For discussions of growing food for people - vegetables, grains, fruits and
nuts.  Also to be used as a test site for the North American Fruit Explorers
and Seed Savers' Exchange, to see if anyone is interesting in a conference
on fruits or vegetables.

21 responses total.

Someone from Australia interested in 'bush food' (edible wild plants) promised
to check out this conference soon.

A fruit grower just called to say his winter Pomona (NAFEX publication)
arrived with my invitation to fruit growers to join grex.  Welcome to any of
you who find your way here, and let me know what subjects you would like to
talk about in case we start our own conference (discussion area).  The friend
who called will give my email address to horticulturalists in the south Island
of the Phillipines, which he is planning to visit soon, and he promised us
some more dried jackfruit and mangosteen.  Yum!

Hello,
I am joining this group as a grower of zone 3 wild berries and other 
plants that will survive. 
These include wild strawberries, elderberries, chokecherries, wild 
grapes, red currants, buffaloberries, service(june)berries, western 
sand cherries, and pincherries. Domestic names available on request. 
I am also working on establishing a Mason bee colony and am somewhat 
confused as to wether a leafcutting be can be separate from a Mason bee 
or one in the same.
Anyway

It is wonderful to have such a quick response to the new Pomona!  Where in
zone 3 are you located?  The grex computer is in zone 5, and I live a few
blocks north of it (same zone, essentially) and have tried growing wild
strawberries (tasty but small), juneberries (too much shade, we pick lots from
the ornamental plantings around the university and the parking structures
downtown), elderberry (it died, too near a black walnut?), Hansen bush cherry
(it seems to be far too humid here, all the fruits turned brown and fell off
so I removed them), and red currants (died apparently of too much water,
having done well during a few droughts).  We also have clove currant and
buffallo currant, gooseberry, and three pawpaws trees that do not notice the
cold (at least -22 did not bother them).  And two persimmons that die to the
ground every cold winter (cold being below -10) or during droughts.
We have two Siberian apricots (took out a third in between when it got some
bacterial disease) that fruited well last year, but the lower fruits rotted
so we removed the lower branches.  Removed some beach plums and dune cherries,
we have heavy clay soil.  And a plum that has never fruited, and a Seckel pear
that had its first good crop this year.
        Congratulations on figuring out immediately how to use this bbs.  If
we get a few more people writing in I will attempt to start a separate
conference for fruit growing, with separate discussion items for each fruit
group, for bees, or for anything else people want.  (Anyone can start a new
discussion).

Wow, I also got an email from someone interested in fruits who uses Juno, and
wants to be mailed something with a listserve.  I suggested that I post their
emails and responses to them instead.  And this is only the second day that
the journal has been out (I dont' have mine yet).

   In zone three, I live in MN.(German Heritage(:-))  Thief River Falls 
(rural) to be more exact.  I describe it as when you watch the weather 
channel and they predict bitterly subzero weather in the northcentral 
US-- we live in the middle of that dip that comes down from Canada.
        I had a real learning experience with the wild strawberries ( 
My wife, when she first tasted them said, "This is the fare of Kings).  
I started with two plants from the zone 2 area in MN. After a couple 
years of spreading I moved the two sets to their common area and 
waited. No berries.  The internet failed me.  I had to go to a book to 
discover that wild strawberry plants can come with male, female or 
hermaphadidic sp(perfect) flowers. So I discovered I had started with 
plants with female flowers. Since then I have started plants from seed 
and added plants with male organs. Last year we got many servings 
rather that the dozen or so berries the previous year.  The Apline 
strawberries we grew would not help pollinate cause of the difference 
in "ploids".
        You haven't seen Juneberries until you have seen some of the 
Canadian cultivars. We went up to Carmen, Man to a pickyourown.  The 
plants from seeds from that picking are in their second year of 
bearing.  Almost equal amount leaf and berry.
More Later.

Since we're talking about wild fruits here, I've got a question about wild
grapes that perhaps somebody here could answer.  Somebody one told me that
the grapes become much sweeter and juicier after the first frost in the fall.
After trying them both before and after the frost, this does seem to be true.
Does anybody know why this occurs?

Howdy! Another NAFEXian checking in here.  Located in southern 
west-central KY, about an hour NW of Nashville, TN (USDA zone 6).

My passion is northern nut trees - particularly pecans & hickories.
I'm also working with several NNGA members on identifying 
and propagating 'sweet'(low-tannin) acorn producing oaks - most 
identified to date have been bur oak (Q.macrocarpa) or bur oak hybrids.

Our home orchard is currently composed of 60+ varieties of apples & 
pears, also blueberries, juneberries, pawpaws, persimmons, mulberries, 
figs, gooseberries, hardy kiwis - and constantly expanding!

Looking forward to sharing tips & materials with other fruit & nut 
affectionados.

Hi, and welcome to Grex!

Feel free to enter items in this conference, too.

Scott, I was hoping to start a separate fruit-growers' conference if at least
five people showed an interest.  So far three of us.  So it would help to keep
this all in one item until then.  It could be a few more days until everyone
gets their latest issue with the instructions on how to join grex.
Nutman and berryman, congratulations on figuring it out so quickly.
Coyote and scott are old grex members with an interest in gardening, and I
hope they will stick around, too.
But there is also the option of including the fruit-growing discussions in
the garden conference, which at present seems to be primarily about
ornamentals, if that is what most people prefer.  Let me know.

Why start a new confence?  This one is not overwhelmed by the current
activity.

        The wild grapes that my wife and I have picked and raise, which 
to the best of my knowledge are Riverbank Grapes (vitus riparia).
These do not get sweeter but less sour after a freeze.  We do freeze 
them after picking upon the recommendation of a wine maker.
The grapes produce a pretty decent wine, very good jelly and gourmet 
juice. 

I have made jelly from wild grapes mixed with flowering quince fruits.  How
do you freeze grapes?  We ran some Concords through a Victoria strainer (they
have a grape spiral that works well) and then froze the pulp.  Running it
through twice gives thicker pulp.  The first batch makes nice juice, and the
thicker stuff can be added to oatmeal, or put on ice cream, etc.  
        My Pomona arrived yesterday.  I wonder if Pomona could be put online
and not mailed out to people who don't need hard copy.

I just reread this item and realized that berryman has 'expurgated' his first
response.  This makes it unreadable to the rest of us unless we know how to
read it (I keep forgetting).  Was there some reason you expurgated it?  If
not, can someone explain how to unexpurgate a response that you expurgated?
To got back to read a previous response, if you telnetted, when it asks if
you want to respond or pass type in the number of the response and then enter,
or if you can't remember, type -10 or -20 to see the previous 10 or 20
responses over again.  How would you do this with backtalk (from the website)?
The expurgated response was primarily a list of things that berryman was
growing (mainly berries).

I was just trying to cut down on the scroll.
Re freezing grapes.  Just throw them in the freezer after cleaning 
them.  Along that line of cleaning.  If anyone picks (raises) highbush 
cranberries.(Virburnum trib....).  Put the umbels in a bag and freeze.
Once frozen they come loose and settle to the bottom as if they were 
marbles. It did not work on the wild grapes.  It does to a degree on 
red currants.  

Seemed to work on blueberries, too.  Richard, do you know how to restore the
thing that you expurgated so that new people can read about you?  You should
not have to be scrolling through old responses.  If you are telnetting to
grex, every time just type r 36 n.  Can someone familiar with backtalk explain
how to read only new items using backtalk?
        Today we treated a lunch guest to frozen persimmons, they are like
candy.  Not quite as good once they thaw.
        And we broke open a jar of passion fruit juice and added honey, it is
pretty sour otherwise.

Well, so much for a fruit growers' conference.  I just received by email a
list of the seeds available by mail from a friend in Australia.  She has
collected 340 varieties of peppers.  And a long list of Amaranth.  Anyone
interested please email me for a copy, I send her $2 per variety and try to
maintain the variety.  (I have her cowpeas and one amaranth and a few
brassicas).  She uses the $2 to get something from a seedsaver here.
She has a bit of trouble typing at the moment as a black widow spider got her
left hand and she is allergic to the antivenom.

I will be placing my vegetable seed order soon.  The list is in my home
directory under seeds.  It is about 13 pages long, quite a lot of peppers,
and many things I never heard of before.    Lots of brassicas - cress (9),
mustard greens (10)   Ehtiopian cabbage,  yellpurple Brazilian serrano pepper,
luffas, over a page of eggplants, five tomatillos, Chinese spinach, tomatoes.

Sindi, thank you for the fast and informative reply. If there is no NAFEX
bulletin board, I am not too interested in any other. Ihave surfed the Web
extensively on the gardening, organic gardening, bio dynamics, and
permaculture without finding much infor mation on fruit growing in New
England that is not covered in numerous books I have read. I am joining
three NAFEX interest groups so hopefully they will provide contacts for
the information I need. 

I am in southern zone four in south central New Hampshire at an elevation
of 1000 feet in a Northeast facing Valley in wooded Hills. I built a
cottage in my hometown three years ago and live with my daughter and
grandson. As Donna Hudson so astutely said in welcome to NAFEX our
immediate associates tire of us reading nursery catalogs. I won't list
them but have put in 25 fruit trees and 50 berries and canes the past two
springs. My unusual are edible ash and honeysuckle, goumi, and seaberry. I
will add mo re as I beat back the red oak white pine forest. 

Through the roster I have already found two fascinating NAFEX characters.
One is a permaculturalist with 59 apples among his hundred fifty fruit
trees though he sort of lost track of it all. 

I read your comments on my message format to a computer friend in New
Jersey and emailed him. He thought the problem was on your end but I am
not knowledgeable enough to offer that opinion though I have received no
other complaints on 20 to 30 email messa ges the past week. I am self
taught out of the manual and books the past month, though I get help from
friends when I am stymied. 
(He is sending me email in both plain/text and html versions)

Spring is not yet here as we just got 10 inches of wet snow, on top of the
hard pack we already had. This is typical, we are high enough to get snow
and keep it compared to the cities just southeast of here. Last year on
March 24th I went to Australia lea ving two feet, then returned April 7th
to none. I prefer a snowy winter. I am interested in paw paws, but am
afraid our season is much to cool and short. 

Again thanks for the fast reply, happy growing, John Van Hazinga.[I write
this on Dragon natural speaking so there are a lot of silly little
mistakes.] 

I bought a new computer a month ago with Windows 98 and outlook
express for email and as far as I know have not changed any settings.  I
did just email my computer's tecnical support with your comments but
haven't heard back.  My sister {we live a mil e apart, but she is on Mac,
and an editorial type, so I send email to process some of my contributions
to her writing} says my mail is somewhat messed up but not like you
describe.  I will olso consult with my eldest daughter at Stanford [MBA}
for she is savvy and going into the online world.  I would like to solve
the problem especialy if it creates such problems.  I am leaving tomorrow
for a week in Vermont {transient remodeler)  so will resume my effforts on
return.  Check Dragon at www.naturally speaking.com.  I joined gerx via
website or at least got welcome to Grex flashes but I guess when coldn't
find anything new on fruit column figured I didn't do it right.  Maybe I
willtry with poetry.  I am interested in Pawpaws but most catalogs say
zone 5, some zone 4 or 31 below but they are in the south where they have
nothing at stake in your failure.  I did try two from Miller's in Vermont
but that is Champlain Valley and a long hot summer by my s tandards and
only a year so to soon to tell.  John Van Hazinga


(Excuse the lack of paragraphs, they got erased when I did Ctl-J to fix
the problem of the extra long lines - C. Keesan)

Watch for John in the poetry conf!

From: john van hazinga <vanhaz@gsinet.net>
To: sindi keesan <keesan@grex.org>
Subject: changed format

Back from a week remodeling in vermontand changed format as you explained.
I will try it and see if other mail recipients object.  but now I get a
message saying I did every time I turn on and have to ignore.  As a new
computer user I am boggled by the seemingly infinite complexity of it all
but don't want to be involved except to do the few things I want to do.
(Just because I could run an office for 100 I have no intention or need to)
In Vermont I'm part of a farm which is close to the warmest spot in Vermont
being in the Champlain Valley on the SE side of a hill with a square mile of
open farm land  and the lake to the south.  Except the coldest few nights of
the year are colder than here in NH.  Last spring I put in a lot of
expensive exotics from One Green World Nursery and others less exotic for
the owner and only lost a few. The heat and long season should help
nuts ripen that are margiinal  here.


Are you on NAFEX email discussion list [nafex@cet.com} ?  Ongoing questions
with a lot of response.
John van Hazinga

This week I have been hand pollinating the pawpaws.  They have blood-red
flowers (the color of raw hamburgers) about 1.5" across which are supposedly
pollinated in the wild by carrion beetles.  In my yard they attract ants and
other little crawly things including an occasional beetle, but do not get
pollinated.  Two years ago I discovered that the female part of the flower
(a round green sticky ball) is ready a week before the male part (dark red
pollen) and they bloom over a two week period.  So I go around scraping pollen
off one of the two trees and carrying it over and stuffing it into flowers
that still have a green middle, then take pollen back from that tree, etc.
for half an hour or so. Two years ago we got over 20 pawpaws that way. Last
year I left the trees alone - two pawpaws and both fell off.  An expert
suggests hanging road kill in the trees to attract pollinators.
        The juneberries are self-pollinating okay, as is the gooseberry and
the two different clove currant species.  The plum is a total loser even with
a few other varieties grafted to it.  The apricots missed last year but fruit
trees are often alternate bearing.  The strawberries are starting to recover
from a late fall transplant but the asparagus did not make it at all.  The
Nanking cherries have both been hit by some pest or disease but are growing
new shoots.  So are the Japanese lanterns (edible when ripe, related to
tomatoes and ground cherries and tomatillo).

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