Backyard Tropical Food Forest in Northern California

Last year I transformed my backyard into a subtropical food forest where I’m now growing hundreds of of edible plants including tropical and subtropical fruits that don’t normally grow in my zone (9b). I’ll take you on a tour of my densely planted backyard jungle in this first video on my new series, to show you that it’s possible to grow tropical plants in non tropical climates. In future videos I’ll show you exactly how I created this food forest and everything I’m doing to maintain it through the years.

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8 months ago this space was nothing but heavy clay soil and gravel and now it’s a thriving subtropical Food Forest here in my Northern California Backyard which is honestly starting to look and feel more like a jungle I’ve done a lot to transform and create this space and I’ll

Soon have a full series here showing every single step of that process and everything I do to maintain it but rather than showing you my process first and just asking you to try that it’s going to work I’m going to start by showing you the results in this full

Tour so that you can see for yourself how every single one of these tropical and subtropical plants are absolutely thriving here in my Mediterranean climate despite being much hotter and drier in summer and much colder in Winter then almost all of these plants are adapted to grow so now that these

Young plants have experienced a hot summer and the winter with a few days of frost I’ll take you around to show show you most of the plants that I have here and some of the fruit that I’ve been harvesting so Far this is my Kohala longan it’s a Hawaiian longan variety longans are also known as dragon’s eye and when I harvest this fruit you’ll see why it has that nickname this tree is about three maybe four years old Max and it set a nice little crop this year it’s had about 20

Fruit and it’s down to about eight fruit left let’s try one of these the skin on the outside has kind of a Dusty Brown beige texture to it with a little bit of green and almost like a reptile scale to it then if I open it up it will

Peel kind of like a hardboiled egg so that skin just comes right off and on the inside here it has this white sort of translucent flesh kind of like a l shees or leachy and now you can really see why it gets that nickname of the dragon’s eye

The texture of the flesh is very similar to a grape the flavor has a mild sweetness almost no acidity and it sort of has a Musky flavor to it to me it almost reminds me of like bread or like a pastry flavor with sweetness very unique not like any other fruit that

I’ve tasted because of that musky kind of bread flavor to it really nice sweet tropical fruit with very interesting unique flavors and they fruit pretty young at least this one did for me here in my food Forest the next PL I want to show you is the one right

In front of this longan and this is a Pino Dulce or Pino melon I have about a dozen or more of these planted throughout the Food Forest I bought one plant last fall and propagated about 50 cuting from it so I planted out a bunch here and gave a bunch away and they’ve

Really been thriving just sprawling out I mean this plant here was just one little stick when I planted it in early summer and now it’s like 5 ft by 5 ft and has quite a bit of fruit on it as you can see it’s got flowers here it’s

Got some young fruits that might ripen up before the frost and it’s got some that are ready to harvest to illustrate just how simple these are to propagate check this out this plant was just growing along the ground here and it’s setting out these little Roots so if you

Want to propagate these it’s super simple you just take a little cutting 4 to 6 in take off the big leaves trim off any flowers put that in some potting mix and that’s going to become a whole new plant that’s what I did for all of these very

Very simple let’s find a little fruit here’s a nice one these things look so cool I think they kind of look like a dinosaur egg they’ve got this pale yellow color with these purple stripes this one still has a little bit of green left on it so it’s

Probably not completely ripe but it should be pretty good there you can see on the inside it has a lot of small seeds kind of a yellow flesh pretty juicy the flavor is very much like a honeydew so it has a very mild sweet melon flavor to it the

Flesh texture itself is also very much like a honeydew or any other really nice ripe melon so it’s not quite as sweet as a ripe melon has a little bit of cucumber flavors to it but it’s a lot softer than a cucumber and a lot sweeter than a

Cucumber the skin is very thin and easy to bite through there’s no real flavor to the skin it’s not bitter it doesn’t really add anything or take anything away but a very juicy watery fruit and these have been extremely productive for me this summer this is my Vernon white

Sapote it’s one of a few different white sapote varieties that I have planted here right behind me I have a subel white sapote and I love these because not only is the fruit delicious but white sapote are actually adapted to grow Thrive and fruit really well in my

Zone so I’ve had both of these for the past two years last year they were both in pots next to my house they went all summer long in full sun with no shade and that didn’t bother them and then they went all winter long with no Frost protection that didn’t bother them

Either and the Vernon actually flowered and set fruit in its first year and the fruit was delicious once again full sun through summer and now through winter they actually have a lot of young tender growth on them and none of the frost we we’ve had so far have affected them at

All and once again the Vernon has set fruit I’ve harvested a few of them and there’s one left so here’s the fruit small round greenish yellow fruit usually they’re about the size of a tennis ball but this one was growing in full shade so it’s a bit smaller really nice soft creamy texture

To it the texture is almost like a very ripe avocado mixed with a very right pear and it even has some subtle pear flavors to it mostly the flavors in it though are like a mixture of tropical fruits like coconut pineapple banana all mixed into like a custard so custardy

Sort of texture and tropical custard flavors to it the skin and the flesh both have really nice flavor and texture this one has one little pit in the middle sometimes they have more but not much for seeds or pit in these it’s got a really good flash to seed ratio

And it’s a subtropical tree with very tropical flavors that thrives in a non-tropical area with no protection and fruits really early so Vernon white sapote this is my tropical green Juju be very popular in Thailand Vietnam and India and if you you watched my Orchard series you’re probably familiar with my

Lee Juju be which is a deciduous variety both are related but they’re quite different the Deciduous one right now has no leaves and it hasn’t had any fruit on it for a couple of months the tropical green Juju be is Evergreen so it’s going to have leaves year round and

It’s been fruiting since Midsummer still has quite a bit of fruit on it they’re both very fast growing and fruit when they’re young this thing was this tall and it was a little twig and it put out this branch and it’s just like quadrupled in size and put on quite a

Bit of fruit so still has some fruit but we got a lot of rain last week so a lot of this fruit is starting to split either way should be plenty good to eat so let’s try some really nice crunch nice texture great flavor pretty juicy the flavors

Are a little bit like apple and pear and it’s not as sweet as the ones I was eating earlier this season because we had all that rain so anytime you have a lot of rain and the soil is saturated the sugar level of any fruit is going to

Go way way down so not quite as sweet right now but still plenty sweet and honestly the dominant flavor in these right now for me is young coconut which is kind of cool to get that coconut flavor out of a fruit like this little pit in the center

There this is a delicious and productive tropical fruit tree green Juju I’m growing five different varieties of papayas here but the first one I want to show you is this Bacco papaya because this is a naturally occurring hybrid from Ecuador that is not only Frost tolerant but it’s also

Cold tolerant into the 20s and it has all female flowers that are self-fruitful and have no seeds in the fruit I had this plant for over a year now last year it was in a pot it fruited its first year and once again it is full

Of fruit it still has flowers on it it’s got all this fruit this fruit is still a little bit young some of the larger Ones Will ripen up but some of the smaller ones won’t quite make it but if this tree performs the same way it did last

Year most of this fruit will ripen up in Spring the fruit will be yellow rather than orange a little bit smaller than your common papayas and not quite as sweet as the papayas that you might be used to it has a mild somewhat sour somewhat sweet flavor and a little bit

Of essence to it that’s kind of cool so very unique different flavor of papaya and it’s a variety that will grow in cold climates which is perfect for me here in Northern California right here on this side I’ve got a black sapote black sapote are not at all related to White sapote they’re

Actually related to pron if you’re familiar with Pon trees you you can probably see that this foliage looks very similar to a pmen but pmen are deciduous so they lose all their leaves in the winter time the sapote is Evergreen and with that they’re also very Frost sensitive and cold sensitive

But that said it still has a lot of young tender growth on it that it put on in late summer that has not been affected at all from any of the frosts we’ve had so far so it’s surprisingly looking pretty good this tree is probably a few years old it’s it’s grown

Very rapidly since I planted it in the ground but it’ll still be a few more years before it starts fruiting it flowered this year but the flowers didn’t set any fruit and these usually take a few years to fruit but I happen to have a black sapote fruit that I

Ordered from Miami last year I ate a couple of them have one more that I kept in the freezer so I can show you what the fruit actually looks like so here’s the fruit this one’s still frozen so I’m not going to cut into it and it’s a little bit Frosty but

Basically it’s a dark green somewhat large fruit this one’s a little bit more of a beige brown color because it’s been in the freezer but you don’t really Harvest these until they are very ripe and soft almost overripe but then you cut into them and they look and feel

Like you’re scooping out chocolate pudding that’s why they get the nickname of the chocolate pudding fruit they even have a lot of flavors I think of chocolate pudding but they also taste like a really ripe sweet pumpkin delicious very unique fruit and I can’t wait for this to start fruiting for me

This is an Oakleaf papaya and it’s one of the trees here in my food Forest that I’m most excited about because I actually grew this tree from a seed of the fruit that I harvested in a greenhouse in Santa Cruz last year I started that and a bunch of other seeds

In pots and then germinated them transplanted them out this was about 4 in tall when I planted it now it’s nearly 10 ft tall it’s full of fruit and it actually has fruit fruit that are ready to harvest right now so that’s incredible that it can grow that fast

From a seed and produce fruit in less than a year that is not very common for any fruit tree also it’s a papaya variety that’s native to the Andes so it’s actually cold tolerant down into the low 20s when the temperatures get that low into the low 20s which they

Haven’t here yet these will become deciduous so they’ll lose all of their leaves which is not common for papayas so it goes deciduous then it’ll come back in spring with more foliage so this tree still has most of its leaves but I expect most of them to fall off by the

End of winter another very unique thing about this papaya variety as you can probably see is that the fruit is teeny tiny which makes it not only unique but it makes it a great candidate for growing in a non-tropical Zone with our shorter growing season it actually has

Time to set fruit and fully ripen on the tree unlike the larger more common papaya varieties that can take 6 to 9 months to actually set and fully ripen which is fine if you’re growing them in a tropical Zone that’s essentially warm year round but because here we have such

A shorter growing window a lot of times if you’re trying to grow those varieties they’ll set fruit they’ll start to size up on the tree but they won’t have enough time in that warm growing season to actually ripen on the tree so smaller fruits like this are perfect and this

One started from a Seedling this year already had time to set fruit next year as it comes out of spring as it’s already established it’s going to set its fruit probably in early early summer and be ready to harvest in late summer potentially even get a second crop as

These often do let’s try some of this fruit so here’s the fruit about the size of an acorn mostly orange little bit green has some kind of cool stripes on there and on the inside it looks similar to some other papaya varieties where it has a bunch of little black seeds little

Bit of Flesh and some skin you can eat the seeds but they have a pretty strong flavor to them and I want to save these to plant so I’m going to take the seeds out and that leaves just a little bit of Flesh and a lot of

Skin the flavor is actually very similar to many papaya varieties so if you’re familiar with the flavors of papaya expect a lot of those flavors from it it’s a little bit sweet not very tart but slightly tart quite herbal actually I think it has a lot of flavors of

Nestum flour if you’ve ever tasted those very unique flavor but I think this flavor kind of hits it spoton um little bit of spiciness a lot of herbal flavors to that it is January right now so the fruit on here that’s ripe is not nearly

As sweet as it will be when it ripens in summer when this tree next year actually sets its fruit early enough and ripens in summer it’s going to be a lot sweeter but either way delicious fruit does have some tropical flavors to it and it’s a papaya variety that tolerates cold

Temperatures fruits ripens in cold temperatures in a short growing season so awesome variety to grow in a non-tropical Zone Oakleaf papaya this is a red papaya it’s a pretty common tropical papaya variety but it’s also not adapted to grow here in zone 9B it’s the most Frost and cold sensitive

Variety of papaya that I’m growing but it’s actually done surprisingly well through the few frosts that we’ve had it’s had a little bit of damage but for the most part the top has been unscathed but I don’t expect that to continue through the whole winter here once we

Start getting into the high 20s a lot of this top is going to die back but it was a foot tall when I planted it now it’s 10 ft tall and the trunk is about 5 in wide at the base so my hope and expectation is that although the Top’s

Going to die back the trunk itself will not completely freeze and die back and there’ll be enough energy stored in this trunk that it can bounce back in Spring then hopefully flower and fruit in late summer it did actually flower and fruit this year but it was in Fall the fruit

Is really small it’s definitely going to fall and not ripen but hopefully this tree survives maybe it won’t follow along and see this is a ruby Supreme guava it’s a somewhat rare guava variety and a lot of people consider it to be one of the very best tasting tropical

Guavas but I haven’t tasted this fruit yet and I will today I came home a few days ago and found that most of the fruit had fallen off I don’t know why because it wasn’t particularly cold or hot or rainy or windy but a lot of the fruit in different sizes small fruits

Large fruits all fell off and it was all completely green so it didn’t really have a chance to fully ripen on the tree because it’s January right now so I brought some of the larger fruits inside and ripen them on the counter for a few

Days and after a few days they turned to the yellow color and they’re a lot more soft so of course this fruit won’t be as sweet or as flavorful as it would be if it had a chance to ripen more on the tree but I think it’s still going to be

Pretty good and it will give me an idea of what it’s going to taste like next summer when hopefully it sets sooner and ripens in the warm weather that is a beautiful pink guava has a really nice seed to flesh ratio and if you could smell this thing it smells so good m

Very sweet very creamy very tropical it’s like the epitome of what you would think a delicious tropical guava should taste like flavors of strawberry and lime it’s almost like a creamy strawberry lime sorbet I can only imagine how delicious this fruit’s going to be next summer when it actually ripens while it’s still

Warm hopefully considering it was this delicious ripening on my kitchen counter in January wow Ruby Supreme guava it definitely met my expectations probably even exceeded them considering the fruit is this delicious in January this is Inga adulis also known as ice cream Bean it’s native to South America and it gets

That nickname of ice cream Bean because it creates these large bean pods and surrounding those beans in the Pod there’s this white fluffy fruit that has similar flavors to vanilla ice cream but also has a lot of cool tropical flavors in it very delicious very unique fruit

And because it’s a bean creating legume it’s also a nitrogen fixer so it takes nitrogen from the air distributes it through its roots to the other plants around it so it makes a great mother tree for the food Forest that’s why I have two of them growing here also very

Fast growing so it creates kind of a shade canopy for some dappled light and a little bit of RIT through our hot summers here which a lot of these young kind of understory tropical plants want to have so very fast growing I mean this thing was because this tall when I

Planted it now it’s grown 8 ft just since planting it in early summer it hasn’t fruited yet I’m hoping that it fruits next summer but at least by the following year it probably will but it’s been taking the cold just fine they’re usually good into the high 20s we’ve

Gotten down to 31 so far and a lot of frost so far but it still has a lot of young tender growth that’s been completely unaffected it’s continuing to grow through winter right now I think that’s going to slow down once we get into the 20s and it might have some die

Back but it’s established enough that it will survive it’s going to grow into a pretty large tree I’ll trim it so it doesn’t get so massive that I can’t actually harvest the fruit but Ingot aduis ice cream bean I cannot wait for this to fruit and to share this with you

Because it is so good this is a blue Java banana it’s a cold tolerant fruiting banana from Southeast Asia and this thing has grown incredibly fast it was about this tall when I planted it then it just shot up it’s massive now it put off five pups I took three of them

Away and potted them up to leave just three trees right here and the other ones have shot up as well it hasn’t fruited yet but it’s still young so I’m hoping by maybe next summer but at least by the following summer it should set a nice rack of bananas but it’s tolerated

The Summer sun really well it’s tolerated our cold very well so far we’ve had quite a few days of Frost has a little bit of cold damage you can see with these little black dots on the leaves and I do expect some more cold stress as we get further into winter and

Our temperatures get into the to the 20s but even with some dieback this tree will be totally fine here to come back in Spring hopefully give me some bananas this is all turmeric or turmeric and it’s all ready to harvest in fact it’s probably a couple of weeks past ready to

Harvest but I wanted to leave this in the ground as long as possible because I planted late so it’s probably only been in the ground for about 5 months where ideally it would grow for 7 to 9 months to get larger also it’s growing in a lot

Of shade right here so that’s going to create smaller turmeric so more sun more th it would be larger but it’s grown all it’s going to grow this season so let’s dig some up see how it looks all right not too bad not quite as

Large as it would have grown if I had planted it earlier but not too bad you can see this is actually the piece that I planted starting to rot looks a little bit older more calloused over and it grew all of this so I’d say it’s about

Four times the size so good return on investment let’s spray this off and see how it actually looks all right I’m pretty happy with that especially considering I planted late and did pretty much nothing with it after planting and it’s growing in a lot of shade so turmeric pretty

Easy plant to grow time to harvest the rest this is one of a few different plantings of Ginger that I have here and like the turmeric it was planted late so I’m harvesting it a little bit later than I normally would be and it’s growing in mostly shade so it’s going to

Be a little bit smaller than if it were growing in more sunlight all right so it’s a little on the smaller side as I expected but it’s met my expectations considering I planted pretty late it’s growing in a lot of shade and I’ve done nothing to it just

Planted some of these ginger roots and they’ve tripled quadrupled a little bit more than that so again good little return on investment for something that’s very easy and low maintenance this is my little mango Grove where I’m growing Valencia Pride Malik and Manila mangoes and yes they are planted very

Close together especially considering mango trees can get enormous but they grow a lot larger in their tropical climates here they don’t really grow at all in the winter time so they naturally stay a little bit smaller but I’ll also be heavily pring these trees and sort of

Growing them as one so for me this close planting should work fine that said these mangoes will probably be the most challenging plants in my subtropical Food Forest because they don’t like intense sun and heat and they don’t have very good cold adaptations so they’ve actually thrived through the sun and the

Heat they pretty much have full midday exposure to the sun that’s been no problem at all now comes the challenge of winter they’ve had a few days of Frost with no protection you can see they have this young growth here this young light yellow green growth is

Certainly a lot more tender than the older more established dark green growth so this stuff will probably die back within a few frosts you can already start to see it’s getting these little brown black dots on it and that’s a sign of cold stress totally fine the tops of

These will probably die back this year but there will be enough energy stored in these plants to bounce back in Spring and hopefully with a little bit of frost protection on our coldest days this year when it gets into the high 20s these plants will Thrive so I will frost

Protect them for the first couple of years and then after that they’ll be out on their own to see if they make it or they don’t this is my wax Jambo and I won’t yet consider this to be one of the plants in my food Forest because as you

Can see it’s still in a pot I brought this home from the nursery in this container in late summer and that wasn’t a great time to plant this going into fall and now we’re going into winter so I’ll keep this in this pot through winter then I’ll plant it out in Spring

But I wanted to show you this because it actually has quite a bit of fruit on it and I’m using these little wire mesh bags to protect the fruit from any birds squirrels or rats and they’re working pretty well I have a link to these in the video description below when I

Brought it home from the nursery it had no fruit no flowers it flowered pretty quickly and then almost all of those flowers turned into fruit and now the fruit is starting to drop but this variety is supposed to be a black pearl wax Jambo which is kind of like a dark

Purple variety when it’s ripe and these clearly are not that color they’re kind of a pale yellow color so either it was mislabeled at the nursery and it’s a different variety or this fruit dropped prematurely but I think this fruit’s ready to eat has a nice crunch little bit juicy little bit

Dry slightly acidic kind of sweet has kind of an apple flavor to it actually the flavor reminds me sort of of like Apple chips if You’ ever had those dry crunchy apple chips sort of has that flavor with a little bit of perfumey flavors to it as

Well one little seed here on the inside and then kind of like a foamy texture on the inside pretty good well the fruit tasted fully ripe so my assumption is that this is just a yellow variety of wax Jambu but I don’t know the name of it if it is

One of those so if you grow wax jamboo at home and you grow a variety that looks like this tell me in the comments below what you think this variety might be this is my groomy Chama also known as Brazilian cherry and it’s a tropical Cherry native to Brazil not a true

Cherry but has a lot of cherry characteristics to it the fruit looks similar to Cherry has Cherry flavors very delicious so this is actually the second crop that this groomy Chama has put on this year the first crop had these nice round fruit now this second

Crop the fruit is more of a star- shaped it almost looks like cam cherry and I’m not sure if that’s a typical characteristic of the groomy Chama to have two different shapes of fruit all the pictures I’ve seen of this fruit have been very round like the first crop

So if you grow these let me know if this is something that you’ve experienced before with a more star-shaped fruit on a different crop I think it’s very interesting and so far all of these fruits have tasted the same as the first crop but just strange to see two

Different shapes of fruit in one plant has kind of an orange colored flesh with two big seeds in there and the flavor of the fruit is really nice A little bit of cherry flavors little bit of Plum flavors kind of some orange sorbet flavors in it as

Well and then the skin kind of has a little bit of curry flavor to it not a ton of Curry but enough that I think it makes a really Pleasant interesting flavor groomy Chama delicious tropical Cherry this is my lemong guava it’s one of two lemong guava plants I have here

In the food forest and of all the plants I have here this would be my number one recommendation if you’re interested in getting into Tropicals and sub tropicals and you live in a marginal Zone like I do here in 9B because these take the cold really well they take the heat

Really well they’re very productive and they start producing fruit really early this tree is probably 3 years old but they’ll start producing fruit within the first year sometimes but usually at least within the second year and they’re very low maintenance also a very attractive plant stay relatively small

To medium size and the fruit is just absolutely delicious this beautiful yellow fruit soft skin little bit of seeds inside M very sweet the seeds are solid but pretty small you can crunch through them you can eat them totally super sweet little bit of flavor of

Lemon for sure a lot of guava flavors but a very sweet fruity guava M very nice texture inside very much like a gelatin and yeah the skin is just really soft and really pleasant as well one of the most delicious guavas you can grow and as I said one of the easiest

Guavas to grow especially in my zone here 9B so lemon guava excellent excellent plant here in my food Forest these are my strawberry guava plants I’ve got five plants planted right here and actually planted these long before the Food Forest these have all been in the ground here for

About 2 years and they’re actually in full shade they’re underneath my naval orange tree so they don’t get a lot of sun in summer or winter a little bit of dappled light coming through here and that’s it but as you can see still very productive this plant has lots of fruit

On it lots of red ones that are ripe lots of green ones that will be ripe soon there’s a nice one right there so these are very similar to the lemong guava but rather than being yellow they’re red and the fruit is a little bit smaller sweet a little bit tar they do

Have some strawberry flavors to them kind of like a tart strawberry and there are some little seeds inside but you just swallow those seeds very good not super sweet not as sweet as the lemon guava but that could be because I’m growing them in full shade anytime you grow fruit if you have

It in sun it’s going to be a lot sweeter if you have it in shade if it will fruit in shade then it’s not going to be quite as sweet as if it was in full sun but from people I’ve talk to who grow both strawberry and lemon guava in full sun

They still seem to agree that the lemon guava are a little bit sweeter but it’s just cool to be able to grow clusters of fruit like this in pretty much full shade so if you got a shady spot in your yard and you want to try some sub

Tropicals these have done really well here with no Frost protection or anything I mean of course they get Frost protection from the tree that’s above them but very productive for full shade and they’re delicious this is my chile and guava and the best way I could describe this plant would be if a

Huckleberry and a guava had a baby that would be this plant the plant itself looks like a little Huckleberry plant and the fruit looks like little huckleberries or blueberries but they’re guava and they taste like guava these do great in pots last year this was in a

Pot and It produced a lot of little fruit but the fruit was so small and I didn’t realize that it was ripe because it was so small that I just left it all and it eventually fell on the ground I never ate any of it so this year I know

That these are actually ripe when they’re teeny tiny like this the tag says they’re ripe when they’re red but mine have started to fall off before they’re red and they’re still really sweet so I’m going to assume that this is when they’re ripe for me green little

Bit yellow a little bit of red tinge to them and look at that tiny little blueberry looking fruit the flavor is just like a sweet white guava tiny little seeds in it just like blueberry seeds they’re so small you kind of feel them a little bit gritty in your teeth but nothing you

Have to spit out great flavor these are very productive this plant probably has about 20 little fruits on it and I’ve already eaten about 10 or 20 from it and it’s still young so hopefully in the future puts on bigger and bigger crops and I plan on this staying pretty small

It’s a nice kind of midstory plant here for the food forest in addition to all of these edible plants I also have a lot of support plants throughout the Food Forest like this V grass Mexican sunflower ComFree these are the plants that don’t necessarily produce edible

Crops but they play an important role in The Food Forest system by providing shelter and support to the food producing plants in many ways like cycling nutrients to build and maintain healthy soil which is important for any Garden but that’s an essential component to the Food Forest system this is my

Passion fruit wall where I constructed a cable trellis to support these two passion vines that have filled in the entire south side of this garage wall in about 3 months passion Vines are incredibly fast growing and very productive in zones 9 and above and I’ll soon have a full video showing exactly

How I created this trellis because it’s one of the most effective durable and attractive trellises for any vining plant and it’s also very inexpensive and simple to construct I’m actually growing four different varieties of passion fruit here in different sections of the Food Forest a few of them are growing up

These tall posts that I’m using to support this temporary shade canopy which is another project here in the food Forest that I’ll have a completely separate full tutorial video on because this is one of the key components to allowing the subtropical and tropical plants to actually grow survive and

Thrive here in my Mediterranean climate with the hot Summers and the cold Winters I think this shade canopy provides just the right amount of light shade through summer and light frost protection through winter to allow these young tropical and subtropical plants to survive through these more extreme temperature swings while also exposing

Them to our hot summers and our colder Winters so they can start adapting to this Mediterranean climate speaking of which it’s now the last week of February and every plant here continues to thrive despite the fact that we’ve had many days with Frost and some very windy

Storms so I’ve shown you a lot of what I’m growing here in my new subtropical Food Forest but I’ve actually just scratched the surface because I’m also growing avocado dragon fruit chotok Caba L Chi pineapple star fruit star Cherry cherimoya Moringa sapadilla Rose Apple yamate Java Plum and tons of other

Things that I’ll be sharing with you in future videos I’ll also be sharing my entire process for how I created this food forest soil preparation irrigation planting pruning and everything that I’ve done and will continue to do to allow these tropical and subtropical plants to survive and thrive here in my

Mediterranean climate so if you want to follow along consider subscribing if you enjoyed this video hit that like button and as always if you have any questions at all about my garden or your garden ask them in the comments below happy gardening