Building a food forest on the edge of the desert.

This thread are partly so I can keep track of my progress with the food forest, but I welcome all feedback. Here is where I am now, and how it all started.

We live in El Cajon SoCal about 30 minutes from the Mexican border, and less than 5 minutes from Crest National park.

Depending on who you ask, we are in grow zone 9 or 10b. In the winter our lowest temperatures are 34F, and in the summer we reach 118F, so growing food, and especially establishing a food forest, means you need to think outside the box.

A great thing about this area is that we can and do grow food all year round.

Our lot is 1/2 acres. From this you have to deduct our house, part of the road, and driveway, and our livestock pens, but it still gives us plenty of room to grow food.

In our backyard, I have a more traditional garden with raised beds, and irrigation with a mix of perennials, annuals and biannual plants. I practice poly culture here, since I find that I don’t need to worry about pests when I do that. This garden is about 1000 square feet. Our back yard is also where we keep our livestock. We keep chickens, ducks and rabbits for meat and eggs.
Our front yard is where I get to play with permaculture as I work at establishing a food forest. The area is around 5000 square feet, so it has lots of room. When we moved into this property in 2015, we found dead soil that was a mix of clay and sand. Not even weeds would grow there, so we spent the first 2 years amending the soil.

Next we started adding trees. We already had 2 long time established orange trees, but we wanted a wide variety of fruits and berries so we would be able to harvest fruits all year round. The next 3 years we added 2 Anna apple trees, 2 avocado, a Mayer lemon, a tangerine and a peach.

Later we also added elderberries, Banana palms, prickly pear cactus, 2 plums, a mulberry (because we need a big tree to provide more shade during the hot season) and strawberry guava.

This year I have started adding shrubs, brassicas and crawlers to the beginning forest. What we have added are passion fruit vines, sweet potato vines and Kiwano jelly melons in order to get some crawlers. We also planted a Natal plum, rock roses, climbing rose hip bushes, raspberries and blackberries.

We are lucky that our neighbors have a large pecan tree that provides enough shade that our blackberries thrive. I planted my raspberries in partial shade, from a palm tree and an avocado tree. So far it looks like it’s working.

I have also slowly started to add herbs like borage and comfrey, and once we are out of the hot season, I am adding wild onions, wild garlic, mountain mint, amaranth, milkweed and wild flowers. I already have stingy nettles, wild mustard and mallow growing wild each year. We also get a lot of purslane during fall and winter.

So, what’s next? The plan is to keep adding more berries, herbs and root vegetables. I will also continue to plant more brassicas, especially since they are perennials here.

I also have plans on adding alpine strawberries and currants as a minimum, and probably also more raspberry and blackberries after I see which sort grows the best here. My husband also has a fig on his wishlist. We tried those before, but gave up after the gophers killed them twice. We have now figured out a system that prevents them from cutting our trees down, so we want to try again. We basically cover the roots and lower stem in chain mail. As for the raspberries and blackberries, I planted two different kinds of each on purpose, to see which ones like it the best here. So far they are all thriving, but we still have to see how they do during the hot season, and winter.

After taking the backyard food forest webinar I am also adding maximillian sunflowers as a shrub. Apothecary roses are also on the list of plants I want to add. I dabble in herbalism, and those are a powerhouse when it comes to infections and so many other things. In general I prefer to add plants with dual purpose, simply because it makes sense.

As an experiment I have hung up hummingbird houses in the trees, since I want to attract them to this area and not just keep them in our backyard. While the bees we host (from host a hive) do a good job, we still need more pollinators. If the neighbors approve, I am also going to add owl boxes to the pecan tree. While we have snakes moving into the prickly pear, we still need more predators to help with the rodents and gophers. Right now, my husband and our cat goes hunting each evening together. The cat hunts them down, and my husband kills them.

Last year we also gave in, and added irrigation under the trees. We simply don’t get enough water for them to fruit otherwise. The last straw was our avocado trees dropping all their fruits. We will have to get the installer back soon, since we have added a lot of trees and shrubs this year. We can’t use sprinklers and just water, without getting a visit from the water department, so being water smart will be essential to our success.

If you calculate in our backyard and animals, we are 80% self-sufficient in food. Which is something I am very proud of. It’s an amazing feeling to be able to pick fresh fruit and vegetables year round, and it has done wonders for our health. It’s just a different mindset for growing, since there are things that others grow during the summer that we can’t grow until the winter, because otherwise it will be too hot. As it is, I preserve winter greens for eating in the summer, and summer vegetables for eating in the winter. It all works out in the end. This is also why I can get by with a smaller garden. By growing all year round, we essentially double our growing space.

We are still learning. I took the master garden course, loved it, and have used a lot of what I have learned already. I have now started the mushroom course, since that’s on my wishlist for the forest garden.

I also do my own experiments, since there isn’t a lot of material on how to grow specific things under our circumstances. It’s fun to do, and I admit that Alan Booker has me considering buying a microscope. He is right and Hellen Atthowe too, that it’s easier to diagnose pests and diseases if you have one LOL. Where before I would start eradicating pests right away, I now have their voices in my head telling me to fix my ecosystem instead, and they are right. Even our huge earwig infestation was fixed, by simply letting my white queen celery and similar perennials go to seed and die down a bit. Once that happened, they started leaving the rest of my garden alone, and things balanced out.

As it is, learning pruning and grafting are the next on my list, for skills to learn, and I don’t mind. My garden is my happy place. I never feel better than I do with my hands and toes buried in the soil. I can’t wait to see what happens over the coming years, as our trees and other plants grow big and strong.

Rainfall collection
I rabbit on about this subject continuously and with your house and the paved driveway you have a good source of catchment.
Have you considered it.
A 20,000L tank on the buildings is the way to start.
Catchment off paving is handled differently.

Question when do you eat prickly pear cactus?
I have some here and dnt know much about it.

John C Daley wrote:Rainfall collection
I rabbit on about this subject continuously and with your house and the paved driveway you have a good source of catchment.
Have you considered it.
A 20,000L tank on the buildings is the way to start.
Catchment off paving is handled differently.

Question when do you eat prickly pear cactus?
I have some here and dnt know much about it.

We are planning on putting in rain water collection, we just haven’t gotten around to doing it yet. We have several places we can add barrels to catch rain off the roof. We just have other projects that has priority right now. We are currently working on better living conditions for our ducks. Their pen floods every year, so we are working on adding drainage and better housing that’s elevated. Once that’s done, we are going to start working on water collection.

As for the prickly pear. It’s definitely eatable, but it has a lot of small thorns, that’s difficult to avoid. We pick the fruits, but not every year, since we usually get more than we can eat in a year. The paddles can be eaten as well, and added to salsa or fermented. They can be a little slimy until you have them cooked, but has a nice tart flavor. Medicinally the sap inside the paddles work like aloe Vera, and can be used as such for minor burns or dry skin. Wear garden gloves topped with cactus gloves when you harvest, and then burn off any thorns you see. The fruit can be peeled and eaten that way, or made into juice and frozen.
Mostly though it’s there to create a habitat for snakes and other reptiles. We have a lot of rodents and gophers, so I want more predators in there. They are coming, so it’s working. We have started to see snakes, which I am happy about. You just have to pay attention to where you walk.

Why are there so many rodents there?
Is it because you are growing food?
Is it a natural level of rodents?

My grandmother had lots of prickly pear around her house and used to make jam every summer. We used kitchen tongs to pick the fruit, and she would put them whole into a big pot and gradually boil them down to mush. She used layers of gauze or cheesecloth to strain the liquid and this would get all the spines.

For the pads (nopales) I like to pick them when they're quire small and immature, before the spines have emerged. In Ulla's photos, you can see the leaves on several of the younger pads...they are like little fleshy spikes, and only remain for a week or two before withering and falling off. I slice them and add to stir fry or soups. I bet they would be good battered and fried like okra, but haven't tried that yet. I might, because I miss okra and it just doesn't get warm enough here to grow it but cactus thrives as long as it's in a well-drained situation.

John C Daley wrote:Why are there so many rodents there?
Is it because you are growing food?
Is it a natural level of rodents?

I think there are many reasons for all of the rodent.
1. We are close to the national park, but the predators don’t come this close to buildings. We also have a lot of wild rabbits.
2. Everyone in our neighborhood grows food and most keep livestock too. We keep chickens, ducks and rabbits. All lots in our neighborhood has 1/2 to 1 acres, and we are outside city limits. People move here to get large gardens and no HOA’s
3. Gophers is a huge problem in all of San Diego. They are native to the desert, and with people moving in, they have a larger food source, and fever enemies, so the population has exploded.

We have a lot of coyote packs roaming, each night and early morning, but they prefer to go for the livestock, if they can.

Phil Stevens wrote:My grandmother had lots of prickly pear around her house and used to make jam every summer. We used kitchen tongs to pick the fruit, and she would put them whole into a big pot and gradually boil them down to mush. She used layers of gauze or cheesecloth to strain the liquid and this would get all the spines.

For the pads (nopales) I like to pick them when they're quire small and immature, before the spines have emerged. In Ulla's photos, you can see the leaves on several of the younger pads...they are like little fleshy spikes, and only remain for a week or two before withering and falling off. I slice them and add to stir fry or soups. I bet they would be good battered and fried like okra, but haven't tried that yet. I might, because I miss okra and it just doesn't get warm enough here to grow it but cactus thrives as long as it's in a well-drained situation.

I do the same as your grandmother, except we use a fruit crusher to smash them up before boiling. After that I first use a fruit press to get the juice, and then I strain it through a cloth.

We love okra too. I just picked the first of the season today.

Here is a little July update.

Well, kiwano’s don’t like being transplanted, so it died on me, but I have put some seeds in the ground, since the temperatures are perfect for kiwanos during the hot season, and they grow really fast.

Today I harvested the apples on our dwarf Anna apple tree, the apples on our second tree isn’t ready, which will stretch the season. Most will go into the dehydrator, since I still have a lot of apple sauce left from last year, but are out of dried apples.

The same goes for the peach. It’s a multi fruit tree, so the fruit will ripen in batches. We have been eating fresh white peaches for the last month, and today I picked a load of yellow peaches, for jam and fruit butter.

The elderberries are gorgeous right now, with large heads of white flowers. Hopefully we have enough pollinators, that I will get enough berries, so I won’t have to buy them this year.

We are also getting small portions of raspberries and blackberries, which is great for a first year, and I am starting to see a difference between the plants. I planted 2 different varieties to determine which one will do the best here. It’s very obvious and one of them are struggling with the heat.

My tree collards and sweet potatoes are lowing life. We grow a lot more than we can eat, so most goes to the animals, that loves them. The chickens go crazy when they can see I am bring them collard greens.

Our of 2000 poppy seeds, I got one plant LOL. Hopefully some of the seeds will survive the winter, and sprout next spring.  The borage are blooming and spreading out, and the comfrey coming along nicely. Plus it looks like we will get plums this year. All in all I am happy with how things are looking. Then temperatures has been in the high 80’s, so it’s getting hot outside.

I have added hummingbird houses to the trees as an experiment to see if it will attract more of them. They are great pollinators in our area, and lovely to watch.

I am getting to the large steps in creating our forest garden. All of the trees are in, most of the shrubs and a lot of the vegetables too. I still need to plant some more berry bushes, herbs, vegetables and wild flowers. In order to finish the last stages I have ordered an organic Agra mix, which is a mix of mulch and compost. I am spreading a 6 inch layer over the whole area as prep for the seeds and bulbs.
My order arrives today, on top of ordering 30 cubic yards of the agg mix I also ordered 25 cubic yards of organic compost, so I can fill the last of my raised beds, and top up the old ones. I am adding 3 to my raised bed garden, and decided to add one round bed for strawberries and 2 8x4 beds for onions and garlic, to the edges of the forest garden. As to why I made that decision, it was two fold. We have a lot of rabbits in the forest garden, so I wanted to be able to protect the strawberries until they have established themselves. The two other beds, has been placed, where my husband had made a habit of putting garden trash. I hated having trash in that area, and now there are no room for that LOL.
Once we have spread out the mix and filled the beds, it will be time to do some seeding. Some will go in now, and others will have to wait until spring. I have plans on making a sunflower hedge along the edges of the forest garden towards the driveway. I want a lot of them, since it’s my plan to start pressing my own cooking oils. This is yet another step towards food self sufficiency.
In the area where I am putting in the strawberry bed, I am also planting 2 black currant bushes, and adding wild onions, wild garlic, and walking onions.
I have 4 places between trees and bushes, where I will establish different insect habitats. There will be two or three for predators insects and one or two for butterflies.
Underneath all of my trees I am seeding herbs of different kinds. Comfrey, Borrage and mountain mint. In all of the larger areas, I am spreading a low growing wild flower mix, plus dandelions and purple dead nettles.
After that I will be done, and it will be time to see things hopefully grow and merge into something beautiful and practical. Once the trees are large enough, I want a bench or two, so I can sit and watch the wild life, while smelling the flowers and listening to the birds. I have already added a bird bath, so the birds can drink water, instead of eating my elderberries. It’s a win win. I love watching them drink and they do leave my berries alone.
I just hope that enough of the greens will grow, that the wild rabbits, and gophers don’t destroy everything.
As it is, I am already starting to see more predator insects, snakes and a coyote or two. Last week we heard an owl, and again this week, so we are putting up owl boxes, in the hope they stay.
I want this forest to be not just for us humans, but for the wild life as well. I want to create a balance for us, if possible. I tell people, that my garden is my church. It’s where I feel close to Giah, close to god, and where I watch miracles happen. It’s where I learn to be a better person and aim to find balance not just with and in the earth, but also in myself physically and mentally.
Anyway, this is where I am right now. Time will tell how things develop. There will probably be things I will have to change or adjust but we will have to wait and see.

My lemon tree are finally giving us a great harvest. After surviving 6 years with no less than 3 cut backs by gophers. I have never been so proud of a tree before, as I am of this one. The resilience of this tree has been no less than amazing.

Thank you for sharing your process and your progress with us all, so interesting and you're doing an amazing job, both for your own household and for the wild creatures around you!  Its a lovely oasis that will get even better.  And thank you also for talking about prickly pears so we who don't live in the desert know more about the best ways to eat them.  I watch Naked and Afraid a lot and, unless the fruits are out, the people on there when it happens in the desert eat the pads and don't like them but make do with them.

Riona Abhainn wrote:Thank you for sharing your process and your progress with us all, so interesting and you're doing an amazing job, both for your own household and for the wild creatures around you!  It’s a lovely oasis that will get even better.  And thank you also for talking about prickly pears so we who don't live in the desert know more about the best ways to eat them.  I watch Naked and Afraid a lot and, unless the fruits are out, the people on there when it happens in the desert eat the pads and don't like them but make do with them.

I just saw what you said about the prickly pears. On that note, as far as I know all cactus fruits are edible, most just don’t taste very good, or like the prickly pear, they have lots of thorns. In a pinch though, eating and drinking from cactuses can keep you alive.

We are now in February 2024. I/we are behind with a lot of things. I had a mini stroke Christmas Day, plus a medical port had caused a blood infection. Even though I was only hospitalized for a week, it has still taken me until now to feel well enough to do any gardening and food preservation.
Instead my family has taken care of the most urgent chores and the rest was left until I am feeling better. While I was recovering in bed, they finished the last three beds, for our raised bed garden. They each have an arbor between them, something I have wanted for a long time. I am looking forward to peas, melons and other vines there.
The rainy season finally hit us, with storm/flood warnings, so soon it will be time to spread flower seeds in the front yard forest orchard. It also meant that we had to harvest all ripe citrus, to prevent the fruits from splitting in the trees. We have 2 orange trees, one are ripe now and one isn’t. The first one, that we think are Cara Cara oranges were ripe, so we harvested that tree and got 100 pounds of sweet fruits.
Next we harvested my Meyer Lemons, and we got 71 pounds of those. So far we are almost done processing the oranges. We made 9 half pints of orange marmalade, the rest of them were juiced and frozen so we can get them freeze dried. We still have 45 pounds of lemons left to process into lemon curd, candied lemon slices and what nots, but we have vacuum packed and frozen 20 whole lemons, 1 gallon of slices and 1 gallon of quartered lemons. We have also made 2 gallons of fermented lemons and 13 pints of strawberry lemonade concentrate.
I still have lots of pumpkins and winter squash to process into flesh and seeds for oil, and lots of garlic to peel as well.
So what are we harvesting right now:
Lettuce, for us lettuce is a cold season food. It’s really hard to grow during the summer heat
Cherry/grape tomatoes I just harvested the very last I found on the plants. Give them to the chickens though, since they didn’t look very nice.
Spinach we have two perennial types. Both produce year round.
cutting celery I have two that survived bolting and frost, plus I planted an additional 12 plants
spring onions, I always plant onions too close, and then harvest som as green/spring onions.
Collard greens All of our collards are loving the weather and are producing nice sweet leaves
Oranges and lemons as you already know
Tangerines are starting to ripening
Passion fruits are also ripening slowly
Rapid and early cauliflower and broccoli are also giving us our first harvests
Kohlrabi purple kind are ready
I only got about a pound out of my cassava plants, but I am not giving up. I think I know where I went wrong.
In the food forest, some of my micro climates changed, because my neighbors cut down a lot of trees, we will have to wait and see what a difference it will make. Once the last of the compost has been spread, I am planting hibiscus and tree collards along the fence to our neighbors. I already spread out plants, cuttings and seeds for wild garlic, wild leeks and wild plus walking onions. In about 2 weeks, all of the berry bushes I ordered will start to arrive.
Until then, it’s all about spreading compost and remove the weeds I don’t like.
Last note for February, today we also welcomed the second gopher snake to the forest orchard/garden. It had found a home by my passion fruit, which isn’t the best place, so I relocated it to the prickly pear where the other snake I have seen lives.  My husband gave me a metal garden bench for Christmas and I love it. I installed a bird bath, since I find that if the birds has access to water, they leave my berries alone. I have some art and two fountains on my wishlist for my birthday in April.
This isn’t going to be the traditional food forest garden, and that’s okay because this is my project, and I want art and flowers there too. I want these 3300 square feet area to be a magic place where you can find food, herbs, art, wonder and peace. Where I can worship and meditate. Right now most of the trees are small, so as they grow things will change, and there will be things we have room for now, that won’t fit later. That’s okay too, this place will grow and spread out, and competition will show which plants ends up staying and thriving and which ones won’t.
I have added some photos of the garden, plants and out food preservation efforts. Hope you enjoy.

First off wish you well on the health issues. Everything you are doing is looking really great! I can’t wait till my berries start producing well. Finally get fruit trees this year. It’s encouraging to see such good yields in an extreme hot area. I had poor luck due to extreme heat last year and started saving seed from what did decent.

Is that a picture of hummingbird house? I tried some made from wicker but had no takers. I had actually never seen any and just ordered them. Have you had any move into the houses? If so do you remember where they came from. I love watching the hummingbirds and lots come to feeders I would love to help them nest.

Joe Hallmark wrote:First off wish you well on the health issues. Everything you are doing is looking really great! I can’t wait till my berries start producing well. Finally get fruit trees this year. It’s encouraging to see such good yields in an extreme hot area. I had poor luck due to extreme heat last year and started saving seed from what did decent.

Is that a picture of hummingbird house? I tried some made from wicker but had no takers. I had actually never seen any and just ordered them. Have you had any move into the houses? If so do you remember where they came from. I love watching the hummingbirds and lots come to feeders I would love to help them nest.

Thank you. This was the first year we got a big harvest of lemons. Last year we got 10 in total. It’s a 7 year old tree, but gophers cut it down twice, before we learned how to make cages well enough that they can’t cut the trees down. So many peaches too this year, and it looks like at least 1 bucket full of passion fruits are in our future.
I think that the key to growing in extreme heat, is to use lots and lots of mulch and compost. The mulch and compost will help suck up water during the monsoon rains, a little like in hugelkulture. We also use drip irrigation, which has been layed about an inch under the mulch and or compost.
I have also picked the trees with several things in mind. First goal was to have access to fresh fruit all year round, second goal was to follow the tree guild model and get trees and shrubs of different height. We are lucky that our neighbors has large pecan tree, which helps give shade to blackberries and strawberries. It will also provide shade for the currants I have ordered. On the other side of the yard, we have a large palm tree, and some old flowering bushes, that gives shade to my raspberries.
Now that most of the trees are 5+ year old, they are starting to be able to provide shade for herbs and things like alpine strawberries (which I planted under one of the plum trees.
The last steps for me, is to add wild herbs, perennial vegetables (other than sweet potatoes and collards) and lots of wild flowers growing in different Hights. I bought some from American meadows. Their lawn exchange mix only needs continuous water the first 2 years. Once it’s established it doesn’t need watering except for during the hot season, if we have had a long drought. I am going to the extremes with Hellens no bare soil principle. Bare soil equals water loss.
As for the hummingbirds and birds in general, I see them everywhere both in the forest garden and in the raised bed garden. I am planting hibiscus along the fence to our neighbors, and they are going to love that. I never put feeders out for them, since I want them to pollinate instead. There are plenty of food and water in the forest garden to satisfy them year round.
As for the houses, I bought them on Amazon. They were cheap and badly made, but we fixed things with super glue. I have 4 houses in the trees, and 2 have nests in them. Let me see if I can find a picture of one. It’s also very early in the season for nesting, so hopefully they will all be full once spring arrives.

We are now in March and the plants I pre ordered are slowly arriving. I ordered another 6 blackberry plants, 6 regular raspberries and 2 carpet raspberries, 8 different currant plants, plus more wild strawberry plants.
We also removed our banana trees. We have tried unsuccessfully to grow them for 5 years, so it was time. I also found out that the cold hardy banana tree I planted is an ornamental, who will never give fruit. I have 1 Nain left that I am giving a change. The cold hardy are going to our neighbors and instead I am planting blueberries in that area. We are also moving my lemon grass from the raised beds to the forest garden, since they have outgrown their growing space. Lastly I am moving mint in from the back yard, and moving plants around in the back yard raised bed garden to make room for the 25 purple asparagus plants, I forgot I pre-ordered a year ago.
One thing that has surprised me the most, in the forest garden, is how well tree collards are growing. I rarely have instagram worthy plants, but these are very beautiful. I propagated 6 cuttings and those are now growing by the fence towards our neighbors. I hope they make it. We use a lot of tree collards as animal food, and we also love eating them. Especially in the winter they get sort of sweet.
Here is what we are fresh eating and harvesting during the month of March.
Tree collards, spinach, lettuce, radishes, daikon radishes, turnips, beets, rutabaga, kohlrabi, passion fruit, tangerines, rapini broccoli and early sprouting cauliflower, celery, mint, green onions, lemon balm, rosemary, thyme and carrots. We also still have onions, sweet potatoes and winter squash fresh in storage plus 1 small pumpkin. I have also been able to dehydrate 1 gallon of pumpkin/squash seeds I am going to try and press for oil.
I did find one thing I am very excited about in the forest garden today. All of the sweet potato vines I planted last year, are coming back up. I did not expect then to survive the winter.
We have also decided to plant hibiscus along our fence to give our rabbits some shade. Our new neighbors cut down some large trees that was providing shade for our rabbits, so we thought we would give hibiscus a chance. I planted a culinary variety where both leaves and flowers are edible. I use hibiscus in one of my signature tea blends, so I am excited about starting to grow them myself.

Beautiful!

I am sorry to hear about your health issues.  I hope you are recovering nicely.

Your gardens are looking great.

Best wishes.

Anne Miller wrote:I am sorry to hear about your health issues.  I hope you are recovering nicely.

Your gardens are looking great.

Best wishes.

Thank you. I am slowly getting better. I am finally completely free of infections, so I start iron infusions on Monday for the anemia. Anemia is one of the side effects you can get from the treatments I get. I have a condition called autonomic inflammatory poly neuropathy. Because of it my body produce antibodies which causes damage to my body. Mondays I go to a clinic where they exchange 3 liters of my bad plasma and clean my blood. Since this also removes immunoglobulin I get some of that Tuesday morning. I am also still on blood thinners for the clotting issues, and it’s going well.
After my Tuesday treatment, I usually feel great for the next 5 days, able to work in my gardens and kitchen. Anyway, with treatments and iron I should be back to normal on Wednesday, and until then my family are doing my chores.
My chronic illness are part of why we are building the forest garden and planting lots of perennials in both. Once established, it’s a lot less work than only growing annuals.

Wow! What a transformation! from bare lawn to food forest in 6 years. You should be very proud of your achievement there.
I will be interested to see how your watering requirements evolve. Hopefully the plants will be able to send their roots deeper as they grow. Were you able to design in much in the way of soil water retention features? Being from a damp climate, I'm in awe of anyone that can garden when it doesn't rain fairly often!
Although you ended up with an ornamental banana, I believe the leaves can still be used as food wraps, on some varieties the stems are edible too (but do your research there as I may be misremembering!) Also as fibre - I remember a thread about banana weaving.....this thread gives some alternative uses of Musa basjoo.
Thank you so much for sharing your beautiful garden.

Nancy Reading wrote:Wow! What a transformation! from bare lawn to food forest in 6 years. You should be very proud of your achievement there.
I will be interested to see how your watering requirements evolve. Hopefully the plants will be able to send their roots deeper as they grow. Were you able to design in much in the way of soil water retention features? Being from a damp climate, I'm in awe of anyone that can garden when it doesn't rain fairly often!
Although you ended up with an ornamental banana, I believe the leaves can still be used as food wraps, on some varieties the stems are edible too (but do your research there as I may be misremembering!) Also as fibre - I remember a thread about banana weaving.....this thread gives some alternative uses of Musa basjoo.
Thank you so much for sharing your beautiful garden.

Thank you. I have been thinking about water from the beginning and it’s in the design too. The wild flowers I bought from American meadows are all local drought resistant plants. After the first 2 years, I should be able to stop watering them and only water the trees.
I also plant herbs and strawberries underneath the trees, so they can share water. I also use a lot of compost and mulch in the forest garden, since that sucks up water and then slowly releases it over time. Right now we spend 300$ a month just on irrigation for the back and front yard. It’s a lot, but I easily save more than that with what the garden produce. I saved over 4000$ last year on produce, add to that eggs and meat that we also produce. We only spend 30-40$ a month of animal feeds, since I grow a lot of the food they eat. Last year was the first year we produced more eggs than we could eat. It’s time to water glass eggs, while I still have 90 left from last year. My freeze dryer broke down, but once it’s fixed, I am freeze drying them and adding them to my long term pantry.
The design has evolved a lot since I started it and it still does. It’s only 2 days ago someone here commented that gophers don’t eat asparagus roots. I had planned on planting more asparagus in the bed where I already grow some but also have perpetual spinach and rhubarb, but now I am considering planting them in the forest garden instead. I also had to add plants along the fence line to our neighbors, since they removed the trees and shrubs that grew there. It was annoying at first, but I now see it as a blessing. It meant that I could plant hibiscus by the rabbit cages, and more tree collards, which is what we feed the chickens (and us). Growing hibiscus has been a wish for a long time, since I use it in my tea blends, kombucha and for medicine making.
A lot of what grows in the forest garden, started their life in the raised bed garden we have in the back yard. That’s also where we have our chickens and ducks. Once the plants outgrow the raised bed, I move them into the forest garden. By then they have huge root systems, so the gophers leave them be. As for the banana trees. We also have 3 Nain banana trees, so I will get plenty of banana leaves from them.
We eat a lot of berries in our household, so blueberries will save us a lot of money in the long run.
Thank you for the comments, please feel free to ask questions. I will post an update soon. My plan is to post an update monthly.

April 2024
The warm season has finally arrived with lots of warm days. The weather is still a little unstable, so we still have rainy days and sometimes night temperatures are in the 40’s. This is why time of year, it’s important to remember not to go crazy with planting.
I also don’t have room to plant outside again, since I have to process our cold weather crops first. I am very behind, partly because I am still healing and partly because our freeze dryer broke down. It’s finally fixed now, so I am happy.
We baked the last of our pumpkins, freeze dried them and made them into powder.
Next up are 4 trays of nasturtiums that made it through the winter and now are growing big. I don’t tolerate pepper very well, and nasturtium powder works really well as an alternative.
Celery is also something I am freeze drying a lot of. 3 of my celery plants from last year came back and are the largest celery plants I have ever seen. I cut two to harvest some, and that will also be freeze dried, since we have a lot outside for fresh eating and a lot more to harvest.
We also picked lots of radish pods, which are being blanched and frozen for later use. I am leaving some pods, since I am going to start saving my own seeds this year.
I am going to harvest all of my kohlrabi, rutabaga and turnips today as well, so I can start prepping the beds for the tomato plants I have started inside.
In the forest garden, we are seeing 3 types of flowers on our multi species peach tree. It’s the first time that has happened. There are also a lot of flowers on the avocado, my currants have started flowering as well and I saw the first flowers on the elderberry trees. The mulberry are also full of flowers, and it looks like we will get a second harvest of lemons in fall.
Soon it will be time to start moving more of the perennials to the front yard, and to sow sunflowers. In the middle of that bed, my rock roses are flowering, the rose hip bushes too and the Natal plum has set fruit.
This is what we are eating fresh right now:
Oranges, tangerines, spring onions, mint, lemon balm, radishes, collard greens, broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, turnips, rutabaga, parsnips, carrots, mustard, celery, nasturtiums, lavender, bok choy, Chinese cabbages, daikon and beets.
We are also using a lot of the greens, especially collard greens and mint to feed our chickens. Herbs are good for chickens, as they help keep them healthy and prevent pest like mites if you add it to the nesting boxes.
Our chickens, ducks and rabbits are the main reason we are growing so many tree collards. You plant them once, they grow quickly and the chickens treat it like it was candy. They just love them, and we save on the feed. We actually grow a lot of what we feed out animals, not only to save money but also to keep them healthy.  We are truly blessed. We have lots of eggs coming in, and I still have 90 water glasses eggs left from last year. Those are going to be whisked and freeze dried, and added to our long term food stash.
We are going to get more ducks this year, since a Coyote killed five out of the 7 we had. We are all devastated, since we thought we had the pen secured. It turns out that rain had washed away enough soil for it to dig and squeeze in. It’s fixed now. We are going to get some both for meat and eggs, plus chicks for meat and maybe a couple of turkeys, for thanksgiving and Christmas.
Raising our own meat, means that we know that the animals have been treated with the respect they deserve and are fed a healthy variated diet.

May on the homestead
We are now in may 2024, and very busy. My hospital stay and the after effects from that has put me way behind with everything. It’s why I have been quiet for a while. We also kept getting hacked (my husband and I), so I wanted to change to using security keys (a physical key) for login, so I won’t be hacked again.
Enough about that though, here is what’s going on, here on our homestead.
Spring is when our harvest and planting season starts. While we do harvest during the winter, April and May are when we really get busy. Today I made apple cranberry sauce out of our last storage apples and my canned cranberries. It’s really yummy. I use it to make rice porridge in my instapot. Here is the recipe

Rice porridge with raising and apple sauce (4 people)
2 cups of short grain rice
2 cups of water
1 cup of apple sauce (any kind you like)
1/2 cup of raisins or other dried fruits.
A pinch of salt

Instructions:
Add everything to the instapot, in the order of the recipe. Select the rice button on you instapot (10 minute setting) add the lid and close the vent. Before serving sprinkle with 1 tablespoon of Mable syrup or brown sugar.

Right now, we have cauliflower and broccoli coming in, and are enjoying it fresh.
My white cabbages are ready, so we need to make sour kraut. Andreas made kimchi after we harvested the ingredients. I have harvested all of my rutabagas, turnips and radishes. We have also started bringing in beets, and harvested 7 pounds scallions and spring onions. We harvested some leeks, and are slowly starting to harvest onions. My largest harvest so far has been celery. I have harvested twice now with a total of 24 pounds. My carrots are growing slowly, but we are also eating those right now.
I have started planting too. Sweet potatoes that grew indoors for over a month, has been transplanted either to pots, or into a raised bed.
In the front yard forest garden, we have planted the last shrubs. Last year I planted 2 blackberries and two raspberries to see if they would grow. Since they do I have added 2 boysenberries, 7 blueberries, 2 blackberries, 5 raspberries, 7 different types currants, 3 hibiscus plants, 10 musk strawberries (2 varieties) was planted under the trees together with mint. All of the herbs and wildflowers are coming up too, and I got started on the fountain and my yoga and meditation area. The perpetual spinach, sweet potatoes and lemon grass took the transplanting well and are growing so I am happy. Our mulberry tree is full of fruit, so we pick the black ripe ones every other day.
My family got me a solar light pole to place next to the bench I got for Christmas. I have started taking my morning coffee there. It’s so nice watching the birds, hearing them sing, and see rabbits coming out for a snack.
We have also taken in 11 ducklings for eggs and meat. The coyotes took 5 of them last winter. On June 15 we will be getting 24 chicks, both some egg layers to replenish our flock and some meat birds. I was finally able to find a house for the ducks, so they have more shelter during the rainy season.
I have been doing a lot of freeze drying too, especially things like celery. We have stock cooking on the stove right now, so I want to try and freeze dry some of it. I also freeze dried any water glassed eggs we had left from last year.
Today calls for canning more broth, covering the bare soil by the blueberries with lettuce seeds to prevent weeds, pruning the passion fruit and sowing lots and lots of sunflowers, so we will be able to make oil for the rest of the year. I am also starting to prep an area in the forest garden for amaranth and maybe flax. We will see, I haven’t made the decision yet.
Last I am trying to build a fountain. The base is a half barrel filled up 2/3 with rocks, the top will be bamboo and it will run on solar power.

Today I installed the bamboo fountain I had ordered online and it looks great. I also got more tiles, so the meditation area can get bigger. I made a short video to show case it, and so you can get a better view of the forest garden. This has always been planned as a space to feed both body and soul, humans and critters.
It’s a place where you can forage for herbs, find small sculptures in unexpected places, listen to water and bird songs, discover berries growing under trees and bushes and so much more.

https://youtu.be/WmM7zsgvXsc?si=1vEUzbzRpNo8BGa9

June
It’s a strange feeling to have finished a project I see as my legacy. To have made something that speaks to me at a level few people can understand. To go outside in the morning and be greeted by a riot of colors, bird song, wild rabbits and squirrels. Will it ever be completely done, of cause not, there are always things to do in a garden. There are always more plants to plant, flowers, herb and food to harvest, and new species of plants to test out. It’s done in the way that the vision that until now only have been on paper, now are right in front of me.
There are also always things to maintain or add. Like for example our passion fruit vines, that got too heavy for the trellis, so it collapsed. I still have not figured out how to get it onto another trellis, but we will figure it out, just like we have figured so many other things out.
All of my onions have been harvested and they look fantastic and they are hanging in the garage curing.  Our cabbages were made into kimchi, sour kraut and red cabbage&beet kraut.
I am worried about my garlic, which have lots of dead leaves, but no scape yet, and I know that at least half of what I planted are hard neck garlic. I also checked a few and they have only just now started to form a head. The only thing I can think of, is that they are getting too much water, so I asked my husband to water less.
Frantic birds, and squirrels are stealing my sunflower seeds, and rabbits eating the few sunflowers coming up. I am now trying bribery since covering the seeds didn’t work, and a trip around the neighborhood showed that they don’t really have another food source close by. So, I went on Etsy and bought a giant bird and critter feeder.  It’s up now, so we sowed sunflowers yet again, and are now hoping they will leave them alone. So far, it has given me even more birds, in my forest and I am not complaining. I didn’t just build/grow this for us, but for them as well. It’s my church, so why wouldn’t I feed all of gods creatures?
I also made some small changes to the fountain, since we got a lot of mosquito larva in it. I added mosquito fish, duckweed and lotus to it, and it works really well.
In the backyard raised bed garden we have finished transitioning from cold weather crops to warm and hot weather crops. I have planted tomatoes, peppers, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins, winter and summer squash, and cassava. After that I still had room, so we decided to try out growing some gluten free grains.  My 3 kinds and I have to be on a gluten free diet due to celiac disease. I had 2 places in the FFG and 2 in the raised bed garden I could use.
I ended up sowing and planting 3 kinds of Amaranth, 2 types of Sorghum, Jop’s tears, and flax.
I hope it works out, since it’s hard for me to grow enough cassava to satisfy our need for flour. Plus with the exception of honey, I don’t have a source of sugar.
For oil I am mainly counting on the sunflower seeds, and pumpkin seeds, but it would be nice if I could get some flax oil too.
My mullein has finally set flowers, and there are so many of them. I thought that only 1 flower stem would grow, but I have many growing on my two plants. They have now passed 6’ in height. I was sure that the comfrey that was planted with them, would be strangled, but no, it’s just fine and are flowering too.
As for what we are eating: carrots, turnips, rutabaga, collard greens, mulberries, oranges, lettuce and herbs plus what we have preserved. We just finished processing 56 pounds of leeks, and over a pint of coriander seeds, next up is rhubarb.
I am keeping track of what we harvest and putting it into an excel sheet, so that I can show you what we have produced in a year, once new years arrives.
I hope everyone are enjoying their summer.

The food forest garden are now as done as a garden can be. Because of this I have made a new thread where I share stories from our Southern California Homestead. That’s where the story will continue. Here is the link webpage
Hope to see you there.

September 2024
With September, fall has arrived here on the homestead. Where most homesteaders can start to see an end on food preservation and gardening, for us it signals the start of our cold weather growing season.
We still have more pumpkins and butternut squash to harvest, and maybe a few more melons, unless one of the critters takes them. We have harvested the grains we seeded in June. I got a total of 20 pounds of sorghum out of this little experiment. As for Amaranth, they are going to be critters feed. It’s too little a yield compared to the space used. In spring I am going to try millet again, it didn’t germinate at all, during the hot season.
The sorghum are in the freezer waiting for the freeze dryer to finish what’s in it.
My tomatoes are almost done, at least the determinate ones in the back yard beds. The wild ones in the forest garden, have just started to go red.
I am very pleased with how the strawberries have spread out, and my asparagus will give us plenty next year. We are leaving them all, to get stronger plants.
Otherwise, my cucumbers are done for the year, I need to harvest parsley, nasturtiums, carrots, celery, sweet potatoes and cassava, but are leaving the last to until just before we get frost.
As for food preservation, the freeze dryer is running constantly, I bought a dicing machine since my sons and my hands hurt. It broke down on day two sigh, so back it goes to Amazon. I messed up my water glasses eggs, but it just goes to show, that I shouldn’t do it, when I am tired. I am glad I freeze dried some from last year, since ours are molding right now. I have canned and dehydrated/freeze dried around 60 pounds of peaches this year. We are at 140 pounds of pumpkins so far, with a few more coming. I have at least 12 butternut squash left, each around 15 pounds. I won’t have to grow it next year. I think I grew enough for the whole street. Summer squash and zucchini also gave us a lot, and are still giving. We have canned, pickled, frozen and freeze dried so much, that the rest of the pumpkins will be made into powder.
Along side the food projects, I have started on our cold season crops. I am attaching a photo of my white board. I use my computer for most garden planning, but since I do crop rotations every year, it usually takes some fiddling to figure out where to plant my annuals. I have to take harvesting into consideration, since cold weather crops will start to be transplanted before the last crops have been harvested. I am glad I have the flexibility of an indoor nursery.
Cassava is one of my main flour crops, and it takes a full year from planting to harvest. To do that you pull the plant, and cut off the roots, which is the edible part of the plant. The rest have the leaves cut off and the stem divided into 12” sticks. Those sticks are then planted right away in pots or in the ground. We have to use pots, since my test crops couldn’t handle even the small to almost nothing frost we get here. This means that they spend their first 4 months in the indoor nursery. Then they are transplanted into one of the deeper beds together with turmeric and ginger. As for sweet potatoes, they stay fresh longer (in our 10b grow zone), and often also grow larger if we leave them and only harvest about 20 pounds at a time. Because of this we also don’t start cutting the vines until they start to go brown. At that point they go to the chickens.
There are also a few things we grow all year rounds as perennials, so those are only harvested as needed. Spinach is one of them, spring onions, collards, peppers and kale are others plus of course some of our herbs.
At new years, I will post a copy of my excel sheet so you can see how much food we have produced in 2024. So far we are at 1299 pounds of produce. About 500 pounds of that is pumpkins and squash.
As things go we have also had our disasters. The arbor collapsed under our passion fruit vines, it then got tired of waiting for a new one are now using my prickly pear. We lost one of our orange trees, and I have some dead parts in our elderberry patch, and one of my avocados are looking unhappy and dropping leaves. As a gardener you have to take the bad with the good. Just like you do in life. All in all we have already passed last years numbers, in all things except for eggs. We lost too many this winter and I lost 60 eggs from water glassing. We have 8 new laying hens but they are only 3 months old, so it will be a while still before they start laying. At least I still have freeze dried eggs, from last fall.

Things are going well in the forest garden, and the raised bed garden. Despite not getting any avocados, plums, apples, passion fruit or guava, we still ended up growing and harvesting 2206 (1 metric ton) of produce, seeds and grains. We have a lot of avocados on the trees though, that will be ready to harvest in spring. We are also looking at a big harvest of lemons and tangerines. One of our two orange trees died on us, so we will have to plant another. We also still haven’t gotten around to building a new trellis for the passion fruit vines, but hopefully we will get it done during the holiday break. It was supposed to be built during thanksgiving, but our chicken cook broke down, so we prioritized building a new one.
The weather has been warmer than it usually is this time of year, so we are still getting strawberries, raspberries and tomatoes, which are great but feels surreal. I have spread out green manure and mulch, so all I have left right now, are pruning the trees, blackberries and raspberries.

Thank you for sharing your year Ulla! It is lovely and strange for me to see how lush it all looks there still :) I remember that Patrick Whitefield reckoned that nasturtiums were a good plant to find frost pockets in your garden, since they die back at the first sign of the cold.

Nancy Reading wrote:Thank you for sharing your year Ulla! It is lovely and strange for me to see how lush it all looks there still :) I remember that Patrick Whitefield reckoned that nasturtiums were a good plant to find frost pockets in your garden, since they die back at the first sign of the cold.

Thank you. We don’t get any hard frost, so that’s probably why it thrives during the cold season. It never likes it when it gets above 100F, but once established it’s easy to grow. You can see it growing wild in many places, like along the highways Or retaining walls. This one was planted 3 years ago. Every year I cut a lot to use as a spice, but it still comes back larger than before.
I really love this season. It’s nice and cool at night when we sleep and the days are in the 70’s most days. It’s also nice to get lettuce to eat. I always miss lettuce during the hot season.

A while ago, I wrote in this blog, that I probably wouldn’t have much more to write, since I had finished it. Well, I was wrong. Looking back, I don’t know why I thought I was done. I don’t think any garden ever really gets completely finished and stay that way. Things always happens, and I am always finding new ways to add more plants, and change things around. Here is a few examples:

Our passion fruit trellis broke in a storm, almost a year ago, and while we are working on building a new one, it’s slow going.
One of my avocado trees and one of my orange trees died this year, so we are planning the work of removing them and planting something else instead. After long discussions, we settled on exchanging the avocado for a cashew tree Cashew, Red (Anacardium occidentale) and the orange tree for an exotic cherry tree Surinam Cherry (Eugenia uniflora). We have a second orange tree, which gives us about 100 pounds a year, which is enough for our needs.
We also got new neighbors and they removed all of the plants next to the fence on their side. We have decided to use the fence to grow pepper vines Black Pepper Vine (Piper nigrum). Then I also added 3 types of pineapple plants, so we can see which one grows the best here, and they will grow nicely with the artichokes I have growing in the indoor grow room. Last I found a cardamom shrub I loved to that went into my shopping cart as well. Since the nursery agreed to hold my order until April, we have plenty of time before we need to start digging, and remove the old trees. I also must admit to buying 2 coffee trees at the Black Friday sale, and more currants, because you just can’t have too many .
My point is that it will keep evolving. My hope is that once the trees are more mature, the canopy will stabilize the temperature and humidity. Which hopefully will enable us to grow even more food, and maybe add some mushrooms into the mix.
Right now I am waiting for the Santa Anna winds to settle, so we can get lower temperatures and higher humidity. Then, after moving dead leaves to the side, I am going to spread out a wide mix of culinary and medicinal herbs to grow with the wildflowers we grow there. Once those are spread out, the leaves go back, so the seeds don’t dry out, and it’s harder for the birds to find them.
Yes, I hide seeds from the birds 🐦. Our song birds has figured out that I often spread seeds out, when I am in the front yard, so if I don’t hide them, they will eat some, and then “help” me by moving the seeds to a different location. This despite having a perfectly fine bribe station available at all times. It just means I have to outsmart them. Even though I kind of don’t mind finding corn and sunflowers growing in my raised beds, along with sorghum, asparagus and everything else, I still want to be in charge of my “workers”.
Other things has also happened. The fountain didn’t last. The bamboo broke during the hot season, so I have to figure out a different solution. What I really want is a tall fountain of rocks with water running in and out of ceramics flower pots, and succulents decorating it. I am currently researching if it will be possible for me to build one myself. They cost over 1000 dollars to buy, which is out of my budget. I also still need to finish the meditation/yoga deck, and pruning the trees and shrubs.
I think that my mistake was thinking of it as a stationary thing, instead of the evolving ecosystem I am working with. It’s as I always say, a garden are never done, but it supports our goal of living and loving life with a holistic approach.
Then I got a wishing well planter for Christmas, so that has to be installed, after getting a layer of wood protections.

We finally got rain. We have prayed for rain this last months. We are in Southern California southeast of San Diego. These last weeks has been hard. We were constantly on fire watch, and the air quality has been very bad. Today we finally got rain, and we should get more over the next 2-3 days.
Rain for me also means, that it’s time to direct seed annual herbs, vegetables and flowers in the forest garden. Eventually I won’t have to do this, but the forest garden isn’t mature enough to self seed all of it, plus I had some flowers from last year, I didn’t like.
I planted nasturtium on the small hill, where we also grow roses, sunflowers, bulb flowers and annual vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower. It’s still too early to seed my sunflowers, but the rest went in. I like being able to forage in the forest garden, so I mix up a lot of seeds to spread out. To name a few, that I planted, there are calendula, 4 types of mint including mountain mint and wild mint, the veggie mix is a mix of rutabaga, radishes, early broccoli and turnips. Plus I spread out a lot of amaranth seeds, because they are pretty and the birds love them.
I also planted and/or seeded rams aka wild leeks/onions, regular onions, welsh onions, cherry & small grape tomatoes and skirrets, which is a type of carrot. This garden also gifted me with 3 strawberries and 4 raspberries.
If the raised bed garden, we are drowning in collards and other greens, so this week I am going to juice a lot of them, together with turmeric and ginger. This will then be the base of my daily vitamin drink. Our Chinese cabbages are ready for harvest, and our peppers are still producing, so it’s the perfect time to make kimchi, except the diacon still isn’t large enough to harvest. Our lettuce, kale, green and red cabbages are doing great too. My root vegetables are coming along nicely, and it’s time to thin out my diacon radishes, and my regular radishes.
My yoga and meditation deck are finally done, but I will have to wait until the rain lets up, before I can start using it again. Indoors, the basil are taking over so we are going to make a mega batch of pesto, to clear up more room. I need the space, so I can start our warm season (April to June). If I start them too late, my plants will have trouble as the hot season (July to October).
Lots of new things are happening. We have an arborist coming in March to remove the trees we lost this year, plus two that’s just not working out. New additions are artichokes, pineapple, cashew, exotic cherry, coffee, peppercorns, cardamom, and a few other things. I am still considering tea plants, so we will see how things goes.
I am building 2 tipis, to act as frost protection during the cold season, and hot dry weather protection during the hot season. I am using adjustable tent poles, and will then use black landscape fabric for frost protection and shade cloths for that.
I hope it works, since I am very frustrated about not getting any bananas, because the flower is sensitive to even light frost. It should also help my coffee trees, since they like a higher humidity than we have right now. If it works for the coffee, I am going to try planting tea again.
Unfortunately we also lost our two passion fruits, so once we have a trellis up, I am getting new ones. I also want a coconut tree, but my husband has vetoed it, and he is right that we probably don’t have the room. Last thing, is that I got a wishing well for Christmas. I am looking forward to planting alpine strawberries in the large part and succulents in the bucket.