As long as the back slope will not be shaded by other trees, then it's a perfect place to plant citrus and avocados on the same drip system. Their water requirements are similar, with avos being a little higher, but considering the cost of an avocado these days, even here ($1.89 each!!), the watering bill might be worth it. Also pretty on the hillside if you're considering things that produce would be pomagrantes. They have very pretty reddish orange flowers, and low maintenance, almost completely pest free, and provide delicious fruit in the fall. Excluding their lovely fruit, there are a very attractive landscaping plants in their own right. You can then add in some other lower water requirement plants such as lavendar, Santolina, rosemary, Mimulus all great pollinator attractors.

If you're planning on having a veggie garden on the left side, the planned hedge is going to block a lot of your sun as they'll cast a shadow on the area to the north of the hedge. Not so great for a veggie garden. You can make a veggie garden attractive by planting flowers (annuals or perennials) along that south edge of the raised planter instead of a hedge. You'll have something to detract a bit from any veggies that might get a wee bit scraggly, and also provide some attraction for your pollinators, again, so you have a good harvest. Consider maybe an attractive fence with some nice posts and finials perhaps? to give that veggie garden its own presence and create some garden art. I attached a nice link from Sunset magazine that has some good planting suggestions for slopes and other parts of your yard that are water-wise. Pretty choices of grasses to consider, if you decide to go a different way from citrus. Btw, I love your hardscaping! Especially how your landscape designer encorporated your decks in the back and especially the front. Exceptional use of deck and hardscaping! Can't wait to see photos of the work in progress, how exciting!!

Patty S.

Here is a link that might be useful: Sunset Magazine: Water-Wise Gardening

Thanks so much for your advice. I really appreciate it!

link didn't work.

Whatever fruit trees you plant, make sure you have easy access to get the fruit. Having to crawl around slopes to get oranges and avocados got really old fast here. We had to add a pathway on the slope to make the fruit trees worthwhile.

Unless you really love limes, plant a true dwarf. Even our true dwarf lime tree gives us more than we can ever use, and we use limes a lot. Go with fruit you are going to eat. So much ends up going to waste. Oranges you can always make juice out of and they are easy to give away. Clementines are really good also easy to give away. Meyer lemon, dwarf thornless mexican lime, Valencia orange, Clementine (they are addictive), coastal Naval. Those are the ones worth planting and watering.

If you don't eat kumquats normally, having a tree of them isn't worth the water.

Hoovb,
I took it down as I posted on another forum here and got a lot of slack for it.

Thanks for your advice.

Hoovb gave excellent advice! I, too, added flagstone steps up our hillside, instead of ones just sort of carved out in our DG/granity soil, so we can get up to the top of the slope to get to our citrus in the backyard, and same in the front yard. And absolutely only grow what you love. I have a fabulous Meyer lemon, several blood oranges and grapefuit hybrids, a Cara Cara navel, several mandarins, a Bearss lime, and a few odd assorted interesting citrus, some grown for their ornamental value (like my 5 variegated Calamondins that line part of my driveway). I keep everything pruned down, so I don't have to get up on a ladder and to keep the crops down - I'd prefer many smaller trees and variety, than a few gigantic trees with overwhelming, but limited variety fruit production. And talking about kumquats, I had to laugh - we had a kumquat tree in our very first home we ever owned. I had never seen one, before. Was told how to eat them by the previous owner, and if they were too tart, to cut them in half, and then dip them in sugar and then pop them in your mouth. They were sort of a novelty, so I only occasionally had them. The odd thing - the little kumquats kept disappearing. No one could figure out where they were going until I looked out the back window one morning. There was my German Shorthaired Pointer, very gently pulling a kumquat off the tree, and chowing down. She would only eat one or two every morning, but it apparently was a habit. We cracked up, and just let her eat them. The tree was lovely, though, and very ornamental, so we and the dog all enjoyed it, just in different ways, lol!!

Patty S.