This is the second of four posts that focus on which plant species are my highest priority going forwards. This kind of periodic reassessment can be useful to reflect on the performance and potential of different crops, and to avoid the temptation to become a wide but shallow, “one of everything” plant collection which lacks the genetic diversity to achieve any meaningful local adaptation.
Thanks for a page full of raisins again. Just did what you are doing planting dozens of parana pines all around the village for future sustenance or grave danger of falling food.
What needs to go on your list however is pouteria in all its form. For us it is p.lucuma. what a food. Starchy and sweet like chestnut with maple syrup. Can be dried and stored. What I wanted to ask you is graft compatibility. We have a native pouteria costata with 2n=28 chromosomes. It is a super hardy shrub growing on clay from dry cliff edges to the bottom of headlands right to the high tide mark. It produces oily fruit with a thin pulp that taste like some resinous wild avocado. Maori used to grind the whole fruit and seed to extract oil. It produces most of the year and fattens wood pigeons. It seems to grow as slow as the exotic pouterias but it is everywhere in the warmer parts of coastal NZ and could provide a tougher rootstock as lucuma is a bit fickle with phytophtora and native armillaria. I can't find chromosome data on other pouterias and don't understand it anyway but I figured that canistel has the same numbers as p. Costata and can be grafted on p.viridis and lucuma. We are planning to start a project with a native nursery nearby on the coast run by the uncle of a friend who is learning syntropy stuff with us. Our friend wants to start a food forest on that stunning family farm at the headland but his uncle is ultra native conservationist. Funny enough the nursery is called Tawapou, the name of said tree! So we are scheming how to cloak the system in native garb. Being able to graft lucuma onto their Costata would be awesome but I would like some more affirmation of some potential success. Nobody seems to have thought about it so far.
Hope you get your full strength back soon. And then get some lucumas in the ground. Greetings to the goats (they love lucuma branches)!
If you ever want to take a chance on importing diverse bunya nut seeds to add to your population then let me know. I think we might have a big crop ahead this summer and if so I will be visiting all the old diverse trees to collect seed and spread them far and wide.
You got me really interesting with your suggestion on pouteria lucuma. I think I have seen them occasionally available in rare fruit tree catalogs, but don't seem to be common in the area. I have grown sapodilla and love the fruit, but they are extremely slow growing here and not at all productive. I suspect if I put them on a drip irrigation line and fertilised them they might yield a useful amount of fruit (but I am not prepared to do so). Lucuma seems a bit more high altitude tropical, as in needing moderate temps and constant moisture, which parts of NZ can provide in abundance but schizophrenic Queensland weather cannot manage. Still- if I see seed or small seedlings available in the future I will have a crack at growing (and probably killing) them.
AFAIK grafting isnt usually that sensitive to chromosome number, so I would just start doing experiments with any species in the same genus and seeing how they get along. Often the details of the grafting technique are the critical issue, so expect to repeat the process using a half dozen grafting methods, different timing etc etc until something sticks. Sounds like an amazing opportunity to develop a new crop for your area. And don't forget that grafting can lower hybridisation barriers, so in the long run a cross of the imported species with high quality fruit and the native with the roots that love the local soil could produce a viable tree crop with no more need for annoying grafting.
The banya is a nice offer. A friend has some starting to produce and it seems to have taken some 30yrs even on his volcanic soil.
We have hard clay here on the coast and lucuma has been super slow on the slope. When the first produced after 14yrs at a hight of 4m we planted some seedlings on the cooler frost prone alluvial flat and they went off 5 times faster. Almost doing a meter per yr. I now see them in all their tolerances and growth comparing to oranges except that it would not handle tropics.
A neighbor had an Australian pouteria with dark long fruit which hardly produces and tastes fairly bad.
After grafting pear on Quince over the last couple of years in quite a number I got nervous when some treecropper told me that incompatibility can take up to 8yrs to show up with rejection. Apparently due to chromosome missmatch. Interesting that grafting affects hybridization.
Grafting pouteria is not that easy due to its latex.
Are you growing any perennial malvaceae for leaf or seed or fodder such as any of the brachychitons?
Amazing lucuma is doing so well for you (and a great example of the power of just planting something new and seeing how it performs, though for tree crops the true test often takes decades to be really sure of persistence and productive potential). Unless the tree cropper used the exact clone you grafted of pear/quince I wouldnt waste any emotional energy worrying in advance. Grafting can be a powerful tool to lower hybridisation barriers, and even do crazy things with transferring heritable genetic material between the rootstock and scion if done properly.
I can grow Brachychiton acerifolius and discolour here reasonably well, but they are not productive enough to be useful animal fodder. The inland species are so drought hardy they come in handy for this role (though are easily overgrazed IIRC). I do grow Malvaviscus arborea for fodder since the goats love it and it grows into very effective hedge rows (provided they have an electric fence line to protect them from direct grazing pressure). I love cutting them back during droughts and chucking the juicy branches over the fence for the goats. God I miss them, but hope to have a new herd started next year.
Couple of questions. How is the yield of wild vs cultivar macadamia?
Do you do any protections for wallabies? I understand the desire for breeding resistance, but with rare genes you could make an argument for protection.
Do you any of your tree crops provide a significant amount of protein? I realize that is what the goats are for. On a related note, have you looked into leaf protein concentrate? I have experimented with making it at home and I think the process itself is not so bad, though the flavor was not good. But, it could be a way to utilize other tree species (such as your mulberry that can’t hold onto its fruit) as a protein fallback.
Wild/pure species macadamias have a pretty poor yield but the odd tree is half decent. Nut quality is probably a more pressing issue, but thicker shells can be a positive sometimes. Seedlings from commercial macadamia strains seem generally promising for precociousness and nut quality. Grafted trees are mostly an advantage for commercial growers for uniform harvesting time to save on machinery operation, but for a person hand harvesting it is much better if the crop drops over a period of weeks or even months to make the logistics of picking up all the nuts before the rats find them easier. I have a few dozen seedling macadamias that are starting to mature at about 5-7 years from seed, and a much bigger and more diverse orchard of 110 seedlings that are a few years behind them. Give me another decade and I should be supplying all my macadamia nut needs. I plant my tree seedlings densely enough that 2/3 of them will need to be thinned out as they mature over 10-20 years, which means I can select out the best 1/3 performing trees (allowing for spacing, but it is unlikely that more than a couple of good trees will end up right next to each other).
I see SE Asian culture as an example of how far a society can go with converting from animal to plant based protein. Their diet is a lot of starch supplemented by a huge diversity of fresh vegetables, and a lot of fermented legumes. The impact on human body size is striking, but throw enough small, spritely people together and they can do amazing things provided they are cooperative enough. Leaf protein concentrate is an interesting idea, but I see it as a famine food strategy when nothing else is available. A fermented stew of starchy plants combined with fresh high protein leafy growth could do a lot of good (especially if fortified with wood ash for more minerals). Better yet if you can add at least a little plant derived fat. But none of that comes close to the quality and profitability of dairy animals (and to a lesser extend egg layers, provided you can keep up a steady supply of energy and protein for them, which is much easier to do for goats that eat just about every weed and tree species provided you keep them growing).
I don't do any wallaby protection (tree guards often end up strangling more plants than they save in my experience), but I am getting better at reading the landscape to guess where wallabies are likely to discover newly transplanted tree seedlings. You can pick out animal trails in the weedy undergrowth if you pay attention, and planting tree seedlings away from these trails gives them the best chance of being overlooked. Ideally I would shift to planting all my trees from direct sowed seeds, and I am making some progress on this front through experimentation, but again it requires a lot of trial and error to get a feel for where the seeds will do well on the landscape, and which seasons and times of year are likely to give the highest success rate. A lot of wild trees only successfully establish a new generation of seedlings once every few decades, so humans shouldn't expect to be able to replicate that like it is some kind of machine. After a 6-12 months in the ground transplanted seedlings seem to lose any appeal to the wallabies. I have done trials of batches of pot grown fodder trees, giving half a normal amount of trace element fertiliser, and the other left to struggle without any fertiliser. The fertilised seedlings all got destroyed by the wallabies, while the half dead starved ones were ignored and went on to grow fine. Watching the goats made me realise that herbivores are not just browsing based on the plant species, but on the exact nutritional status of every leaf and bud. I suspect the wallabies senses are finely tuned to sniff out any vegetation that is rich in whatever trace elements the landscape is lacking, so planting out luxuriant well fed potted trees is a recipe for failure. I particularly hate buying trees from nurseries for this reason. I would probably have to starve them in a pot for a year or two to prepare them for life in the real world. I would always rather grow my trees from seed if possible to avoid this annoying issue.
Good point. I will check out if there is some way I can add a substack post explaining who and where we are as a general reference. I did a post a while ago analysing rainfall records from our nearest town with data going back over a century- https://zeroinputagriculture.substack.com/p/lord-make-me-moist
We would be in Z9b, with light frosts most winters. Northern Florida or the humid eastern part of Texas near the coast are probably the closest climate matches.
We are in Cooran if you want to search its much shorter climate record, but you will see we are a bit wetter and warmer than Gympie which is further inland and in a minor rain shadow behind some low mountains.
Have your jackfruit and mangoes struggled with the cold? Have you used your survival of the fittest style approach to identify genetics that can take the light frost, or were they okay from the get go?
Mango has no problem with the cold here. We got a -5 C frost one year, but that was a once in a century cold snap, and the mangoes were untouched. Jackfruit are a bit more sensitive when they are young, but established trees should be able to handle that kind of extreme with sufficient canopy cover. I find establishing jackfruit is easier in spots where they aren't exposed to morning sun in the winter time, which greatly increases the intensity of frost.
Great read! We have Bunya pine's smaller coned cousin Araucaria araucana here, but I've yet to find one that reliably has filled out seeds. So I opted for Korean stone pine. Also interesting to read the Indigenous people in your neck of the woods leach the black bean tree, here it was done with acorns and makes a really good 'flour' product, as well as a powdered starch and natural clothes dye all in one process.
I look forward to hearing about your ideas for sugar as that's something I think about a lot as well. Take care and I hope your health continues to improve.
Adding monkey puzzle genetics to the Araucaria domestication program could push its range deep into the colder zones around the world. I tried growing some here but it is too hot for them to do well, but someone in just the right climate should be able to grow bunya and monkey puzzle together. Pine nut hybrids are being produced in a few places (Rhora's nut farm in the USA looks to be doing good work) so I hope you jump on that movement if the genus suits your conditions. Sugar production is a strange addiction given no human really needs to eat it at all, but at least I am not breaking my back to support a post-industrial caffeine addiction (even though coffee bushes grow like weeds here, by the time you do all the fiddly processing you get back less of an energy boost than you invested in all that leg work).
Very interesting. I think they're actually in Canada as well, but very close to the border, unless there's 2 by thr same name. We live in the mildest part of Canada so that gives me hope, may have to try and get some Bunya over here for breeding.
I have fresh seed most years in January/February. Peak viability is fairly short so I like to post out asap if you want to give them a go. Mature bunya are pretty common in Victoria in our south which I believe is at least Z8. As long as they don't get hard freezes they are pretty adaptable, so hopefully there are a few pockets around the world where monkey puzzles and bunyas can mature side by side. I suspect places like Ireland and bits of coastal Canada warmed by ocean currents could be suitable.
I'd love to buy some of you! Maybe just 6 or up to 10 depending on spread and cost :) what time could I come by and what's your address? bee.walter@gmail.com Alternatively: do you ever go to the Cooroy Permaculture Club night? Next one is Tue 2.July
I have been to the Cooroy permaculture meeting a few times. I have to come check out the inside of the new shelter. I hate driving at night these days but when I get my plant sales up and running again maybe I should drop in every couple of months to catch up with people I know who go more regularly. I'll email you to follow up on the Atherton raspberry divisions.
Kia ora Shane,
Thanks for a page full of raisins again. Just did what you are doing planting dozens of parana pines all around the village for future sustenance or grave danger of falling food.
What needs to go on your list however is pouteria in all its form. For us it is p.lucuma. what a food. Starchy and sweet like chestnut with maple syrup. Can be dried and stored. What I wanted to ask you is graft compatibility. We have a native pouteria costata with 2n=28 chromosomes. It is a super hardy shrub growing on clay from dry cliff edges to the bottom of headlands right to the high tide mark. It produces oily fruit with a thin pulp that taste like some resinous wild avocado. Maori used to grind the whole fruit and seed to extract oil. It produces most of the year and fattens wood pigeons. It seems to grow as slow as the exotic pouterias but it is everywhere in the warmer parts of coastal NZ and could provide a tougher rootstock as lucuma is a bit fickle with phytophtora and native armillaria. I can't find chromosome data on other pouterias and don't understand it anyway but I figured that canistel has the same numbers as p. Costata and can be grafted on p.viridis and lucuma. We are planning to start a project with a native nursery nearby on the coast run by the uncle of a friend who is learning syntropy stuff with us. Our friend wants to start a food forest on that stunning family farm at the headland but his uncle is ultra native conservationist. Funny enough the nursery is called Tawapou, the name of said tree! So we are scheming how to cloak the system in native garb. Being able to graft lucuma onto their Costata would be awesome but I would like some more affirmation of some potential success. Nobody seems to have thought about it so far.
Hope you get your full strength back soon. And then get some lucumas in the ground. Greetings to the goats (they love lucuma branches)!
Klaus
If you ever want to take a chance on importing diverse bunya nut seeds to add to your population then let me know. I think we might have a big crop ahead this summer and if so I will be visiting all the old diverse trees to collect seed and spread them far and wide.
You got me really interesting with your suggestion on pouteria lucuma. I think I have seen them occasionally available in rare fruit tree catalogs, but don't seem to be common in the area. I have grown sapodilla and love the fruit, but they are extremely slow growing here and not at all productive. I suspect if I put them on a drip irrigation line and fertilised them they might yield a useful amount of fruit (but I am not prepared to do so). Lucuma seems a bit more high altitude tropical, as in needing moderate temps and constant moisture, which parts of NZ can provide in abundance but schizophrenic Queensland weather cannot manage. Still- if I see seed or small seedlings available in the future I will have a crack at growing (and probably killing) them.
AFAIK grafting isnt usually that sensitive to chromosome number, so I would just start doing experiments with any species in the same genus and seeing how they get along. Often the details of the grafting technique are the critical issue, so expect to repeat the process using a half dozen grafting methods, different timing etc etc until something sticks. Sounds like an amazing opportunity to develop a new crop for your area. And don't forget that grafting can lower hybridisation barriers, so in the long run a cross of the imported species with high quality fruit and the native with the roots that love the local soil could produce a viable tree crop with no more need for annoying grafting.
Thanks Shane,
The banya is a nice offer. A friend has some starting to produce and it seems to have taken some 30yrs even on his volcanic soil.
We have hard clay here on the coast and lucuma has been super slow on the slope. When the first produced after 14yrs at a hight of 4m we planted some seedlings on the cooler frost prone alluvial flat and they went off 5 times faster. Almost doing a meter per yr. I now see them in all their tolerances and growth comparing to oranges except that it would not handle tropics.
A neighbor had an Australian pouteria with dark long fruit which hardly produces and tastes fairly bad.
After grafting pear on Quince over the last couple of years in quite a number I got nervous when some treecropper told me that incompatibility can take up to 8yrs to show up with rejection. Apparently due to chromosome missmatch. Interesting that grafting affects hybridization.
Grafting pouteria is not that easy due to its latex.
Are you growing any perennial malvaceae for leaf or seed or fodder such as any of the brachychitons?
Amazing lucuma is doing so well for you (and a great example of the power of just planting something new and seeing how it performs, though for tree crops the true test often takes decades to be really sure of persistence and productive potential). Unless the tree cropper used the exact clone you grafted of pear/quince I wouldnt waste any emotional energy worrying in advance. Grafting can be a powerful tool to lower hybridisation barriers, and even do crazy things with transferring heritable genetic material between the rootstock and scion if done properly.
I can grow Brachychiton acerifolius and discolour here reasonably well, but they are not productive enough to be useful animal fodder. The inland species are so drought hardy they come in handy for this role (though are easily overgrazed IIRC). I do grow Malvaviscus arborea for fodder since the goats love it and it grows into very effective hedge rows (provided they have an electric fence line to protect them from direct grazing pressure). I love cutting them back during droughts and chucking the juicy branches over the fence for the goats. God I miss them, but hope to have a new herd started next year.
Couple of questions. How is the yield of wild vs cultivar macadamia?
Do you do any protections for wallabies? I understand the desire for breeding resistance, but with rare genes you could make an argument for protection.
Do you any of your tree crops provide a significant amount of protein? I realize that is what the goats are for. On a related note, have you looked into leaf protein concentrate? I have experimented with making it at home and I think the process itself is not so bad, though the flavor was not good. But, it could be a way to utilize other tree species (such as your mulberry that can’t hold onto its fruit) as a protein fallback.
Wild/pure species macadamias have a pretty poor yield but the odd tree is half decent. Nut quality is probably a more pressing issue, but thicker shells can be a positive sometimes. Seedlings from commercial macadamia strains seem generally promising for precociousness and nut quality. Grafted trees are mostly an advantage for commercial growers for uniform harvesting time to save on machinery operation, but for a person hand harvesting it is much better if the crop drops over a period of weeks or even months to make the logistics of picking up all the nuts before the rats find them easier. I have a few dozen seedling macadamias that are starting to mature at about 5-7 years from seed, and a much bigger and more diverse orchard of 110 seedlings that are a few years behind them. Give me another decade and I should be supplying all my macadamia nut needs. I plant my tree seedlings densely enough that 2/3 of them will need to be thinned out as they mature over 10-20 years, which means I can select out the best 1/3 performing trees (allowing for spacing, but it is unlikely that more than a couple of good trees will end up right next to each other).
I see SE Asian culture as an example of how far a society can go with converting from animal to plant based protein. Their diet is a lot of starch supplemented by a huge diversity of fresh vegetables, and a lot of fermented legumes. The impact on human body size is striking, but throw enough small, spritely people together and they can do amazing things provided they are cooperative enough. Leaf protein concentrate is an interesting idea, but I see it as a famine food strategy when nothing else is available. A fermented stew of starchy plants combined with fresh high protein leafy growth could do a lot of good (especially if fortified with wood ash for more minerals). Better yet if you can add at least a little plant derived fat. But none of that comes close to the quality and profitability of dairy animals (and to a lesser extend egg layers, provided you can keep up a steady supply of energy and protein for them, which is much easier to do for goats that eat just about every weed and tree species provided you keep them growing).
I don't do any wallaby protection (tree guards often end up strangling more plants than they save in my experience), but I am getting better at reading the landscape to guess where wallabies are likely to discover newly transplanted tree seedlings. You can pick out animal trails in the weedy undergrowth if you pay attention, and planting tree seedlings away from these trails gives them the best chance of being overlooked. Ideally I would shift to planting all my trees from direct sowed seeds, and I am making some progress on this front through experimentation, but again it requires a lot of trial and error to get a feel for where the seeds will do well on the landscape, and which seasons and times of year are likely to give the highest success rate. A lot of wild trees only successfully establish a new generation of seedlings once every few decades, so humans shouldn't expect to be able to replicate that like it is some kind of machine. After a 6-12 months in the ground transplanted seedlings seem to lose any appeal to the wallabies. I have done trials of batches of pot grown fodder trees, giving half a normal amount of trace element fertiliser, and the other left to struggle without any fertiliser. The fertilised seedlings all got destroyed by the wallabies, while the half dead starved ones were ignored and went on to grow fine. Watching the goats made me realise that herbivores are not just browsing based on the plant species, but on the exact nutritional status of every leaf and bud. I suspect the wallabies senses are finely tuned to sniff out any vegetation that is rich in whatever trace elements the landscape is lacking, so planting out luxuriant well fed potted trees is a recipe for failure. I particularly hate buying trees from nurseries for this reason. I would probably have to starve them in a pot for a year or two to prepare them for life in the real world. I would always rather grow my trees from seed if possible to avoid this annoying issue.
Do you have a post where you discuss your growing conditions? Specifically average winter low?
Good point. I will check out if there is some way I can add a substack post explaining who and where we are as a general reference. I did a post a while ago analysing rainfall records from our nearest town with data going back over a century- https://zeroinputagriculture.substack.com/p/lord-make-me-moist
The raw climate data for Gympie can be found here: http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/averages/tables/cw_040093.shtml
We would be in Z9b, with light frosts most winters. Northern Florida or the humid eastern part of Texas near the coast are probably the closest climate matches.
We are in Cooran if you want to search its much shorter climate record, but you will see we are a bit wetter and warmer than Gympie which is further inland and in a minor rain shadow behind some low mountains.
Have your jackfruit and mangoes struggled with the cold? Have you used your survival of the fittest style approach to identify genetics that can take the light frost, or were they okay from the get go?
Mango has no problem with the cold here. We got a -5 C frost one year, but that was a once in a century cold snap, and the mangoes were untouched. Jackfruit are a bit more sensitive when they are young, but established trees should be able to handle that kind of extreme with sufficient canopy cover. I find establishing jackfruit is easier in spots where they aren't exposed to morning sun in the winter time, which greatly increases the intensity of frost.
Great read! We have Bunya pine's smaller coned cousin Araucaria araucana here, but I've yet to find one that reliably has filled out seeds. So I opted for Korean stone pine. Also interesting to read the Indigenous people in your neck of the woods leach the black bean tree, here it was done with acorns and makes a really good 'flour' product, as well as a powdered starch and natural clothes dye all in one process.
I look forward to hearing about your ideas for sugar as that's something I think about a lot as well. Take care and I hope your health continues to improve.
Adding monkey puzzle genetics to the Araucaria domestication program could push its range deep into the colder zones around the world. I tried growing some here but it is too hot for them to do well, but someone in just the right climate should be able to grow bunya and monkey puzzle together. Pine nut hybrids are being produced in a few places (Rhora's nut farm in the USA looks to be doing good work) so I hope you jump on that movement if the genus suits your conditions. Sugar production is a strange addiction given no human really needs to eat it at all, but at least I am not breaking my back to support a post-industrial caffeine addiction (even though coffee bushes grow like weeds here, by the time you do all the fiddly processing you get back less of an energy boost than you invested in all that leg work).
Very interesting. I think they're actually in Canada as well, but very close to the border, unless there's 2 by thr same name. We live in the mildest part of Canada so that gives me hope, may have to try and get some Bunya over here for breeding.
I have fresh seed most years in January/February. Peak viability is fairly short so I like to post out asap if you want to give them a go. Mature bunya are pretty common in Victoria in our south which I believe is at least Z8. As long as they don't get hard freezes they are pretty adaptable, so hopefully there are a few pockets around the world where monkey puzzles and bunyas can mature side by side. I suspect places like Ireland and bits of coastal Canada warmed by ocean currents could be suitable.
We are on the Southern Gulf Islands so I bet with a little care we could get them going! Would be interested in a few seeds.
Great- drop me a message in the new year and I will keep you updated as the crop comes in.
Superb information. Thank you. We are on the Eumundi Range. Do you think Atherton Raspberries are worth a try?
Absolutely. If you can't find a more convenient source I can sell you some bare rooted divisions anytime.
I'd love to buy some of you! Maybe just 6 or up to 10 depending on spread and cost :) what time could I come by and what's your address? bee.walter@gmail.com Alternatively: do you ever go to the Cooroy Permaculture Club night? Next one is Tue 2.July
I have been to the Cooroy permaculture meeting a few times. I have to come check out the inside of the new shelter. I hate driving at night these days but when I get my plant sales up and running again maybe I should drop in every couple of months to catch up with people I know who go more regularly. I'll email you to follow up on the Atherton raspberry divisions.
I understand. I avoid night driving myself for the wildlife road toll alone.