"like rainfall" is pretty vague. I wouldn't know what to do with that either. I'm sure there is good advice on-line you can find. I have grown tifblue and premier (also rabbiteye-type bluberries like yours) for a few years now. I planted mine in fall, and watered well (probably about 4+ gallons per plant) maybe once a week for five or six weeks. I haven't hardly watered them since then, and they do fine on their own. They are just getting ripe now and loaded with berries, and covered with netting since yesterday so the birds don't get them all. Kind of like the blueberries you find at the edge of the woods, they are tough once they get established. So you can probably just water them in real good once a week for several weeks in the summer and then let them go. Mulch them good with pine straw and leaves, which also may help to keep the soil on the acidic side--they like that. Others who have been growing them longer can probably give you more advice. If I had sun and the space to grow them, I would love to grow muscadines, a persimmon tree, and maybe a peach tree. Todd

Yesterday one of my planters was dug up and plants here and there. I tucked them back in muttering unflattering comments about squirrels and watered well thinking that might deter the critters. Awoke this morning to a big pile of soil and plants on the ground. Decided that I would tuck the plants back in and put out the plastic knives. Surprise, there was a mallard duck nest with a bluish egg in the planter! Sorry, squirrels. Disturbed plants got put in another container and duck nest will stay. Thought the mallards were nesting away from our yard this year. This is very late but they are welcome.

Great ideas, great collaboration. Very interesting concepts. The desert straw bale home you posted was a key inspiration picture for us for our "in progress" straw bale home. Some may be interested to find more info about your picture at simple living today. I really compliment you on mastering Sketch up! I gave up. As you say it gives you placeholders, but with straw bale construction and clay plaster you can be so creative with materials like adobe brick and cob. I wish I knew the source of these pictures from Google. Both show thermal mass around a wood burning stove as you propose. The one above is on the funky side of design The next much more sophisticated but two examples of all that straw bale and cob can offer. I know you are in the early design phase and not focusing on details like these yet, but you will have so many options. Enjoy!

A few more updates.. Within the last couple of days, two sapodilla seeds have sprouted, and just today, I saw that two of the Peruvian apple cacti had sprouted, but they were right behind the plant tag, and I didn't see them until moving the tag. I've also got some white pitaya (dragon fruit) seedlings that have been sprouting over the last week or so. I'd all but gave up on many of these things, but I guess there is some hope for things that haven't sprouted so far. Still hoping for some A. Reticulata, A. Squamosa, Mexican cream guavas, purple star apple, blackberry jam fruit, phalsa berries, and jujubes that I'd recently planted (after cracking the shell and soaking in hot water for several days, with several water changes) from a seedling tree I had. So far, I've also had 4 out of the 7 chestnut seeds sprout. So, the final number that will have sprouted will be between 4 and 7. I'll probably propagate them in larger numbers next season, as long as I can verify the type and where they were grown. If nothing else, I could use them as rootstock for grafting. Lastly, I planted out the new unframed no-till (back to Eden) raised bed with two cassava plants and five sweet potato plants. I'll probably go back in after all of this rain and flooding and fill in the area with peanuts as well. It has a higher sand content than any of my other beds.