I'm posting some pictures of our trees.  Everything is starting to bloom.

Our Kumquat Grove has finished blooming.  I'm waiting for the fruit to appear now.

Getting Ready for Spring

The weather is cold and it’s too early to plant anything yet.  The trees are getting ready to put on their leaves and flowers but there isn’t much excitement in the yard yet.

In the meantime, I’m getting ready to plant some vegetables and flowers.  The flowers will help attract the bees and butterflies that will pollinate the crops.  They will also provide some food for the grasshoppers that are bound to come along.  The flowers are a diversion so that the grasshoppers and caterpillars will eat the flowers and stay away from the trees.  I know I’ll lose some of the vegetable crop to them, but if they have enough other things to eat, hopefully they will leave most of the fruit and vegetables alone.

Mother Nature is able to grow a wide variety of food in a small space that feeds numerous mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and insects. The insects will help pollinate the plants, but unfortunately there will also be insects that want to eat my plants.  That is where the toads and frogs that reside in my forest come in. The frogs and toads are my natural insecticide.  This was Mother Nature’s plan.  

I will also have to contend with squirrels, rabbits, gophers, opossums, raccoons, snakes, dogs, cats and the occasional cow that gets out of the neighbor’s fence.  These animals and insects have been in my world for a long time and helped make growing plants in my yard possible.  They have been the backbone of most of the forests in the United States and will be the backbone of mine also.

Kumquat Grove

Our kumquat grove has the most interesting trees in the yard at the moment.  About 7 years ago I bought kumquats at the grocery store.  After I used what I wanted, I threw the rest in the backyard for the squirrels and rabbits to eat.  Apparently one kumquat seed survived and made the first tree.  At the time I couldn’t get anything else to grow so I left it alone to see what would happen.   Over the years some of the fruit that wasn’t eaten by me or the animals has fallen and created more trees around it.  I now call it the kumquat grove. The trees make a good crop of kumquats every year, enough for me and the wildlife to enjoy. 

I don’t think the kumquat grove knows that it is winter.  It started blooming already.  It is always the first thing to bloom in the yard.  We still have a few more weeks of cold weather but the trees will survive and give us the sour fruit that it is known for.

Kumquat Grove pictures

Fruit Forest in January

I am posting pictures of the fruit forest.   Although there is no snow on the ground I assure you that it is winter in central Texas.  We have had temperatures in the 30 and 40’s for the last few days.   Most of the trees are dormant now, but there are some that have refused to give up all their leaves.

Pictures of fruit forest

Welcome to Family Fruit Forest

 I’m going to start by giving you a history of the project.  I live in the country about 40 miles from Austin, TX.  I have an acre of land that for years was pretty lifeless except for the grass, bugs and gophers.  Everything I planted died, I tried trees, shrubs, vegetables, and plants that people said were unkillable.  They all died… Most of this was because we had very little top soil before we would hit clay.  The droughts in the summer didn’t help either.   I gave up after the first few years and resigned myself to never having a tree on the property. 

A couple of years ago I tried again. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on plants that I knew would probably die so I dug up plants from the roadway and took clippings from friend’s bushes.  To my surprise, almost everything I planted grew.  After analyzing why the change occurred, I realized it was because I had done very little to the yard over 9 years and allowed Mother Nature to take her course.  First every time we mowed the lawn I allowed the clippings to stay where they were. Then the gophers, ants, mice, frogs, and other critters had dug up the ground and had pulled all the clippings down into the ground.  I finally had a good layer of top soil.  I never thought mulching and aeration could be so easy.

Having some confidence I proceeded to plant some fruit trees.  They grew and put on blossoms.  I didn’t get much fruit from them but that was because they were still young.  The important thing was that they lived.  With my new found courage I then installed a sprinkler system to combat the droughts that we have.  This worked better than I expected. 

My back yard is now being referred to as my orchard.  I prefer to think of it as a fruit forest. 

We are in the middle of winter now and although we don’t have bad winters like the north does, we still get some pretty cold days.  A few days ago the temperature got down into the twenties which occasionally happens.  We have freezing temperatures a few days a year, but most of our winter is cool, not cold.  Still, citrus trees are hard to grow in this area.  But apples, pears and peaches do well, Pecan trees in particular.

I’m hoping to continue blogging about the fruit forest as we get into the spring and summer.  I am going to grow these as organically as Mother Nature herself would.  I realize I will have to deal with the pests that come along and try to eat my crop.  But in a weird way, that’s what’s going to make this project interesting.