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Hi all! So, my property is on the westward (slightly southwestward) slope of a mountain in the catskills. One of the areas that gets the best sun in our relatively dark little valley is a steep hillside, 6+ hours from mid march to, presumably, mid october. I am working on terracing parts of it (pics here). It’s a ton of fun building the retaining walls, and it’s gotten me to finally work on a lot of brushy invasives (multiflora rose and honeysuckle mostly). It will give me a lot more usable space… but I’m not sure what to use it for?

I have plans to do blueberries for sure (something that’s never really been an option here because of heavy clay soil and lack of sun hours) and lupine, probably in the same terrace. Native raspberries. Sunchokes maybe? One terrace w a mix of echinacea, milkweeds, coneflowers, etc. And I may save space to grow winter squash in some of them, maybe with a trellis arch going from one level to the next. I’ll probably broadcast clover in all or most of them, etc.

But I’m looking for other ideas. Do you think sun from about noon to 6 (at which point it tends to go behind the trees before setting behind the mountains) would be too harsh for currents? What about hardy kiwi? Other ideas? I am thinking abt filling one small terrace w ‘discard’ rocks, and sand from the streamside, and growing eastern prickly pear – anyone from the catskills region have experience growing it? It’s native but I’m still suspicious it’ll be hard with our wet winters. And springs. And all years.

Folks keep talking about using LLM (nicknamed ‘AI’) to try to answer plant questions, and bemoaning that the data those LLMs scrape from is un-verified blogger heresay. People keep talking about creating a database of professionally verified plant information about specific species, featuring things like:

• Soil parameters
• Best growth conditions and tolerance outside of that
• Bloom and fruiting timeline
• What can it be used for?

I want to let y’all know that This plant database already exists.

It’s called https://plants.usda.gov/characteristics-search

>Go to the Characteristics Search

> Click ‘Advanced Filters’

> Click on whatever category you want. (If you want to find edible plants, go to ‘Suitablility/Use’ and check ‘Palatable Human: Yes’

> Click on whatever plant you’re interested in.

> Click the tab inside that plant for ‘Characteristics’

> Scroll down to view a WEALTH of information about that plant’s physiology, growth requirements, reproduction cycle, and usable parts for things like lumber, animal grazing, human food production, etc.

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If you’re dissatisfied with the search tool (I am, lol) and wanted to build a MASSIVE database of plants, with a better search function, this would be a great place to start scraping info from – all of this has been verified by experts.