of ups and
downs on a hillside, not a place you could drive a trailer to the far end
with lovely compost and mulch, so it's wheelbarrows and buckets, and lime
and dolomite and gypsum.

Raspberries grow well. The raspberry patch is between the house and the
chooks as it happens.... And there is a white raspberry doing very well
this year (the added lime over the winter?) on the other side of the lawn
pathway.

As soon as the Omega plum has ripened and been picked it'll be time for
the chooks to get out and have the whole area to fossick around in.

I'm in South Mississippi, but my thought was that since there are tons of
varieties of blueberries that can grow pretty much anywhere, maybe you could
find one that was right for you. We have sort of odd soil, that seems to be
a layer of about 6-12" of topsoil over clay. The blueberries do fine here.

I'm jealous that you can grow raspberries. They do notoriously poorly here.

I have two types of figs. One is a "traditional" type that is not big
enough to bear, and the other is a new hybrid out of a nearby university
that exploded into growth and produced very early. I have a couple of other
fig varieties I have my eye out for.

One thing about winter is that it lets me add a bunch of leaves and other
stuff to the goat house, which then gets "enriched" over the winter. I am
looking forward to spreading this over my beds in a few weeks.

Have a good day;

Amy


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