Thanks guys. great resource too!
4.5m! yikes. more than i was hoping. Right off the bat i should say Taiwan has massive lychee plantations too, i live in the middle of it and have family growing it, but i am 100% organic (i don't sell table fruit, i eat it) and here they use a lot of chemicals on their crops. There are many good developments here for fruit, but rarely do they not involve chemicals so i tend not to adopt them.
so 4.5m is the minimum. is there anyway i can cut that down to 3m and do small trees like they do with other crops such as mango? I assume the issue is with pruning them short all the time then?
I think i may start thinking about keeping some stock plants in pots and just keep them closer without worrying about fruit then have a few out in the ground at proper spacing. biggest thing for me is i need stock plants of many varieties for grafting/propagating.
For the flooded portion, you might consider Jaboticaba. They love wet conditions, but they are a very, very slow growing tree (can take 10 years to fruit).
you arent kidding. i bought 4' trees 5 years ago and they still have not given me a fruit. i will be planting these for sure. Any other suggestions for wet loving plants? i can control how wet the area stays directly by how much i let out. so it will all be pretty customizable.
After reading it you may want to leave some of the banana plants in place as a windbreak.
good idea. i just lost a lot of trees at my other farm from a freak storm. had hail too! we will be building a 6' chainlink fence around the whole place with concrete base. a lot of people here use black plastic on said fences for wind break, but i will be leaving bananas as you say and also growing various vines i enjoy along the fence. will probably be growing lots of different gingers along the fence which wont provide wind break for at least a year when they grow taller.
Here is a basic layout of the new farm, we are also going to live there once house is built. we will have a well, irrigation ditches and also pipes, so water anywhere is easy to do. the light shaded grey area is where is going to be raised further to avoid any flooding. the black area is going to be concrete, so no in ground plants there.
EDIT I also wanted to ask about cacao. I have grown it for 5 years, in pots, without issue. My other farm floods badly in summer, sometimes a week under water (-1m), and T. cacao ALWAYS dies in ground there, no matter what i do even putting them on mounds. The dirt is the same i use in their pots. So i want to grow lots at the new farm, and am wondering should i place them in the higher half where its drier? or lower half where its more moist.
Also note, our wet season is May-Oct, dry season can last up to 6 months without a drop of rain, but still always humid and i mulch lots so ground never dries too bad.