A few years ago I started experimenting with urban
permaculture. I posted one or two posts here regarding me starting.
https://permies.com/t/9571/permaculture/Permaculture-NW-Ontario
Now it is a full blown urban
permaculture garden. My seedling apricot is surviving ok. My seedling
apple and euro pear are doing amazing. Ive expanded the beds to about three times their size from 2011 and added around 100 species of plants.
A near full list of plants I have outside year round can be found here on my blog (which does need more attention I might add) but Ill mention some of the major ones.
http://canadianplant.wordpress.com/2014/02/20/complete-plant-list-2013/
On top of my seedlings and honeygold
apple, I now have a toka plum, two evans cherries, John pear, golden spice pear and a seedling plum which was from a small yellow green plum I think was a greengage. I removed the blackberries but now have Jostaberry (which is way hardier then I ever expected), pixwell gooseberry, 2 tundra 1 cinderella and 1 honeybee haskap, 7 kinds of grapes (beta, valiant, himrod, niagra, flame seedless, some seedling volunteers and a new suffolk), hardy kiwi (which havnt done too much. This is year three. Theyre alive but dont seem to do much) and tons of strawberries. Mixed in are some mints, chives, flowers and clovers.
This weekend I will be grafting Flemish beauty scions to all my pear
trees. Probably the best chance I have at growing European pears. There is apparently a hardy type that was apparently bred here called "Westfort" that I would love to get my hands on.
Everything is still young. Nothing has really produced too much. My John pear produced a few pears, but it is still young. My Honeygold produced two apples, but I am not sure if it is a maturity issue or pollination issue (I have no flowering apple trees in my
yard but there are quite a few crab apples and a few producing apples in the block). The toka needs a good pollinator but I am so far not having luck finding any Prunus nigra, which the University of Saskatchewan states is the best if not the only pollinator for the Jap x american plums.
Its interesting to learn what can grow up here. To my knowledge there arent many orchards here, or any real variety of fruit trees that people do grow. I was surprised that there were two pears found here that have been shared off and on (westfort and highway61). This year Ill be experimenting with Kentucky
coffee tree (which despite what some people say, it either does not fix nitrogen at all, or it does very slow), Shagbark hickory (carya ovata), Cornus mas and maybe something that catches my eyes in the garden centers.
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