With their matching clothes and arrogant gait, they all kind of look the same at 70-80 mph.

Just so you know, being planted near black walnut trees also makes things grow slower. But yeah, I imagine that Maine would depress just about any tree…

Amen brother hallelujah!

Continuous harvest is the best! We can’t just stop eating when the plants stop fruiting, so having successive fruiting seasons in a year is really helpful. If durian fruited year-round… monoculture would be tempting.

Do you trellis the blackberries or just let them sprawl everywhere?

Yes, that is a bush. What do you like about it?

Diversification is key to any successful investment strategy.

How big do those trees get?

…Close enough.

You don’t. Bamboo is not your friend. Bamboo is not anyone’s friend.

Kill it before it can escape and consume everything that you hold dear. Fire helps. Dynamite is better.

Yeah, give saskatoons a try! You’d be surprised what’s possible even in your climate.

put out a sucker below the graft

We tell the trees to grow, and they do grow, but just to spite us. (That’s called “malicious compliance.”)

(non-native) purslane species

I don’t think that it matters at this point. Native or not, it really is a useful plant, not only for the garden, but also for those sidewalk cracks where nothing else seems to grow.

I’d be worried about runoff.

You’d only need to prevent the water from spreading it around until it breaks down. If you compost it on a small raised platform with a roof over it, you shouldn’t have much issue. For any minor spillage, you can plant something around the compost platform to absorb it. Once the compost breaks down, runoff would be a concern only due to the loss of hard-earned nutrients, which you could also reduce with vegetation and mulch.

I’d also like to do some cover crops and chop-and-drop this fall for mulch.

I’ve heard that buckwheat can work as a winter cover crop, though I’ve never actually seen it done. Do you have any Acer negundo popping up? That would probably be choppable and droppable, though more suitable as mulch for the fruit trees than the garden beds. If you have any Elaeagnus umbellata in your area, you could cut it down for woody mulch as well, but I don’t recommend planting it. For mulching the garden beds, some large herbaceous plant probably makes more sense, but I don’t know the cold-climate equivalent of banana, and the closest things to Tithonia diversifolia probably wouldn’t grow back very well. I do NOT recommend grass.

As an honourable mention… Robinia pseudoacacia is another potential source of woody mulch, but it’s probably the nuclear option. I don’t know if there are any cow pastures or old copper mines near you, but if so, then this could probably reforest them if you let it grow up to produce seeds. The neighbour’s lawn wouldn’t stand a chance. If it isn’t already growing in your area, exercise extreme caution. This plant is not a toy.

Good doggies. Now plant trees.

Kill it before it can reproduce.

What about your greenhouse-grown tomatoes? Are you really going to let the neighbour win?

In order to flower well, longan usually needs a “winter” season with min temps <12°C and/or less rain. While fruiting, hot and wet is best. At sea level in the tropics, the low temps usually don’t occur, and even if the winter is dry enough for longan to flower (but not dry enough to kill it), the other half of the year usually doesn’t get as hot as subtropical summers, so the fruits might not develop properly. Either you have a strange tropical breed of longan, or you are very lucky to have the right conditions where you live.

Frozen? Probably a ‘Mongthong’ harvested unripe in Thailand. I highly recommend going to Malaysia or Borneo and trying a fresh durian instead. You only get one first durian, and you owe it to yourself to try a good one.

I don’t want to ask for your exact location, but longan at sea level is… unusual. Don’t take it for granted. Cherish it.

Nice! Cherimoya and lúcuma are the two cold fruits that I wish that I could grow.

That’s like Florida… wow. If you’re already on the limit for apples, then further warming of the winter will probably put an end to them, but it’s still impressive that you have them at all. Do you know if cherimoya fruits well there?