Well, I didn’t mention tomatoes. And I’m slowly replacing my grass with a sort of food forest. It may not be native wildflowers, but I don’t think I’m lost.

The point in the article assumes you are solely reliant on rain for watering your plants. Where I live it doesn’t rain for like three or four months in the summer, so that argument is invalid. I use irrigation in my orchard every couple of weeks to deeply soak the area around a tree. The wood chips around the trees do help prevent the soil from drying out because they keep it cool. It takes heat energy to evaporate water. And since the mulch blanket keeps the soil cool I only have to water the orchard once every two or three weeks.

One thing to bear in mind is many of these plants don’t grow true to seed. Avocado, peppers, tomatoes, etc., you may get a plant that produces a fruit that resembles the one the seed came from. You may not. I’ve even grown peppers from seed packages that weren’t true to the variety on the label. All it takes is one bee to fly in from a hot pepper plant, for instance, and while the fruit made from the flower that bee pollinated will be true-to-type, the seeds of that fruit won’t be.