Join me on a tour of our urban farm, where I’ll be sharing with you the progress report of our newest additions. From mango trees to starfruit, learn from our successes and failures as we explore the challenges and rewards of growing your own food.
CHAPTERS:
0:00 Starfruit
1:42 Mango
3:49 Lychee
5:07 All Spice
5:57 Plumeria
TRANSCRIPT FROM VIDEO:
Hi, my name’s Lindsey and I’m here on the urban farm. And today I wanted to go over with you a progress report of our newest additions to the farm. About a year ago, we got these fruit trees and we’re really excited to share with you how they’ve grown, how they’ve done, and just some things to keep in mind when you’re adding new trees to your property.
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.
This one next to me is a starfruit. This is by far my favorite and the most exciting edition. You can see that it is already producing starfruit. So back in October it flowered and they have since grown. They’ve been a little bit stunted by the colder months that we’ve had, but I’m hoping in the next coming weeks as it warms up, we get full beautiful starfruit that we can harvest and enjoy. Starfruit is a tropical tree. We have it here behind our Hong Kong orchid tree, which provides a lot of shade to the starfruit in the summer. So this will be the perfect little micro climate for it to continue to grow. It’ll get enough shade, enough moisture, and the perfect amount of filtered sun. So Starfruit is definitely my favorite edition, but let me show you a few more.
Next to me. Here I have one of our mango trees. This is also a new addition. And over the year that it has been growing, it’s definitely gotten a lot wider. We have a lot more growth. You can see it’s starting to put out new green leaves. I just deep watered this the other day because it was getting some brown leaf edges, which can be a sign of too much salt accumulation in the soil or just irregular watering. We’ve had some rainfall in the last few weeks, so sometimes that can just mess with the irrigation a little bit. So we have new growth, which is definitely very exciting.
We’ve gotten two mangoes in the year, which is a great start for such a new tree. But this is our mango again, it’s in filtered sunlight behind some of the other trees. And then it also uses the house for shade in the summertime. So definitely when you’re planting tropical trees, you wanna make sure that they don’t get full sun in the summer. That’s a really important thing to remember
Next to me. This is another mango that we got at the same time. It’s a different variety. I believe this one is fruit punch, which is just a variety name. This one has grown a decent bit. It’s a lot taller than the other one. I feel like this one is growing up. And the other one is growing out. And different varieties will have different growth styles. So it’s just important that we keep it trellis and we give it support, especially if it’s windy. Or like recently we had frost here, so I had to stake it up and then we put frost cloth over it. But this one is doing really great. You can see that this one doesn’t have as much of the leaf burn, so it’s something in the soil over there that just got a little bit off. But we will fertilize these with magnesium soon and then they will be all set for the spring. But this one has definitely grown upwards. And we got a couple mangoes off this one as well. Over the year.
Unfortunately where I’m standing is where we had planted the lychee tree and this was one that I was super excited about. I love that fruit. Personally, unfortunately, after we had planted it here a couple weeks later, it had a blue film on the leaves and it started to experience the symptoms of chemical burn. And we’re not sure how that happened. Nothing we use on the farm would have given it those symptoms or it affected it that way, but ultimately it couldn’t come back and it did kill the tree. We’re thinking that maybe something since its proximity to the street is really close. Maybe something from the street splashed up and got on the tree. We’re really not sure. But it was definitely a sad loss and I definitely wanna try to get one of those trees again, but we will not be planting it here.
So just remember to keep your trees somewhere they can be protected, the best place for them to grow. But also don’t be too hard on yourself because things happen and plants can be diseased or have something wrong with them or outside. Factors can always influence what happens. So just something to keep in mind.
This is the smallest tree that we got about a year ago. This is an all spice plant and it is here underneath one of our carob trees. It gets filtered sunlight. It does have a little bit of damage. It hasn’t liked the colder weather. I had it covered for the few weeks that we were in danger of frost, but I think it still just did not, it was not at its happiest. So I’m hoping in the spring you can see it’s starting to get some green new growth. So hopefully it’ll continue. And then in the next year, once it’s established now, it can just continue to get bigger and we can have an all spice harvest because that would be really interesting to see. So this is a plant that I was not that familiar with, but I’m excited to see how it develops here in the next year.
The final tree we got last year is this plumeria. And this is a landscape plant, so it’s not edible. It does drop its leaves in the winter. So that’s why it looks like this. Usually it has leaves similar to mango leaves and then it has really beautiful flowers. We had this one, it’s a tropical plant, so again, under the carob tree, so it gets filtered light and it’s leaves should start to come back in the next few weeks. But this is just a beautiful addition to the landscape and the flowers are really remarkable. So that’s why it has a home here.
We hope you enjoyed seeing the progress of our fruit trees over the last year. These are our newest additions, but we’re always hoping to add more. So if you have any suggestions, we would definitely love to hear them and we encourage you to also try growing new trees, experiment with things, and just increase the beauty and the abundance of your garden.
