Yes, convert that lawn! Two plants worth considering are Prunus persica ‘Kernechter vom Vorgebirge’ and Amelanchier × lamarckii. I’ve heard great things about them, but they were growing in SW Germany, so do your own research first. What do you use for a ground cover? Clover can be a valuable ally in the fight against the grass.

That is an impressive agroforestry system. :) Which chestnut species do you grow?

You have a ton of potential in South Florida! (Until sea level rise floods everything, of course.) Will you add more fruit trees? The nurseries in your area have some amazing options. Which mangos and avocados do you grow? I’m curious about the quality of ‘Monroe’ and ‘Oro Negro’ avocados.

It’s strange what’s happening with your avocados. Do you know if the bloom timing of avocados in your area has changed at all? If they were previously getting pollinated by trees that now bloom at different times, then that could explain the lack of fruits.

If it’s a choice between banana and grass, I recommend banana 100%. Pine Island and Excalibur both sold Dwarf Namwah last I checked, and that should be very productive. Excalibur also sells FHIA-18, which doesn’t taste so much like banana. I recently posted about it here, though the linked PDF is in spanish.

Off to a good start! Do you know what else you want to add? Forelle pear might be worth considering for your area, but do your own research.

Sounds like you’ve got a great thing going! Maintaining fertility by mulching with cut vegetation and composting “waste” is really important. How big is your fruit forest? Do you plan to diversify further and fill up the field? How small do you plan to keep the trees? I’ve found that pruning tall trees with a pole saw is really tedious and exhausting. Do you have a particular method that’s easier?

The whole book is available here for those interested.

Yeah, I hate when the temperature falls below 18 degrees Celsius! There have been times when I’ve gotten so uncomfortable that I’ve had to put some pants on. It’s possible to survive it, for sure, but it sucks.

a berry pie without any sugar but what’s already in the berries shouldn’t be too bad.

Wolves have been observed to subsist on almost exclusively blueberries during the height of the season in Yellowstone, so I’d say the glyphosate residue in the flour is much more of a risk than whatever fruit is in the middle.

THIS is the actual definition of Veganism, directly from the people who coined the term:

That definition is from 1988, so it’s questionable whether it came “directly from the people who coined the term” in 1944. Here is a re-publication of the 1951 Leslie Cross definition:

“The object of the Society shall be to end the exploitation of animals by man” and “The word veganism shall mean the doctrine that man should live without exploiting animals.”

Allegedly someone read The World Peace Diet (by Will Tuttle) to Donald Watson on his deathbed, and Donald Watson said that the book encompassed everything that he intended when he founded the Vegan Society. Make of that what you will.

Probably ‘Silk’, AKA Latundan, from the Philippines.

While it’s important to recognise the gravity of the problem, it’s also important to recognise concrete steps that can be taken to address it, and this article doesn’t really go into that. For example, to stop the Amazon deforestation and burning, it is necessary to both stop the “global appetite for burgers” and shift to reforestation and sustainable decentralised food production. This is one example of people trying to do that, but such projects need to scale up massively in order to have an impact on such large problems as climate change.

Not all, but yes, some components are inevitably lost in the drying process. There’s a reason that dried fruit is often treated with sulphur dioxide as a preservative. Of course, preserving the colour doesn’t prevent the loss of large amounts of essential nutrients like vitamin C. Fresh is best whenever possible.

I haven’t run the numbers, but your assessment seems about right. The lower the humidity, the greater the potential for evaporative cooling, and the higher the max tolerable temperature. No reason to avoid moving to the tropics anytime soon.

Let us not forget that this is primarily due to deforestation, whether directly (due to loss of tree cover for moisture retention) or indirectly (due to climate change).

People are working on it.

We need both, obviously. Ending animal agriculture is the most practical way to achieve it.

Anyway all policy scenarios with any hope of staying below 2ºC, let alone 1.5ºC, include a lot of net reforestation. So we’ll have to turn this around, somewhere.

It seems like people are working on it in various places, especially in the Amazon:

• https://amazonrestore.codeberg.page/
• https://www.eco-libre.org/vegan-communities-ecuador/
• https://cocolandia.org/locations/

Did you sort this out?

Did you ever find an answer to this re: reforestation projects? Could be useful to relocate termites in order to introduce the microbes to grasslands.

Projects like this are in desperate need of serious people to help them scale up. If even a small fraction of the people who see articles like this (or videos, or whatever) were to contribute some of their time and energy to the projects themselves, then the odds wouldn’t be so against them, and that little bit of progress would become reforestation of entire regions. The question isn’t whether it’s possible for a project like this to succeed; the question is whether there are enough people willing to make it happen.