I stayed with Matt Hunter - wanderingupward.org - hung out with him on the five acres he's working on using permaculture methods, and went to the Orlando Permaculture meeting. He gave me a bunch of ideas for places to check out in Florida, including so e that I've now been to!! He introduced me to Erica Klopf - floridaediblelandscaping.com - down in Naples, who is a permaculture teacher and designer. She also started a nationally recognized food forest at the university here. She took Matt and me to the Fruit and Spice park. It's a wonderland of fruit trees where the rule is: if it's on the ground you can eat it. I tried for the first time canistel, gamboge, as well as had star fruit, avocado, sapodilla, sugar apple. Yummers!!! There we met up with Eric: a yogi staying at the ashram in nearby Homestead, also knowledgable in permaculture, he's spending the winter down in south Florida. Afterwards we we drove down to the keys to Keys Cable, a wakeboard park, where Erica led a permaculture design course a year ago. It was amazing to see how much abundance was to be had. We harvested and pruned pigeon peas, moringa, greens, herbs, cassava. We planted a bunch of seeds. The next day we went to a historic site for fruit trees: Grimal Grove - . There were a bunch of on-of-a-kinders for the USA. Mangoes, Jamaican Cherry, Sapote, Mamey, Carambola, and many many more. This dude Patrick Garvey is restoring this historically and botanically significant spot after it fell into disrepair. Cool to see!!
i have moringa, pigeon peas, bananas growing in south bay home...would love to have a jack fuirt tree. chiku and cheremoya,...couldn't find heirloom varieties of those in LA...any idea?
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