Hello all, I’m in the eeearly stages of designing a forest garden on my one
acre property, I live in very South Georgia about 30 minutes outside of Valdosta in zone 8b, and my main major concern is the winters where I live. It certainly gets cold, and I allegedly get
enough chill hours here to grow a lot of fruits that need it, but it doesn’t ‘stay’ cold consistently. It tends to go a week where the temperature doesn’t get any warmer than 60, followed by a day -or even a week sometimes- of temperatures in the mid 70s. I have heard that
people struggle to grow
fruit trees in this type of situation due to the brief warm spell bringing the plant out of dormancy where it then begins to bud, just to have it killed back by the frost the next day.
So really my question is, are there any ways I can work around this? I figured it’d be a no-brainer as a first step to source plants locally that are acclimated to this area, but I am also worried this will severely limit the variety of trees I can grow, as I am already having a hard time locating
nurseries nearby that carry any real variety, or at the very least that carry some of the more “uncommon” trees i would like to plant. So I feel as if my main option for the time being is ordering bare-root trees
online, but I have no idea what trees or varieties I
should look into. Does anybody here know what trees might be more tolerant of this situation in the first place, or maybe how I might go about just keeping the trees alive until they can acclimate themselves (assuming they can)?