It always impresses me when I see PPL living in the middle of a city with a small yard growing food. A friend of the family has a 10 by 15 foot backyard and three or four chickens on it. Some PPL have a garden that flows out to the sidewalk. Our local city council asked us if anyone would put a beehive on top of city hall and that is not uncommon on the island. This is hippie central.
We live on the outside edge of a small city. A friend helped me complete (today) a 7 foot by 19 foot greenhouse, using used sliding patio glass doors as the walls and the glass from same, covering the roof. I plan to run our roof rainwater out to it for watering, although water here is not a problem. It is practically a rainforest here compared to the rest of Canada. We only get snow maybe one day a year or not at all and last winter we had none. There is a lot of Brits living here Tyler as well as expats from over Europe. The climate is similar, but less populated.
I heard that there is a breed of lemons that will grow here, but you have to cover it over during the coldest nights of the year, but my friend gets lemons from it. We cover the figs but after a few years you don't have to apparently. We have peaches, figs, pears, apples, cherries, prune plums, raspberries, grapes and soon gojis. Even tho the honeybees didn't make it through last winter (my fault) we got mason bees in the spring, so they did an amazing job on the pears and apples. Peaches and cherries were a medium crop, last year we were drowning in peaches and pears with our honeybees. The figs are amazing. Always lots of prune plums. The grapes are in too shady an area to do much. We just got some thornless blackberries. I also harvest the rosebuds for vitamin C and I save the peach and prune pits and break them open for the B17
I also did a few things like milk thistle for the seeds (Cleans and repairs the liver), coriander seeds, potatoes, celery, tomatoes, Daikon radish, swiss chard, kale, carrots etc but each thing was generally only in small quantities. The chickens would dig up any visible soil for the worms and kill the young plants. Next year we will be better organized. Everything just grows like crazy here including weeds.
Unfortunately either a raccoon or an eagle/hawk or a weasel got our three chickens, so next year when the garden is better protected from them, we will get some again.
Our life is certainly different than when we lived in the north.