Glad I found this thread! I'm a long time lurker on permies, first time poster. I too live in San Diego County, eastern Escondido, with 0.8 acre lot, mostly flat, but slightly sloped in some areas and on septic. Have about 30 fruit producing trees and shrubs, a mix of established and still developing:
Many kinds of citrus
Avocados
Grapes
Pomegranate
Apricots
Passion fruit
Loquat
Pears
Apples
Feijoa
Almond (?)
Peaches
Dragon fruit
Raspberry
Blackberry
Mulberry
Perennial dino kale
Some of the fruit producing trees and shrubs are on a series of terraces.
2 main rectangular raised beds for annuals, and 2 circular raised beds using fire rings, then a bunch of grow bags.
We water everything by hand since the sprinkler drip system is currently broken. The water situation is one that I think about a lot but haven't found good workable solutions that we can afford. I've had lots of success with a couple of mulch drops from a free service called chip drop as well as a few cubic yards of free mushroom compost. I also intermix a lot of native perennials throughout but since our area is so big nothing looks like it's intensively cultivated. Most everything has to get planted in gopher cages, even aloes and lavenders and sages now. We had great success one year with traps but they got too smart for those.
I use a modified hugelkultur using the plant refuse we tend to have a lot of, palm parts, smaller sticks and logs etc. We keep seven chickens in a big area and use hemp bedding ,which is fantastic. They're used bedding gets integrated into compost and near the bottom of the beds.
