willow ditch san fernando valley

if i ever visit southern florida, the 1st place i'd want to go is the fruit and spice park.  naturally i wish that socal had the same kinda park.  voila!



yesterday the kid aka "pal" planted a 2' moringa at the base of a willow in an overgrown ditch that drains from the community where he and his mother, marilyn, live.  here they are on the other side...



it's the same small cluster of fan palms in both pics to give you a sense of scale.  i don't know who the land belongs to.  in theory it could be bulldozed at any time.  but in the meantime i figured we'd try diversifying the ditch.  

i'd like to open the ditch up a bit by clearing away fallen branches and so on.  the problem is, if i did this, then one second later there would be a swarm of buzzing motorbikes flying through the willows and the palms.  motorbikes are anathema to me.  i do recognize the ideal possibility of somehow converting motorbikers to permies.  in the meantime we will have to very awkwardly plant trees in the thicket.  

here's a list of trees we already have...

achacha (garcinia)
annona (montana, deliciosa, cherimola, atemoya)
avocado
black sapote (diospyros nigra)
canistel - (pouteria campechiana)
capulin cherry (prunus salicifolia)
catalina cherry (prunus ilicifolia)
ceylon gooseberry (dovyalis hebecarpa)
dragon fruit
fig
guava
inga
jabuticaba
jackfruit
kei apple (dovyalis caffra)
kwai muk
loquat
longan
lucuma (pouteria lucuma)
mango
monstera deliciosa
mulberry
nance (byrsonima crassifolia)
passionfruit (passiflora phoenicea 'ruby glow')
pineapple
pineapple guava
pomelo
rose apple (syzygium jambos)
royal poinciana (delonix regia)
silverberry (elaeagnus multiflora, pungens, latifolia)
starfruit
sugercane
surinam cherry (eugenia uniflora)
wax apple (syzygium samarangense)
white sapote (casimiroa edulis)

a few trees, such as the catalina cherry and capulin cherry, are in 15 gallon pots and have already fruited.  these will go in the thicket 1st, in order to free up space to put the 7 gallon trees into 15 gallon pots, and so on.  i'd like to keep the 2 cherries kinda close to each other in the ditch so that hopefully they will be cross-pollinated.  

not sure how many of which varieties of nitrogen fixers to plant in the ditch.  i'm also not sure how many trees can be supported by a slow trickle of water.  

any input and feedback would be appreciated.  if anyone happens to be in the area and is interested in participating, please pm me for the exact location.  of course you'd be more than welcome to contribute your plants, expertise and time.  if anyone outside the area wants to send specific plants, please pm me.  

in theory we could donate the listed trees to a local park, of which there are several, but i really hate red tape.  if it was easy to correct an organization direction, then new organizations would rarely be created.  kodak would have switched to digital, blockbuster would have switched to streaming, toyota would have switched to electric, and so on.  in reality, there's no need to try and predict or guess demand.  if people want to donate twice as many temperate fruits as tropical fruits to the willow ditch, then that's the demand.  that's the most beneficial direction.  if people then decide to donate 5 times as many native plants as foreign plants, then that's the demand.  that's the most beneficial direction.  no need for a committee to try and guess something that can be easily discerned.  

for a bit of background...

SoCal Public Park For Subtropical Fruits And Nuts?
list of fruit trees in los angeles parks

some updates.  first the bad, and ugly...



a couch that's been there a while.  



some recently discarded furniture and 3 old tires, among other trash.

now for the good.  



a mature capulin cherry i planted.  it's around 6' tall.



a mature catalina cherry that i planted around 20' up the hill from the capulin cherry.  hopefully when they bloom soon they will be cross-pollinated.  



the catalina cherry just before i put it on my shoulder and walked 10 minutes to the willow ditch.  



fruiting size guava, psidium longipetiolatum, that i planted around 15' down the hill from the capulin cherry.  



child labor is underrated.  pal digging the hole for the next guava while i sat on the wall.  he stopped digging a few times to show me an "artifact" (trash) that he unearthed.  i joked with him that if he dug long enough he would find a chinese girlfriend (reference to the music video for the song "say hello" by deep dish).  



psidium sp red that we planted 10' down the hill from the longipetiolatum.  

since it's been raining quite a bit here, all the ground is soaked, but not equally so.  up the hill was drier, down the hill, towards the ditch, was wetter.  digging down, the 1st couple feet was mostly sand, and after that it was mostly clay.  no idea if i planted the trees the optimal distance from the ditch.  

in the same hole of each tree i planted around 5 other plants from this list of support species...

cnidoscolus aconitifolius (chaya)
dragon fruit
elaeagnus multiflora
elaeagnus pungens
euphorbia lambii
ficus carica - fignomenal
moringa
sugarcane

it will be interesting to see where they survive on the moisture gradient (distance from ditch).  i need to add rotheca myricoides and manihot carthaginensis to the list of companion plants, since they are both good at storing water in their roots, which they will readily trade with their nearest neighbors for other resources.    i'm guessing that manihot esculenta can't be grown here?  i have some katuk cuttings that are starting to grow.  i'll add them to the list.  i'm on the lookout for toona sinensis.  

not sure if you can tell, but i tried to make the trees inconspicuous.  i recently watched a great video on youtube... Growing an Urban Food Forest in a Public Park to Feed the Community! – The City Food Commons.  the food forest was successful but one person in the community randomly chopped down some of the young fruit trees.  i'm hoping that the fruit trees that i planted will go unnoticed until they are too large to easily chop down.  eh, summer drought is most likely a bigger threat.  

planting the trees has freed up pots and space in the yard for other fruit trees, such as an ice cream bean tree (inga sp, nitrogen fixer) and a longan tree to be potted up in preparation for planting in the willow ditch food forest.  there are still a couple of trees in 15 gallon pots, such as a pakistan mulberry and a guava, that i'd like to plant.  my neighbor has a big overgrown fig tree that i plan to air-layer the big branches for the food forest.  i already air-layered big branches on his crazy lemon tree that i need to cut off and pot.  gonna try grafting pomelo scions onto them.  

my friend in the area, more or less, gave me a couple banana pups to plant in the food forest.  i potted them with other trees.  

it feels like i'm quickly running out of the optimal time in the year to plant in the food forest.  of course i'd love to have a productive and diverse food forest overnight.  but it's probably prudent to take it slow.  

from raindance seeds i just ordered the following seeds for the food forest...

diospyros californica (baja chocolate persimmon/sapote)

passiflora palmeri

passiflora pentaschista (desert passionfruit)

prosopis pubescens  (screwbean mesquite)

ziziphus parryi (desert jujube)

I like your guerilla gardening efforts! Make the world a better place even (and maybe especially) when it's against the rules.

Hi Carlos, Thanks for introducing me to the fruit and spice park, sounds like an awesome place to go! I hope you achieve abundance in your local ditch.
Joseph Lofthouse's family have successfully populated parts of their locale with a variety of food plants by seed sowing. There are pluses and minuses of both approaches (sowing from seed or planting larger plants). To my mind, the biggest pluses from sowing from seed are the ones that survive are the ones that like it there and are more likely to reproduce themselves so forming a new community. Since seed is cheaper (or free for local found fruit) you can put some in lots more places than you can trees and ones in more favoured locations will grow, the ones that dry out will die, but you have used less effort. It's truly amazing how fast five years go and you will soon have fruiting trees from those seeds.

Bouncing off of what Nancy has said, I personally really enjoy the efforts I put in making seed balls of various types of seeds and guerilla 'hucking' the orbs of plant potential into hard to reach places.

It all is a labor of love at the end of the day.