Let's see if I can get this post posted before we lose power/internet again!
So, I'm in Central Texas, zone 8b. We recently purchased a little over 4 acres of very gently sloping lightly forested property here, with a layer of black soil over a thick layer of calcium carbonate. The existing vegetation is mostly oak (either live oak or post oak, I forget which), low scrub they call shin oak, a few prickly pears and yucca plants, and one or two small bushes I think are a juniper variety (but they call them cedar here). Most of the plot has light to moderate tree cover, and the western-most end is mostly grasses.
We haven't been able to do any real soil testing yet, but from the climate zone and the existing vegetation, would anyone have suggestions for food crop/tree guilds that ought to do reasonably well in an area like this? We'd like to experiment with some Mediterranean plants such as olives and pomegranates, perhaps figs and grapes, all of which theoretically can be grown around here. We also have some flowering trees planned for ornamentation and pollinator-attraction, such as redbuds, crapemyrtle, and smoketree. We'd love to grow a walnut or two, maybe black or honey locust, pistachio or pecan, as well as apples, peaches, pears, cherries, plums... if we can find varieties that tolerate our heat and potential summer drought, or if we can rig up a gray-water irrigation system that will support them.
For shrub-height plants, rosemary grows like wild here, kumquats may or may not survive the winters, and I'm originally from the PNW and I love blackberries, but I'm most familiar with them as highly invasive pests that will take everything over, so I'm not sure how easy to control they are in the drier, hotter climate here. For smaller plants, sweet potatoes, chickpeas and several varieties of beans, tomatoes, potatoes, kale, mustard, broccoli, lettuces, onions, etc... as well as a lot of cooking herbs such as mint, basil, lemongrass, ginger & turmeric, garlic, thyme, and so on. I'd even love to incorporate a little greenhouse for some more tropical trees such as avocado and some other citrus, later on.
How does one begin to weigh which fruit/nut/flowering trees will balance out well with which shrubs and which groundcover, in guilds? We've got to start small, but we definitely don't want to haphazardly pull out trees without having a very clear plan for replacing them with more productive sorts, as the shade is important to us and helps keep the ground cooler and moister, and the more food crops we can get planted quickly, the less we have to rely on long trips to the nearest grocery store for produce, year round.
I hardly know where to start with some of this, or which vegetables require so much sun that they won't function in a food-forest setting, versus which ones will actually appreciate the extra summer shade. Leafy greens maybe? Or will the ground still be too hot at that time of year to get decent results?
Anyone have a good roadmap for starting out from bare, undeveloped land in this sort of climate? Most of what I see online in my own searches seems to be geared toward either more northern climes or tropical food-forests.
