The big challenge is protein, but I'm pretty confident that we could get our hands on some chickens if we absolutely had to and survive from eggs and chicken as our protein source. Oh yeah, and tilapia! In the meantime (pre-apocalypse LOL) I'm thrilled to have harvestbox.com providing us amazing beef, chicken and salmon.
Other than protein, we have gobs of great veg and fruit here at P2. I am especially excited about figs right now, since the front drive fig tree has given me about 20 figs over the past few weeks. This is the "breba" crop late spring/early summer. There is another crop coming, much bigger, late summer/early fall.
Also, the food forest fig trees are excelling, and I expect them to be making fruit starting in 2020. We have Ischia and LSU doing amazing, with the others like Celeste and Turkey right behind.
I have been studying when to propagate figs, and which trees can be propagated. It turns out that new trees (like all of my figs except front drive fig tree) need another year before I start lopping off branches and propagating them. However, this was the right year to find three non-productive pencil thick+ branches off of front drive fig and cut them off to propagate. I did that Sunday... and I'm very excited to see how long it takes for those three cuttings to make roots. I also bought a few cuttings on eBay which I'll get this week and plant. If ALL of these fig trees make 20-50 figs 2x a year, I will be rolling in figs soon enough.
The sweet potatoes are doing great. The sweet potato cage (see post in June) is stunning... the vines are rich and green and prolific, and I'm certain that the cloth pots are filled with young sweet potatoes. If the regular sweet potatoes take 100 days to mature, I should be able to start pulling sweet potatoes out at the end of July, which OMG is only a few weeks away. How time flies... it feels like yesterday when I got the first Gurney's sweet potato delivery on 4/24/19. Those went right into the pots in the sweet potato cage.
I added new aluminum hanging tags to the flourishing fruit trees, as the wood stakes are kind of rotting over the last 2 years. So hopefully the plain aluminum tags will last longer. The dwarf mulberry didn't produce a lot of fruit this year, but the berries it did produce were SO good I ordered a Pakistan mulberry tree and got it delivered today. The pictures for Pakistan Mulberries are amazing - the berries are long and sweet and are considered the world's longest mulberries (4" long). I'm going to plant that beast (25' wide AND tall) away from the house, but not too far away so that the deer get all the good fruit. "These ruby red-purple mulberries have sweet, raspberry-like flavor with low acidity that is good for fresh eating or making cobblers." Can't wait!
So - that's the update. As of today, here's what we have to eat on a regular basis.
- Okinawa spinach (delicious and readily available)
- Cranberry hibiscus
- Malabar spinach
- Bananas (LOTS)
- Papaya (occasional)
- Figs (2x a year)
- Sweet potatoes (Purple now, all varieties in a few weeks)
- Tangerine (the west tree is still prolific with about 200 baby green tangerines right now)
- Star Fruit (Yum - ready to produce in a few weeks)
