May Lotito

Great list George! The leaves are also called cowboy's toilet paper.

Jay offered some very useful tips above that I followed and made several changes to my practices. Thanks Jay! So here comes the results two years later. My bamboo has reached 12 ft tall this year and I will have quite a few culms long enough for serious trellising eventually.

The most important thing she pointed out is that bamm being a heavy feeder. I used to think of bamboo growing wild everywhere since people are freaky out about it running out of control. Come to think of it, bamboo groves are found by river banks where soils are moist and fertile. So I did several things:
1. Add lime, wood ash/char/weed tea to increase fertility. Water in drought.
2.  Encourage chickens to shelter underneath with food and water.
3. Not pruning the winter killed culms, the canopy protects tender young shoots in spring. Let leaves decompose.

Last year the average height was 7-8 ft and the cold hardiness had improved as well. Many lower leaves stayed green when we hit -12F the past winter. This spring I have at least three times more shoots and the final height would be 10 to 12 feet. This variety is slender with a height to diameter ratio over 150, so the thickness only increases a bit to 1/2-3/4 inch. It branches out very low and for culms to be used as garden trellises, I need to rub off young shoots as soon as the sheaths fall off to get the lower portion smooth.

So far I am careful about creating a fertility island to keep it contained. Some runners did escape 10 ft away but they are easy to deal with.

I agree that variety matters, some are bred to be bigger and sweeter. But in my native acid soil with humid climate, soil conditions have a bigger impact on yield and quality. Here are some pictures to show the differences.

Goji berries are consumed dried, preferably sun dried, not fresh. The taste changes during drying. I heard people comparing it to cranberry, which is usually not eaten fresh either.

I used to dry and eat my home grown berries without a second thought, until in 2024, I had a bad crop. The berry bushes were sickly looking and attracting lots of stink bugs. The berries had black spots from bug feeding and wouldn't dry down properly. They basically rotted down under the sun: the surface turned sticky as if sugar oozed out and gnats came to them immediately. In comparison, healthy bushes produce berries that dry to a burgundy tone, never black nor gooey or bitter. The berries have high levels of complex sugars and antioxidants that give the rich sweet flavors. A food drier can not entirely replace this traditional process. Last year, I went on with soil amendments to somewhat mimic its natural habitat (increasing Ca, pH, boron and molybdenum) and the berries were back to what they should be.

The sun "curing" step is really important for the flavor of goji berry. Give it a try and see if you like the taste afterwards.

A little update 5 years later on the elderberry:

I rooted a cutting and planted in a different location. It died 3 years later, same problem.  I also cross pollinated black lace with black beauty but never planted the hybrid seeds. However, the original black beauty held on long enough for me to figure out what was wrong with the soil. It is growing back.

However, I lost a large fruiting mexican lime tree over the winter in 2025. It produced over 70 limes that year and the leaves looked yellow before over wintering indoors. Then it dropped all the leaves and the twigs died. Maybe I didn't keep up with potassium. There's a lot to learn growing fruit trees.

I bought a grafted Nikita's gift persimmon in 3 gal pot. After I got home and removed the bamboo stake, I found an exact same borer hole in the rootstock right down the center! Does it mean the tree is a goner in the near future? Now I am not sure if I should plant it in ground as it might die from weak roots. What's the best way to save the grafted top?

I planted about two dozen each of corn and bean seeds into the winter rye residues on April 15th. Both sprouted in about 10 days then two hail storms hit the area. Seedlings mostly dodged the damage and have bean growing quickly. This planting date has been the earliest for me and hopefully it will extend the season a bit as several of the corn plants are Inca giant.

Same experience with the red buckwheat. I sowed all the seeds and couldn't get a harvest. I am suspecting different varieties have slightly different requirements for nutrients and that one happened to not like my soil. I have difficulty growing Japanese squashes too. I'd like to buy the seeds again and try one more time, but not using them all at once.

Picture one and two are showing different plants. I have these in my yard: one with a whole of 6 leaflets and pink flowers is field madder, one with 4 leaflets is foothill bedstraw. I don't know about the one in the first picture, it seems to be seeding already.