1 and 1/3rd acre, 400 fruiting plants plus flowering trees/shrubs/vines and a veggie garden. I tend to plant in groups, and many of my older trees are on dwarfing rootstocks so it is easy to keep them small. An example - on Fruit Tree Hill I have a Barbados Cherry, Cacao, Cinnamon, Ice Cream Mango, Alano Sapodilla, Papayas, Red Lime, many Bananas, Pineapples, Pomegranates, KM Sugar Apple and Coffees. A Black Bat Plant, Starfish Clerodendrums, and a nice small Blue-flowering ground cover add color and interest. The arch we walk through next to FTH is covered with Passion vines, Possum Purple and Yellow-fruiting varieties. On the left of the arch are various Annonas, Citrus, Bamboo, Cashew, Ylang ylang, Moringas, African Tulip Tree, and Orchids tucked into the Palmetto hedge. As you can see, we fit a lot of plants together, and the end result is very nice! I have many fruiting plants in containers too, on the patio. That is how my collection started, since I had to grow close to the house to try to prevent theft by squirrels. Since we got our Jack Russell Terrier, we no longer worry about squirrels. Have fun choosing your plants! Lisa

so here's what i've found.... In my studies, it seems that you cannot create the original culture of EM without a TON of inconvenience. HOWEVER, you CAN multiply and expand your EM culture so that you're only using 30mL at a time instead of 300mL or even the entire 1L bottle. Therefore, your initial $20 investment can go a LONG way.... I purchased the 1L bottle and since then have made 2 batches of "activated" EM, from which I have made a batch of bokashi from 20lbs of rice bran, poured some into the bottom of my outdoor trash can to help cut down on the stench (which works AMAZINGLY, by the way) and fertilized my garden and flowering plants 3x already. All that from just 60mL of the original bottle. Not even 1/10. I've made 2 batches of bokashi "pickle" from kitchen scraps and it looks like the first batch is almost completely broken down in the soil. I did a test and buried it in some super compacted clay (took me over an hour with a mattock to dig a 16" deep by 16" long trench) to see if it would break down and help loosen the soil. Covered it with a tarp and now, about 3 weeks later, things are looking really good. I took a shovel to the area yesterday and was able to turn up the soil in the are quite easily (having said that, I only had to dig in about 4 or 5" before I hit the bokashi compost). Anyhow, i'm very happy with how sparingly you can use the original EM culture and with how much you can get out of it. Basically, 1L of EM-1 will make 22L of activated EM to be used for whatever. If you plan on only using it for bokashi, I can guarantee you that you will not go through the entire bottle before it expires unless you're composting for an entire business or school or restaraunt or something. Bottom line, I think the $20 bottle is well worth the money.

I'm on my third year of a variation of Gatormom's method and I get great results and save my back all that digging. I actually trim everything in the yard in the last few weeks of August and throw all the trimmings in the area where the veggie garden will be, even big limbs. At that point in the season, it's already got really great grass - better than anywhere else in my yard I'm afraid. I also cycle my composters, spreading the summer's compost all over the bed. I don't even bother to mow down the grass, because I'm about to kill it anyway and I'm going to use the bags of mulch to squish it down. When I buy mulch, I leave the bags on top of all the trimmings and compost for a week. I do this in one-week cycles, buying seven bags of mulch, leaving them there for a week, buying seven more, then using the first seven to prep a portion of the bed. I do this to squish down stuff that otherwise would stick up and let in enough space to let in weeds and such. I spread newspapers under the mulch each time I spread it. I've used cardboard too, but found it actually broke down too quickly compared to newspapers. I know others here have had really different experiences with cardboard versus newspapers, but for me newspapers work best. I lay them pretty thick. (And if you're at all worried, six months after I've put down newspapers, I can't find them anymore. They decompose completely. Same is true for cardboard, but I find they get weedy faster than newspaper does.) In a few weeks with this system, I've got a giant prepared bed for veggies, full of organic stuff, nicely mulched, ready for the baby plants to go in the ground. And that bed is getting better and better each year. As the winter goes on, I also add more compost, so that keeps improving it. This is just about the least work I can think of for my yard - I don't haul the clippings out to the street, just over to the veggie bed and I don't dig up everything. Laying the newspaper under the mulch isn't as easy as just spreading mulch, but it works so much better it's worth the work. And using the bags of mulch to squish down the organic stuff so it doesn't poke through the paper and mulch saves having to cut it up into smaller pieces, plus, being stuck under plastic bags for a week starts the decomposition process nicely. Susannah

A few additional comments about honeyberries which also have the name haskap-and I won't get into the details of the various naming conventions, although they do have to do with the fact this plant is much more well-known in northern Japan, parts of Russia and eastern Europe, etc. So with that out of the way, I disagree strongly with Jocelyn's stating that this plant requires sour soil. It is exactly the fact that it does not require soil acidity that makes it so suitable for large areas of the north. Just normal soils, it is actually adapted to a very wide range of soil acidity/alkalinity. In this way-as Camp has said-it differs greatly from blueberry culture. The very large Nova Scotia grower, BTW, mulches their fields with clam shells! Second, the fruit turns blue as it ripens, but.......be aware, much additional ripening happens after the skin has turned blue. Thus, many folks mistakenly eat what looks to be a ripe fruit, but it's still a week or two away from full ripeness. Common misunderstanding. Additionally, what Jocelyn reports about the need for a co-blooming pollinator plant is true. All the vendors I've dealt with-I've been looking at this thing for a number of years now-are very good about making suggestions of good compatible cultivars for pollination. Next, this plant flowers early. In many case, few bees are active yet (insect-pollinated) when the plants bloom, so some care may need to be taken to insure there is good habitat for things like mason bees, bumblebees, etc. Few honeybees are active when haskap blooms. Also, the plant is, well, a honeysuckle. As such, it would be entirely reasonable to expect individual plants to live and fruit for 40 years or more. In nature, the plant often shows up in wet areas. Millions of cultivated plants however show that any normally well-drained soil is just fine. And this plant is indeed native to areas in Canada as well, so when I grow mine, I feel like I'm using a plant that is almost native to where my land in northern Wisconsin is. We've just got a little pond called Lake Superior between us and the native range of honeyberry! Lastly, it has been oft reported that when the fruits of honeyberry are ripe, birds-especially American robins and grossbeaks will all but take the fruit right out of the picker's hands when harvesting! This is no exaggeration-these birds really want this stuff! So bird netting and that sort of thing end up being a necessity. My plants are young yet and I'm not even trying to get fruit out of them yet. But in just a few years, they'll be ready and I'm sure some kind of netting is going to be required. As you can see, I'm more than just a little interested in this plant, and I do believe it is going to be a star of the emerging fruits market. Taste is said to be somewhere between a blueberry and a raspberry by some. I've eaten just a couple but they weren't really ripe yet. This was while my plants were still in the pots the vendor shipped them in, sitting in my backyard. Squirrels were eating the fruits as fast as they'd develop and it was only for this reason that I sampled a couple. I've got way more info on this exciting new fruiting shrub, should anyone be interested.