I'm looking to do a poly culture/fruit forest. In Central Texas zone 8b

I'm wanting to do annuals mixed together in a no till garden between a mix of food forest and chop and drop nitrogen fixing trees.

I have gotten edible varieties of cholla and opuntia cactus I want to grow in rows to shade the annuals as well. I want to do no till polyculture with mushrooms as well in the mulch.

I have a half acre of land with southern wooded area and on a small northern hillside but gets full sun for about 5/8th of the nonforested area.

I want to raise chickens and rabbits and my pet sudanese sulcata tortoise and even aquaponics. But am worried there's not enough room.

I currently don't have anything to water with besides a 5 gallon jug and a watering can. I plan to buy a food grade 300+ gallon caged tote.

I want to make enough food for me and enough to sell that I can quit my 11 dollars an hour job 🙃 and still have insurance I need for meds.

I haven't gardened much because I always kill everything and I know it's been late in the season in my area to plant but I finally have time to garden this year because my college is winding down and am switching to my summer shift which is 4 10s and have Friday-Sunday off. .

I normally work 4pm to 12 30 am.

I'll link my half acre and the shape of it. My finger in the picture is touching the southern back fence line.

You can still see ground messed up from the bulldozer my family used to clear the family farm of juniper trees my half acre included.

I forgot to mention I have agave I want to try and grow as well for food too.

Welcome to permies Raymond. I'm in a similar climate. It sounds like a neat plan!

We'd love to see updates on how it goes for you. Good luck!

Steve

Thanks 😊

I'm in central texas. I tried aquaponics and failed miserably, killing multiple batches of fish and producing almost no vegetables. It was expensive to set up and never paid for itself.

It's important to have some filtered shade over vegetables during the summer, in my experience. I grow Moringa, which freezes to the ground but comes back and can grow 10 feet in a season. Honey Locust might also work.

Your land looks very pretty! What area of Central Texas are you in? I am about halfway between Austin and College Station, and your land looks very similar to the land around here.

My first thought is will you be living on the land? And do you have a way to protect your plantings from deer and bunnies? And a way to protect your critters from predators like coyotes and bobcats?

It is definitely not the best time to plant most things, especially with how hot and dry it already is this year. I would probably spend the next few months planning and then plant towards the end of the summer. For most perrenials, like fruit trees, fall is the best time to plant anyway. You can plant annual vegetables in the late summer though, for a fall/ early winter harvest. And you can plant cool-season veggies like greens in the fall to use throughout the fall, and hopefully the winter and spring, if the weather isn't too crazy (80 degree days followed by a sudden freeze, and strong wind, like we had multiple times this winter, are really hard on plants).

A really great book with detailed charts on what should be planted when in different areas is "Texas Organic Vegetable Gardening" by Howard Garrett. I bought mine used online at Thriftbooks.com, but you also might be able to find it elsewhere. I refer to it ALL THE TIME, especially since I only moved here a year ago and nothing is really set in my mind yet.

Another thing you could be doing now, to prepare for fall, is building things like lasagna beds, so they may have composted down enough to plant into in the fall. When I clean out my goat houses I am piling the hay, wood chip, manure mix into rectangles, and layering in old bits of wood, dry leaves, kitchen compost, etc to make lasagna beds, in the hopes they will be ready to plant in the fall. I know they won't be fully composted down, but I will make little "nests" in the material, add some good, ready-to-grow-in soil to the nests, and plant into those. If you are a beginner gardener, than the book "Lasagna Gardening" by Patricia Lanza might be a good place to start. I read it recently, but since I had been gardening for a long time and hanging out here and in gardening forums, I found that I didn't learn anything new from it.