About the channel
One gardener, one brutal climate, and an unreasonable number of fruit trees.
It started with avocado seeds.
Like a lot of people, I got into gardening during the pandemic — sprouting avocado pits in a small California apartment. There wasn't much room, but there was a lot of time, and watching something grow from a seed you were about to throw away is a hard feeling to quit.
Around 2022 I moved to Arizona, and the experiment scaled up fast. Queen Creek sits in zone 9b: summers that push past 115°F and flirt with 120°F, UV that sunburns plants as easily as people, caliche soil, and just enough winter cold to threaten anything truly tropical. Most gardening advice isn't written for this place — so I started generating my own data, one tree at a time.
Today the yard holds dozens of varieties across longan, jujube, citrus, starfruit, guava, yangmei, jackfruit, and more — plus bamboo privacy hedges, fragrant jasmine, and the odd botanical experiment like frankincense trees. Some of it thrives. Some of it dies dramatically. All of it gets documented.
The short version
Avocado seeds in an apartment
The pandemic hobby begins in California — small space, big curiosity.
Move to Arizona
Queen Creek, zone 9b. The training wheels come off.
The channel launches
Touch Grass Gardening goes live in October — garden tours, tastings, and survival reports.
A living field trial
Every planting is an experiment with a published result. The collection keeps growing — and so does the list of things that didn't make it.
What this channel is — and isn't
✅ What survived here
Every claim is backed by a tree in this yard. If a variety handled a 118°F week or a 28°F night, you'll see the evidence — and if it didn't, you'll see that too.
✅ Cultivar-level honesty
"Longan" isn't one plant. Six cultivars can behave like six different species in the desert. The channel compares them head to head, fruit in hand.
🚫 Not generic advice
You won't find "plant in full sun and water regularly" here. Everything is specific to extreme-heat, high-UV, low-chill desert growing — because that's the only growing I do.
A family affair
My wife is Chinese, and her father gardens in Wuhu, China — a climate with its own version of hot summers and real winters. Visiting his garden was a revelation: a 25-foot persimmon tree loaded with fruit and completely untended, ideas for varieties I'd never considered, and a reminder that serious fruit growing is a family tradition, not a solo hobby.
That trip reshaped the yard. Some of the best additions to the collection — and the confidence to try things like yangmei — came straight from walking his rows and asking "would this survive in Arizona?"
The kids are in on it too. The daughters eat kumquats straight off the tree, and the persimmons never survive long enough to make it inside.