from
raindance seeds i recently ordered the following seeds for a public food forest i'm starting...
diospyros californica (baja chocolate persimmon/sapote)
passiflora palmeri
passiflora pentaschista (desert passionfruit)
prosopis pubescens (screwbean mesquite)
ziziphus parryi (desert jujube)
they are all from baja california, more or less, except for the mesquite.
recently a friend gave me a couple seeds of cyrtocarpa edulis, also from baja california. he said he'd root a male and female cutting for me.
not sure how much cold these plants can take but should be fine here in socal. socal? hmmm... "baja california" means lower california. so when i say "southern california"........ i mean somewhat lower california? ehhhhh.
strange that i haven't seen them being grown around here much. i know the huntington included cyrtocarpa edulis in one of their isi's.
now that i know what to look for, i see prunus salicifolia (capulin cherry) here and there. it's from mexico. i tried a few fruits that were overhanging a sidewalk and they were pretty decent. i think it should be more commonly grown here. last month i planted a fruiting size tree in the food forest. i also have 3 plants from 3 different sources in 5 gallon pots for the food forest.
luc's garcinia is also from mexico, and the fruit is supposed to taste great, so not sure why it's so rare here. maybe it doesn't help that it grows soooo slow.
i kinda want to blame the native americans for not doing a better job of spreading fruit seeds around. was this really their responsibility though? is it really anyone's responsibility to improve the distribution of plants?
The absence of [Dendrobium johannis var. semifuscum] from the mainland of the Northern Territory and its presence on Melville and Bathurst islands leads to the speculation that it might have been introduced to the islands by Macassamen (trepang fishermen) who were known to plant all manner of things on some of the places they visited during their travels. - A. W. Dockrill, Australian Indigenous Orchids
i had the hardest time refinding this quote, until i finally remembered that i put it in a google doc i created for quotes about carrying things. we're exceptionally good at simultaneously carrying multiple resources over great distances, is it a coincidence we're exceptionally smart? nope. imagine we all have spaceship equivalents of dugout canoes that we can use to colonize the solar system. individuals who make smarter carrying decisions are going to exert a greater influence on the gene pool. not sure how many plants it takes to make enough oxygen for a small spaceship...
it's my responsibility to improve the distribution of plants in the solar system. just like it was johnny appleseed's responsibility to improve the distribution of apples in north america.