Oooh, smart thinking. Do they still have the seeds available on Ebay? If so, link?
They offer a few other interesting plants too.
They have quite a few cool plants!
Spineless Opuntia, @UnicornEmily ! 
Sale priced listing for those same STX-1. 10 seeds for ~$20 instead of 9 for ~$27.
A little bit 
about $2/seed.
They are pricey, but germination has been ~100% and they always send a few extra seeds.
1 Like
Since you mentioned the spineless opuntia I’ll also add this other place that specializes in cold hardy palms and cacti…
1 Like
Thank you for the link!
Looks like it’s $25 for 10 seeds (when you include postage), which is a bit more than I want to pay right now, but I’ll put it on my list of things to consider buying sometime. It definitely looks promising; I’d just want it to be about half that price before I’d buy it on a whim. 
I planted three of my Moringa stenopetala seeds this morning! In case anyone’s curious, I bought this eight-seed listing on Etsy a few weeks ago:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/1698130220/moringa-stenopetala-african-moringa
It looks like the seller sent me an extra three seeds, so I have eleven to plant, and I’m stoked about that!
1 Like
I like their shop name, pretty funny.
Hopefully if/when I get seeds I will have enough to share!
1 Like
That would be awesome! I’d love to get some from you. I’d love to get enough seeds from mine to share, too!
Two species of moringa that are at just the right point in domestication to have lots of genetic diversity hanging around, while also having a lot of appealing trait selection already done. That’ll be fun!
2 Likes
What is moringa
Turning Moringa into a warm season annual for growth in cooler regions is another pathway to consider exploring if you manage to put together a diverse mixed up population of founding species.
2 Likes
Moringa oleifera is a fast-growing, drought tolerant tree native to India.
The seed pods and leaves can be eaten and provide a lot of nutrition. It is also used medicinally, and often commercially grown for oil production.
Its normal growing zones are 8b-11.
There are also other species of Moringa which include Moringa stenopetala, a species from Africa.
There are a few fast growing varieties with a shorter average lifespan and are grown as annuals. I’m not sure how they handle cooler temperatures but I would think they could be adapted easily. I think germination would be the tricky part, they would most like require warmer temps and would need to be started indoors if the season was too short.
My climate is long hot dry summers and short cold wet winters. And with a lot of short term temperature fluctuations in between. So I think I have more opportunity working in the perennial direction.
Someone a zone or two colder might benefit more from the annual work.
Sounds like we have a similar climate, Justin. Your profile says you’re in north Texas, zone 8a? I’m in the middle of Utah, zone 7b. I’m in a valley, with tall mountains on three sides. How about you?
I get 18 inches of rain a year, most of it in the winter. We usually have 90-100 degree daytime temperatures from May through October, with basically no rain. Our winters tend to have daytime temperatures of around 30-50 degrees. So the top of our soil tends to get a lot of freeze-thaw cycles, and our soil underneath mulch rarely freezes at all. So I can easily store root crops in the ground all winter and pull them out to eat almost any day it’s not snowing. Is that similar to your climate?
I’m thinking that fact that my soil basically never freezes solid in winter, as long as there’s a bit of mulch on top, makes it pretty reasonable to try moringa as a dieback perennial.
I’m also planning to grow katuk. I’ve just started a thread about that!
1 Like
Yeah I’m just northeast of Dallas.
No valleys or mountains here, we’re flat.
We get 30 inches of rain a year, a lot of it in late winter/early spring.
We get inconsistent rain and pretty rough hail storms from later in the spring and through summer. That’s also main tornado season so we usually have some high winds during those storms.
Usually pretty dry by fall and early winter.
We do get a few ice storms in winter. And often at least a half inch of what we call “snow” but it’s usually more like the ice from a snow cone.
90-100 degree daytime temps from May through October sounds pretty similar. By July 90°F is our nighttime temperature, I’m guessing you may cool down more at night being in a valley?
Our winters sound similar as well. We usually drop into the upper 20s at some point. We get a lot of fluctuations in winter where we can go from 32°F to 70°F in a day or two. The rapid warming can cause a lot of problems.
The last few years we have lost a lot of our trees to something called ‘radial shake’ where the temperature swing basically causes the bark to separate from the trunk.
The biggest difference is probably our soils. I have a thick black clay soil that is like working with pottery clay. That’s the nail in the coffin for me, when it’s cold and wet some stuff just rots.
1 Like
I am south of the DFW area and Justins description is about the same for me.
1 Like
Yeah, thick clay is definitely different from my pure sand soil! I was starting to think your climate sounded easier than mine, but then you mentioned clay soil in conjunction with lots of water in winter, and . . . yeah, that would make winter gardening a challenge!
My pure sand soil (which seems to contain zero clay, or even any kind of subsoil – a foot down and below that, it’s pure rocks) can be a challenge in summer, but it’s a blessing in winter.
Interesting! Our rain patterns are a bit different, then. It sounds like my rain stops earlier (and more completely) than yours does, but it also returns earlier. If I plant peas in late October, I can usually count on consistent rain being available to germinate them.
Yeah, our midsummer nighttime temperatures do get cooler than yours. Usually they’re around 80. Sometimes 70, or if we’re really lucky, 60. 90 degrees at night, yikes! 
January and February are our coldest months, and the ones when we get the most water. Usually there’s precipitation every other day, ish. Rain and snow are equally likely, and they often dump a lot of water down.
In December and March, we can easily go for two weeks without rain, which will usually be followed by rain that goes for days. There might be snow, but most of the precipitation will be rain. The water’s less consistent, and the daytime temperatures can sometimes go as high as 80, so plants sometimes need watering, but it’s usually not necessary.
In November and April, we can easily go for two weeks without rain, and when it comes, it may only be a light sprinkle, and daytime temperatures can often go as high as 90. So plants definitely need to be watered deeply once a week.
And then May through October, well . . . usually no rain at all. This May has been weird. We are getting tons of rain, and we actually got a snow in early May. (Which killed my tomato plants that I had assumed would be fine, because we were well past the last frost date, and I’d chosen varieties that can handle a few frosts if one snuck in anyway.) Snow in May!! I have never seen snow in May here before. That was crazy.
Yeah, I can easily see you having variations in temperature of 32 degrees to 70 degrees in a day or two. That’s what most days of winter are like here.
Actually, come to think of it . . . radial shake might be what happened to my peach tree and apple tree in the front yard, which both died this winter! They were both fine in February, and yet somehow, by April, they were both dead. I thought a rodent must have girdled them, because there was a huge spot of bark falling off the trunk near the roots, but if it was a problem with way too many temperature swings, that would also be plausible. Hmm, that’s a good long-term concern to keep in mind. Thank you for mentioning it!
1 Like
Sounds like you have the advantage of being able to easily work organic matter into your soil!
We have no rock layer, the clay just gets thicker the deeper you go and becomes light gray instead of the dark gray/black surface soil. I have improved a lot of my gardening areas but it’s really just a few inches of topsoil and is very difficult to penetrate the rootzone layer.
It could also be sunscald on your trees. With sunscald you see damage mainly on the south/west side of the trunk. It is from the sun raising the surface temp of that specific area, almost like a blister from a sunburn. It happens more on newly planted trees with thin bark and can be prevented by wrapping the trunks with paper tree wrap for the first few years.
This is a conversation I was having last night, actually. In our climate (temperate summer, snowy winters 5b), I was considering that working with STX1 and PKM1 to move toward a more cold hardy plant. I imagine it would end up dwarfing (maybe 2m?) since it wouldn’t be able to grow to full size (20-30m?) as it would freeze during the winters. We’re getting minimal frost depth in the soil these days - it used to be 4ft/~1.25m deep, but now maybe 1ft/~30cm. If I could get some solid mulching going, they might make it. We’d also like to build a good greenhouse, which might be able to house them and keep them at a slightly more reasonable temp (who am I kidding…). 
1 Like
Ohhhhh! Now, that’s an interesting idea. I didn’t know sunscald could be a thing. They were both small trees (planted in 2022), and both had what looked like a rotted area on the south side of their trunks. It looked like it had formed gradually and kept on getting worse. That does sound more like a blister than an animal eating them.
Plus, we have a lot of feral cats in our neighborhood that keep down the rodent population, and I found a wild rodent-eating snake (which is harmless to humans) in our back yard last year, which I happily welcomed and provided more habitat for. So the chances of both trees dying from a rodent gnawing at the bark in the same spot, when the trees in my back yard did fine, probably aren’t very high.
On top of that, both of those small trees had groundcover weeds (a.k.a. a lawn I didn’t bother to mow) surrounding the bottoms of their trunks through 2022. Then, in midsummer 2023, I laid down cardboard to kill all the grass and put wood chips on top. Which means the bottoms of their trunks were shaded for all of 2022, and not for half of the blistering summer in 2023.
I think you’re probably right!
Okay, cool, that implies baby trees need a bit of shade around their lower trunks in my climate, so they need either a groundcover layer or a bush layer around them. (Or both.) That’s a common permaculture design, so it makes perfect sense.
Cool! Thank you! You have just helped me improve my future planning.
Yes, being able to easily work organic material into my soil is terrific! Digging a hole, dumping in organic material, and shoveling the sand back in place is easy. Well, except if you hit the rock layer, which is what happens the first time I do it. I try to dig down at least two feet, so I usually spend an hour pulling out enormous rocks (which I then use as a decorative border elsewhere). Then I throw in a ton of twigs and any kitchen scraps I have, until the hole is half-filled. Then I shovel the soil back on top. So it ultimately looks like the same as everything else around it, but stuff will grow way better in that place.
Do you have a Meadow Creature broadfork? If not, I highly recommend it. It works a treat to dig into my rock layer (much, much, much, much easier than a shovel), so it may be very helpful for your clay.
@jens, I think it would be awesome if you can achieve that. A cross between those two varieties may have a lot of promise. I’m totally rooting for you! 
One of the very appealing things about PKM1 is that it’s the most common variety grown for its seeds, so you can find 50 on Amazon for only $7.51, plus free shipping . . .
Which, you know, I may possibly be eyeing. (Steeples fingers.)
1 Like
hahaha… You are the worst best enabler, and I love you for it. 
1 Like