What a great Forum! Much thanks to those who built it!
Hi! I am Fred in North San Diego County, California. I am a retired anthropologist who for his entire life loved to (try to) grow things, but never really looked into the details as to how best to do it. Just stick a seed in the ground, add some water and see what happens has always been my basic modus operandi. But now, here I am sitting on this nice piece of retirement home property in a part of the world where they say you can grow almost "anything." So it is time to get serious, and I am hoping I can get help from the myriad experts who are frequenting this forum to help in the process. I have dreams of satisfying the yearnings of my childhood taste bud memory cells trained from a five year stay in Kailua Oahu where we could literally pick mangos, guavas, and papayas in our yard, along with a whole lot of other things whose names I don't remember, but hope to rediscover. We bought the retirement property fifteen years ago and began planting trees immediately with the idea in mind that when we were ready to build the house and move onto the property we would already have a bunch of mature fruit trees growing. The plan has sort of worked; many trees survived my well-intentioned, but poorly trained planting and tending methods, and are currently thriving and producing well; quite a few others are alive, but struggling. And quite a few others just didn't make it.
Thriving (more or less):
6 varieties of plum, 2 peach, 3 apricot, 1 pluot, 1 nectarine, 2 asian pear, 3 apple, 2 pomegranate, 2 persimmon
Lots of varieties of citrus -- oranges, lemons, limes, tangerines, grapefruits, citrons, kumquat
1 lychee, 1 longan, 3 cherimoya, 1 atemoya, 2 jujube, 5 guava, 1 feijoa, 2 mango, 1 curry leaf tree, 2 white sapote, 1 rose apple
2 walnut, 2 almond, 1 pecan, 1 macademia
Struggling, alive but not happy:
tamarind, bananas, jaboticaba, sapodilla, pawpaw, plus a couple of hundred hass avocados that are not happy because we cannot afford to give them as much water as they need (this place used to be an avocado ranch; previous owners went out of business because water became too expensive).
Recent Plantings:
Wax jambu, Pakistani mulberry, Persian lime, Rangoon lime, Kaffir lime, Turnbull pear
I look forward to interacting with all of you on the forum. Hope you won't mind putting up with my quirky writing style, and sense of humor.
BTW, I've recently gotten heavily into permaculture. I'm hoping there are other permaculture enthusiasts in the group.
Thanks, Fred