askchapo

Wildlife need food too

I give big grocery bags of lemons and grapefruit to friends and neighbors. They're always overjoyed with it.

As a gardener, that feeling never quite goes away. In the case of fruit trees, freezing and jams are always an option. Maybe make a syrup out of your lychees? Homemade sodas and steamers are the best creature comforts out there, imo.

Have you considered fruit wine or fruit brandy?

You might try planting a pollinator garden. It's a chaotic system which teaches you new aesthetic values while supporting an entire ecosystem. You get to grow a beautiful mess that only becomes more disorganised with time, but that disorder means more calories and habitat and trophic layers. Doing alternative landscaping has really radicalised me against that kind of suburban obsession with control/productivity/perfection. If I plant a sunflower instead of a rose and that sunflower falls over, that's what they do. Now it's a house and food source for an entire community I get to learn about, without a single seed going to waste because that plant isn't an object for my sole benefit.

I grow a lot of stuff and some of the plants here grow more than I and my immediate family can handle. For the most part, this is a a good problem to have. I share with people, make preserves for the off season, and encourage people to come over and help pick for themselves.

There are some actual downsides. Rotting fruit is gross to step in, so you need to clear pathways at least. Rotting fruit is also often part of the disease pathway for pathogens that go after trees, so again, good to clean up.

Wildlife will eat a lot of windfall fruit but this isn't always easy to manage. We have lots of deer in the area and deer fucking love apples. However, deer also love everything else, so I have a fence around our garden so that I could also grow other plants without them devouring things. Before putting up the fence, I could rely on them eating windfall apples, but now I need to do more work. I've done my best to encourage biodiversity but this contradiction (deer are good for windfall management but bad for most everything else that is trying to establish) is just the nature of trying to rewild

How do you think new plants are grown?

Once you removed scarcity for yourself, use the excess fruits of your labor to plant new trees. But make sure your own house is in order first so you don't fall behind on your responsibilities and let the fruits of your labor go to waste.

Seems like a stress dream, but also some pearls of wisdom. Perhaps your overextending yourself a bit.

We rent a small place on an old farm that still has a little orchard that's fenced off from the deer. We throw fruit over the fence all year.

You're supposed to give excess fruit to your neighbors.

Abandon , embrace