Are you concerned about the future and want to be more self-sufficient and independent? Join Lindsey on a tour of Lynette’s Urban Farm and learn how to grow your own fruit trees and plants in your home or community. From pomegranates and figs to citrus and roses, there’s something for everyone.
CHAPTERS:
0:00 Lynette’s Urban Farm
1:03 Pomegranate
1:56 Fig, Almond and Moringa
2:56 Mulberry & Peach
3:59 Citrus Trees
5:15 Roses & Cherries
7:17 Citrus, Plum & Almond
9:11 Medicinal Plants & Mango
10:32 The Thrivers Community
TRANSCRIPT FROM VIDEO:
Hi there, it’s Lindsey. I am here on Lynette’s Urban Farm and spring is in bloom. I wanted to share with you today just some of our favorite fruit trees that are starting to bloom and flower and have buds and we’ll have fruit in the coming weeks and months. This is a really exciting time here at the farm. We love to see everything new popping up. Our bulbs are all coming up and it is just a beautiful green time of year before the true heat of summer hits and we’re all a little bit more miserable. But for right now, everything is beautiful, everything is happy, and I wanted to just show some of our fruit trees that we’re looking forward to.
If you think that the world is headed in a direction that makes you a bit concerned for the future and you’d like to be as self-sufficient and independent as possible, then you’ve come to the right place. My name is Lynette Zang. Now it’s time to go Beyond Gold and Silver.
Above me is our pomegranate tree. So we have this tree as well as a hedge. Our hedge is more for security and privacy than it is for production because we keep it trimmed. But this tree produces pomegranates. In the wintertime, you could see there are still some very old pomegranates that will just fall off soon, but we got most of ’em harvested and taken care of and they are starting to flower again. So these little red buds will come out and open up and the pomegranate will stay green. I’m gonna clean it up a little bit and take out some of these branches just to give it a little bit more energy to go towards getting ready for the fruiting season. But come along with me and I’ll show you the rest of what we have blooming on the farm.
We have the figs, so this fig, I don’t see any baby figs on yet, but our black mission fig in the back. Oh, I spoke too soon. So there are some green figs on here. So we’ll start to see our figs ripening up soon and the tree will become a lot more abundant with those.
Our almond is also, you can see that we already have these little baby almonds growing. So it’s good that this tree gets ready now because once our moringa hedge fills in and starts to leaf out, the trees over on this side get a lot more shade in the summer, which is good and helpful, but we want to make sure those things bloom and get their flowering done ahead of time. Our moringa is also starting to bud out, so we have new leaf development and we’ll start to get flowers on it once it leafs out more. And then it’ll produce the moringa pods.
This is our mulberry tree, one of of our two mulberry trees. We have one in the back that’s a weeping variety and you can see these will turn into the mulberries. So we’re already starting fruit production and you can tell just by the quantity that we will have a really good mulberry harvest this year, which is, this is my favorite fruit on the farm. So very excited about that.
Our peach already bloomed. It already had its beautiful pink flowers and you can see the little baby peaches on here. So I did go out and I thinned a couple of the peaches off just to make sure that the branches could support the weight. Sometimes we don’t think about with these trees that when the peaches or the fruit gets bigger, if it weighs down the branch too much, it can snap and then we can lose that fruit. So always better to be a little bit on the safe side and do just a little bit of control in numbers.
Along this row, we have a good number of our citrus trees. We have a pink grapefruit lime, keefer lime, and a mandarin orange tree. And you can see these are all starting to flower. So we have beautiful citrus flowers. The bees love them. I don’t know if you can see that little guy. I just saw him collecting some pollen, but citrus is one of the bees favorites. You can hear ’em. Yep. And then all this citrus will be the grapefruit and will be ready a little bit later as well as the oranges. But we’ll have lemons and limes hopefully in a few months. You could see here a little bit more of the… It’s a great time for pollinators <laugh>. We have the flowers on our variegated` pink lemon tree here as well as the starts to our fruits. So I don’t see any like teeny tiny lemons yet, but very soon.
Our roses are also in full bloom. This is one of our bros hip hedges. So we use this for just security and beauty. As well as roses can be used for rose hips, which have a lot of medicinal and beneficial qualities. And then behind the roses, this gimongous plant is our hollyhock, which they recede themselves every year. So it’s a little bit like random where they’re gonna come up, but we always have gimongous ones in the front and they’re really beautiful. We have a mix of colors, but once those start popping and opening up, we get a lot more color up front and they’re just a beautiful plant to have and they do all the work themselves. So the hardest part is ripping out the giant stock when they’re done. But they’re definitely, they add a lot of color and they’re a great border plant as well. If you plant them along a fence or a gate, they provide a lot of dense security.
This is our pomegranate hedge that I mentioned, and you could see that it’s butting out in some places. But like I said, this one gets trimmed a lot harder back. So we use this one mostly as a privacy screen. We do get a couple pomegranates off it every year, but its main purpose isn’t production, but I’m hoping we get more this year since it has been trimmed. So I’m hoping that helps give it a little bit of a jumpstart and we can get more from it than we have in the past. We also have our sernium and Barbados cherries along this stretch here. And these are starting to flower. These do a few, we can harvest from these multiple times during the year. We get multiple production seasons off of these, but in a few weeks is when we’ll have the most.
Another variegated, lemon, pink lemon. And then this is one of our kumquats. So you could see the fruit is getting really big. So this one is, there’s a feet that are probably ready to be harvested and this plant has been in for only about a year, so hoping it gets bigger as it gets more established. And you can see there’s little babies on there too. So we’ll get quite a bit of fruit from this little tree this year. Our guava is working on leafing out. This is our other kumquats. It’s not really, it’s not flowering or doing anything yet, so we’ll keep an eye on that one.
And then we have, this is one of our plum trees. So you could see all these green plums that will start to turn purple soon. And with the plum, I have a lot of issues with birds getting to them. So it’s really important that I keep an eye on this every day just to make sure that when they do start to ripen, that I can beat the birds to the fruit. But we have a ton on this tree, so we’ll get a really good harvest this year. This is our other almond tree. This one is a lot bigger. You can see it has a lot more on it, so we’ll get a good harvest from this one. And all these trees have recently been pruned up. Our friend Chris helped us prune up all our fruit trees, which really helps give them an amazing headstart. We applied compost and a new bubbler irrigation system. So these trees will be set to go for this season and just the rest of the year they’ll have a really good healthy start.
More Hollyhocks. This one is gonna be pink. You can see that they’re starting to open. There’s some in the back that have already opened up. Our chamomile and lavender is going strong. We’ll continue to harvest lavender throughout the summer. Our pollinators love this. We can see a lot of bees buzzing around. The chamomile will probably start to dive back in a few weeks once it consistently stays hotter. So we’re gonna harvest all that up and dry it.
And the final fruit tree that I wanted to show you that is flowering is our mango. So our other mango isn’t, we trimmed that up to try to make it stronger. This tree is a lot bigger than the other one in terms of just its, its trunk is just a lot sturdier. So we’re trying to make that other mango tree a little sturdier. But this one is flowering and we got probably two or three mangoes off of it last year, which was its first year in the ground. So we have lots of new green growths and lots of flowering. So we’ll see how many mangoes we get from it this year. But like I said, it’s been fertilized and composted and everything is looking great. So I’m hoping we get quite a few mangoes off of it this year.
I hope you enjoyed this quick overview of all of our fruit trees here on the farm that are flowering and getting ready to go into their production seasons. This is one of my favorite times here on the farm. We get to see so much new growth and see how our fruit trees develop. Feel free to share if your fruit trees are also producing. We would love to see that on our new Thrivers app. So make sure that you subscribe and check out our Thrivers app for all that content and more.
