As far as citrus goes - I like having my own lemons and limes because picking them fresh gives me better tasting food products made with them. It doesn't matter if it is something savory or something sweet, there is a noticeable difference when I use my home grown citrus. Meyer Lemons tend to produce a crop over a longer season and with your set up you might be able to get year-round production. I also get a lot of use out of a little potted Calamondin. The flavor is strong and sour but it is pretty much in fruit all year so I always have a citrus juice to squeeze over fish or berries or ice cream. The only draw back to citrus is the bug issues. Every sucking insect in the world likes citrus so keeping the bugs under control can be a challenge. Home grown blood oranges (I have 'Moro') taste better than store bought because I can pick them at peak flavor and all of the citrus have intense aroma when grown at home and picked fresh.

I get a lot of use out of guavas, both normal pink fleshed type (I have 'Ruby Supreme') and Strawberry guava but some people don't care for the flavor and the seeds are a pain to deal with. Guavas also attract scale insect like crazy so you have to spray or somehow stay on top of them or they go downhill. I hand pick them off of my big tree so it can be done but you have to be dedicated.

I seem to be the only person that likes papaya (I grow 'Waimanalo' and 'Red Lady' and though easy to grow (keep them dry in the winter) the fruit takes a long time to ripen.

If you could get the Cocona to perform better you could have a nice flavored fruit to play with. Maybe increase the air flow around them and spray with soapy water to keep the mites in check. I like them because you can either start them from seeds or cuttings and get fruit by the end of the year either way. I start mine indoors and then plant them in the ground in May and by October I have more than enough fruit to eat. Cooked with a splash of lemon juice and a cup of sugar they cook down to a mush that tastes like mango mixed with tangerine to me.

Though Roselle is more like a large herb plant, it would provide all sorts of stuff for you to sell. The leaves are great sour accents to Asian food when cooked and the calyx makes some of the best jelly or fruit drink out there - like cranberry with a zing. Very easy to grow but seasonal crop, but then they are also very easy to dry and store. People are always surprised by the flavor.

I would think that some sort of smoothie bar where you sold drinks blended from fruits and herbs you grew on site would work. You could simply freeze the fruit in season and blend it when you needed it.

My tree is about 8 feet tall and 10 feet wide, maybe 5 years old (but I bought a tiny little graft-ling)

I prefer mulberries but this year I did not get much of a crop.

These Che taste very sweet, kinda fiber-ey, no seeds, with a strong hint of melon. I can only eat a few of them each day, I find them too sweet (I'm the same way with Muscadines or Scuppernogs).

Citradia - I have Black tupelo in the woods beside the house also. The dogs snarf up the fruit when it falls (mid July this year), I've tasted it and found it way astringent and harsh but people supposedly make jelly with it.

Things are bone dry here in Raleigh NC but it looks like all my hard work watering is paying off with bumper crops of fruit. I've harvested most of the fall crop of Blackberries (Prime Ark Freedom) and the table grapes (Fredonia) have been made into jelly - sorry no photos of either of them, but here's what else is going on in the backyard:


Ogeechee Lime - actually a Tupelo not a citrus



unnamed pricky pear - cactus do fine here if you plant them in a mound of gravel. The fruit doesn't seem to have the intensity of flavor I remember from out west so I plan on harvesting these early and see if that helps.



Cranberries - you don't need bog but you do need acid soil and near constant weeding to keep them happy.



no name trees grown from seed (from named cultivars). The worst thing about pawpaws is that you get a landslide of fruit at one time. Kitchen fridge is full, basement chest freezer is full...



Everything else in the veggie garden is crispy yet this one lonely rhubarb keeps chugging along (don't tell him that we've been over 100 degrees)



Got watermelons planted late but even with the drought they're happy.

looks like some sort of Ruellia - Mexican Petunia

Welcome to the hobby! I'm in Raleigh if you want to visit and see what your life will look like in a couple of years. In the ground I have most of the common trees, bushes and vines as well as Jujube, Pineapple Guava, Loquat, Goumi, native Passionvine and Fuzzy Kiwis. I grow all the normal vegetables for the area as well as Rhubarb, Yacon, Ginger, Turmeric, Galangal, Roselle, Yucca, Sugarcane, Tea camelia, Cocona and a larger fruiting form of Naranjilla known as Lulo. And then there is the greenhouse where I experiment with more tropical plants such as many types of Citrus, Guavas, Papayas, Pineapples, Passionfruit, Sherbet berry and a dwarf Mulberry. I have some tropicals that I grew from seed - Longan, Grumichama, Luc's Garcinia, Jaboticaba, Suriname Cherry. In general I give them about 5 years to fruit. Space is limited so if they aren't doing well under my care I find them another home. I don't keep the greenhouse super warm so a lot of tropical plants are off my wish list.   Good luck!

I don't know the variety or cultivar. The local Asian market seems to have the same Longan and Lychee each year, at least they don't claim different names on them and they always look the same to me. When I've asked they've said that the fruit came from Florida but I seem to remember them saying that the Longan came from Hawaii that year. I know that every seed sprouted and grew, this one grew faster and appeared stronger. I moved into this house in 2010 and it was a year or two after that move that I sowed those seeds so this tree is less than 7 years old.

I tend to sow every seed I find in tropical fruit just to see if it will grow. There is only so much room in the greenhouse so I focus my collection on smaller trees. I've had good luck getting things to sprout but bad luck getting them to live for years and years. Besides this tree I have a purple fruited Passionvine (Passiflora edulis) that fruits well, a strawberry guava, some Suriname cherries and even a Key Lime tree (a friend sprouted and grew the seedling but gave it to me when it got too big). My big failures have been guava trees, I love eating the fruit but when I grow out the seeds they never taste as good as their parent - after 3-4 years of waiting! Other seed grown plants in the collection that have not fruited but are otherwise healthy are Jabuticaba, Cherimoya, Sapodilla, Indian fig Opuntia, a Luc's Garcinia, an Opuntia from Nullzero (doing great!) and some Jungle plums and Grumichamas from Oscar.

There is also a lot of fruiting plants that I bought as grown trees - Papayas, lots of Citrus.

I've tried every trick that I know and the only success has come from seeds. You'll work hard to get to the fruit before all the birds eat them. I was lucky in that my neighbor just happened to have a female tree next to his deck so he could bring seeds whenever it fruited. I've moved and lost touch with him. I keep checking the mature trees in the woods beside my house and I have never seen them bloom or fruit.

I have a small collection of them but I live in zone 7b (Raleigh NC). I have three or four varieties all based on the natives found in the Southeastern US. I also have Azarole which is an Italian relative. All of them are slow growing for me and now at 5 years of age they are just starting to bloom and fruit. The only one I've tasted is the Azarole which has a mild apple/rose hip flavor. My trees do show signs of normal fruit tree diseases but they don't seem to suffer from them.

Don't give up too quickly, a lot of the stuff I grow had weak flavor in the beginning. It seems that after the plants mature they taste better. Mine also seem to have richer flavor if I remember to fertilize them on a schedule.

I still like my P. incarnata vines. Maybe this year the two will have ripe fruit at the same time and I can see how close or how far apart they are flavor wise. I can send you seeds or even fruit from mine and you can compare. I don't really manage the Maypops, they just do what they want out in the garden. I intend to build some sort of trellis system so I can get to the fruit better, but the garden chore list is long.

I have the P. edulis in a large horse feed bucket (maybe 35+ gallons). I stuck into that a very strong and tall tomato cage. The pot is tall and combined with the cage it is over 6 feet tall. The vine climbed up quickly and I wove it in and out of the rods on the cage to try and keep it compact. I drag it into my hoophouse for the winter after first frost. Inside it tends to go wild and climb all over everything. Outside for the summer it seems happy to just drape down from the top of the tomato cage. I haven't had to trim it once this summer and I have it parked next to an elevated wooden deck with railings I thought it would cover up.

AndyNZ - I have started to switch over to the hybrid bush cherry 'Carmine Jewel'. They do well for me and stay small. The flavor is okay (other bush cherries taste like wild plums to me). I do have a 'Danube' and a 'Kristin' - one is P. avium the other P. cerasus. They are just now reaching fruiting size so whichever one does the best will be the one to stay and then I will have room to try another variety. Thanks for the link.

I've never seen it listed but mine do fine in zone 7b Raleigh NC. They do take years to reach maturity and I don't find the flavor all that special. They are nice but not as nice as a sweet cherry (which won't grow here).