JoeReal

Hello Everyone!

I'm Joe Real. I love growing plants and experiment on them in my yard. This is a long post, and will try to start as far as I can remember. My first plant was a lima bean, planted it when I was around 4 years old, watered it myself and got to eat the beans. I planted my first banana when I was 5 years old, it was a Senorita variety. It bloomed after 3 months, then have ripe fruits about 7 months after planting. After eating the ripe fruits, I was hooked to growing plants. In the elementary grade, I have biggest or the most number of garden plots in our school. Although we were assigned only one per student, I talked to the lazy ones and took over their plot, of course, they still get the grades.

I USED TO have a knack for sciences and mathematics and spent my High School in a special school for the technically gifted kids of our country, the Philippines. In first year high school, equivalent of Grade 7 here in the US, we already learned the Krebb's cycle, glycolysis, and anaerobic fermentation, in fact my first science project, I learned to make good wines from tropical fruits without the use of sulfites. Unfortunately, gardening was not in the curriculum in that school, but I find time to help the custodial staff maintain ornamentals and some ladscape, and I managed to sneak in planting of some fruit trees like guavas, calamondins, star fruit somewhere at our school, and got to eat their fruits too.

Entering college, I chose Agricultural Engineering to blend my love for Math, Sciences, and growing plants. I finished that degree well ahead of everyone else in our class and have authored several internationally refereed scientific publications before getting my degree. I worked as a scientific and academic researcher supporting international rice research scientists. I was primarily involved with statistical analyses of various scientific experiments using my own statistical software tailored for agricultural scientific analyses, also with micrometeorolgy, energy balances in ecosystems, instrumentations and computerization of data logging. I also personally have my own experiments, measuring ammonia volatilization losses directly from the field, developing methodologies in agricultural micrometeorology, radioisotope tracing and partitioning of nutrients and fertilizers. I always enjoyed to be at the leading edge of agricultural research, and working in an international organization, I had access to the latest personal computers. During those times, personal computers became affordable for most offices and people, and so practically concentrated on writing a lot of computer software for number crunching. Working in the scientific community for number crunching analyses does not bring financial reward unlike our business counterparts, but nonetheless, I stayed on for 7 years as I love doing my job. By this time, I already received several national and international awards in my field of work and it started to get boring.

I grabbed the opportunity when I was invited to pursue my graduate studies at University of California, Davis about 15 years ago. I pursued Agricultural Ecology. I used my combined skills to do crop modeling, simulation, expert systems, and also real experiments. Also became productive and received several awards of excellence in the software that our team developed. I was also granted permanent residency by the US for having satisfied the highest preference category for immigration, the equivalent of consistent achievements in the extraordinary ability category. While doing my graduate studies at UC Davis graduate studies, I got to do some gardening in communities, and in my research, I enjoyed visiting some off-beaten places and the back roads of California, going to various lakes, and enjoyed fishing a lot too.

Around that time, the Silicon Valley was at the start of explosive growth. Just like most immigrants, the American dream of owning a house became priority, but my degree in Ecology will never allow me to afford one (not to discourage others in the field, but that was just my happenstance). There are too many Ecologists and funding were few and far between, and so the financial future was bleak, at least for my line of work in Ecology. So off I went to Silicon Valley, lived in the upscale Pleasanton area, and then resigned from my work there to build my own software company. I was at last able to afford a modest house with a small yard, and then found time to finance my long-lost dream of growing my own fruit trees. The company was later merged, and here I am, but no I did not become rich, but we survived through the 9/11 which created a severe setback to our company. Our company is now recovering, it is only a matter of time. While dreaming about what's coming, I spend my spare time in the yard and my hobbies.

I love challenges even in our backyard. Tried to use what I learned, oftentimes going overboard. So I push the envelop further in what I can grow here, and that is where I took up the challenge of growing bananas and have them fruit outside in the yard. So I carefully studied various microclimate variations around the house to enable guavas, avocadoes, bananas bear fruits. At the same time optimize production of temperate fruits as well. So I planned to have fresh fruit harvest at least every two weeks the entire year, and harvesting fresh fruits every week the entire year including winter is now a near possibility with my current collection. No, I don't have a big yard. I have a tiny yard in our primary residence, perhaps less than 2,000 sq ft, most it is lawn.

I currently have more than 275 different varieties of fruits in this tiny backyard. I even have berries and vegetables too, as well as roses and other ornamentals. I tend to optimize planting in three dimensions of space, also time, practicing relay cropping of some vegetables over fruit trees. To fit the varieties, I do multi-grafts, and have only 48 planting holes but was able to cram more than 275 kinds of fruiting plants.

Most home growers plant trees based on how they see them in the orchard, and so they end up planting two to four fruit trees in their yard which easily achieve a commercial sized tree. Come harvest time, it becomes unmanageable to harvest the more than 20 bucket loads of fruits within one to two weeks time frame, most of it wasting and rotting away. And after that quick harvest, you are devoid of fruits most of the time. So I do what I think makes more sense for my tiny yard and keep multi-grafted high density planting. My tree spacing are between 3 ft to 6 ft apart which keeps them small, allows me to plant several times more variety and I also keep my trees small by summer pruning. In this case, by choosing cultivars of various harvest dates, I have a prolonged harvest season, with quantities of fruits that are much more manageable to harvest. I currently have fresh fruit harvest every two weeks the entire year including winter, but that soon will change to every week the entire year. We have citrus during the winter to spring. Early spring to summer we have berries, apricots, early fruiting nectarines, midknight valencias. Then summer we have apples, early plums, mid-season peaches, pluots, summer valencia oranges. Late summer we have different kind of European plums, I would still have peaches and nectarines, but will have European and Asian pears. Then the fall season I have apples, raspberries, peaches well into October, quinces, some late plums. Then late fall, we have persimmons, mandarins, and the start of other citruses. Of course I have 5 kinds of lemons as well as calamondins that can be harvested the entire year through, although the peak production starts in November to December in our area.

The excess fruits I turn into wine. I always find time to make wine every now and then. So nothing is wasted in our yard. Whatever is left, I turn into wine, and so far have made about 50 kinds of fruit wines in the US, most are from the backyard.