As you may know, gardening is a huge passion of mine, which has now morphed to permaculture/food forest/mini-homestead proportions. Our family recently moved to a new, 1.4 acre property in south Gilbert, Arizona. This gem has more than thirty mature pink grapefruit trees – our entire neighborhood was once part of a citrus orchard.
The plan over the next few years is to plant as many fruit and nut trees as my husband will allow. We also plan to raise some chickens for eggs and try our luck with a bee hive. We purchased a flo-hive and are very excited to explore beekeeping. (Before that happens though, we plan to take some classes since bees are a little intimidating.)
I am fully aware that we will make dozens of mistakes along the way. As I am writing this, I’m fairly certain our frost protection was inadequate for the cold weather we saw right before Christmas. So losing some tropicals might be our first one…or first five mistakes!
We purchased the following from Shamus O’Leary:
- Aravaipa Avocado
- Gary Mango
- Fruit Punch Mango
- Venus Mango
- Raposa Mango
- Shangri-La Mulberry
- 2 Neem trees
- Dwarf Nam Wah Banana
- Lacatan Banana
We purchased the following from Queen Creek Tropicals:
- Manzano Banana
- Pink Guava
- Jamaican cherry
We purchased these other trees at various places, including Lowe’s, A & P Nursery, The AZRFG plant sale, and the Boyce Thompson Arboretum:
- Beer’s Black Fig
- Black Mission Fig
- Olympian Fig
- Panamint Nectarine
- Snow Queen Nectarine
- Local Mesa, AZ Blackberry vine
- Gold Kist Apricot
- Frederick Passion Fruit Vine
- Dwarf AZ Sweet Orange
- Naval Orange
- Dwarf Bearss Lime
- 3 Papaya
We also found two volunteer ever-bearing Mulberry in random places.
