by George Collins » Thu Jan 24, 2013 1:54 am
Matt,
I have spent so much time studying what grows in my own zone that I am all but completely unfamiliar with what might grow in another. That said, there is a principle I learned long ago while studying the martial arts: the advanced techniques are the basics mastered.
In my opinion, he basics of food forestry are those reliable old standbys that our ancestors have made the mainstay of the homestead for generations: apples, pears, peaches, cherries, figs and plums.
I got some fancy stuff but that is only because of scale. The vast bulk of my food forestry consists of apples, pears and figs with peaches and plums filling in a strong second tier that is being ramped up rapidly. As far as expense, I minimize that at every turn. Just today I dug up 6 peaches and 5 plums. The peaches came from a neighbor's yard and the plums are our native plum that I literally dug from a road side ditch.
The nut trees I'm planting this year consist almost entirely of acorns and nuts that we picked up last fall and have been in stratification since.
I'm also trialing air layering an exceptional seedling pecan and all of the figs I've planted so far came from this technique.
Lastly, one of the pear trees that I collected hog food from last year came from an elderly lady's house that came by her pear tree in a most interesting fashion: her husband came home one day many, many years ago with a limb that he jabbed into the ground and viola! (I'm trialing the heck out of that technique right now.)
So if you are looking for suggestions and money and/or space is limited, I vote to plug in a slam dunk. As long as it is a productive tree and as long a hog will eat it and as long as you eat pork, you can't go wrong.
Buying a $10 pear tree that drops a half ton of hog feed every year for the next 100 years is pretty dang hard to argue with.
And then there is pear preserves and pear pie. You ever had either? Eat a pear pie and you may never eat another apple pie.
"Solve world hunger, tell no one." "The, the, the . . . The Grinch!"
"If you can't beat them, bite them."