Orchard People

[00:00:00] Introduction: The Waiting Game vs. The Hustle
They say that good things come to those who wait, and that can be true. For instance, if you plant a fruit tree today, You may have to wait four years before you can enjoy the harvest and that takes patience.
But there are also some who say that good things come to those who hustle. So if that's true, then waiting isn't good enough. For example, if you want to start a business, you need to work hard in order to enjoy success. Or if you want to learn a musical instrument, you'll need to practice. Now, when it comes to fruit trees, I would say it's a little bit of waiting and a little bit of hustling.
That's because fruit trees take time to grow and mature. But if we do some research and give our trees lots of correct hands on care, we can enjoy fruit trees that will mature faster and that will be more productive. And that's what we're going to talk about today.
[00:01:06] Guest Introduction: John Cline, Fruit Tree Expert
My guest on the show is John Cline. He's a professor in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph in Ontario, and John's focus is on fruit tree physiology, and his goal is to identify the factors that affect fruit quality and yield. So now, before we dig into our conversation, I would love to hear from you. Tell me about your experience with fruit trees.
Have you found ways to speed up the harvest, or does it take forever for your trees to produce fruit? If you're listening to this show live, just send us an email with your comment or your question. So now for today's conversation, John Cline, welcome to the show today. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to join you.
I'm so glad you're here. So tell me a little bit about the work you do. Are you primarily doing work to help commercial growers? And if so, how?
[00:02:10] Understanding Fruit Tree Growth and Cultivars
Yes, I work at the University of Guelph, and I'm primarily located at the Simcoe Research Station, which is about an hour actually from campus, and my purpose is to really, educate orchardists, those that grow fruit trees commercially, and to help them improve fruit quality, yield, and orchard management practices.
Yeah. In terms of what role does the choice of cultivars or trees, how important is the choice of trees that the grower makes in terms of maximizing, getting a tree to grow faster and more be more productive? The choice of tree can play a big role in affecting how soon you get a fruit as well as how much fruit that can be achieved, so we have differences in species, for example, in southern Ontario, where we're where I'm communicating from today, we have a temperate climate. It's on the northern limit of production, but we can grow peaches in the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario, sweet cherries, tart cherries, and in other parts of Ontario, we can grow pears and apples and plums, and each species has different genetics that affect how quickly the tree grows and how much fruit that can be produced.
I've noticed that in my orchard. Essentially what I see in my orchard, and I don't know if this is very common, that the cherry trees grow like crazy. They grow really quickly, but some of the apple trees, oh my gosh, you could wait forever to get a harvest from those trees. Is that a generalization or is it actually accurate?
It's a good generalization. Cherries grow more than apples, in general, in a given season as well as peaches. Peaches are very rapidly growing. When you look at the actual amount of growth in a single year on a peach tree, it can be about a meter long in shoot growth compared to an apple might be half a meter.
The genetics of the species play a big role, but also there's a lot of other factors that can affect the growth of each species. And for example, the climate or the soil can have a huge impact. That's interesting. Okay. So also in terms of varieties, one thing that I've heard, and I don't know if it's true that Honeycrisp apples, which are notoriously finicky and hard to grow, that they are incredibly slow. I've read online that Honeycrisp apples can take seven years to produce their first harvest. is that true? From my experience, no. Partly true. Honeycrisp tree, we group in terms of apples, we group them into weak or vigorous or moderately vigorous varieties. The genetics of the cultivar play a big role in how quickly they grow. But there's something else that we refer to as precocity, and that is how quickly the tree begins to bear fruit. And actually, Honeycrisp are very weak growers, but they're extremely precocious. So they'll start to flower the second year after planting and begin to produce fruit if you let them. Sometimes that's not a good plan though, because it can result in the tree growing slowly and then becoming runted over time or small.
So you introduced two interesting terms that I've seen a lot of and sometimes when you go to a fruit tree nursery, they will talk about vigor. And they will talk about precocity or precociousness. I don't know if it's the right way to say it. What's the difference between the two? Tree vigor, when you think of any plant, really a flowering plant, there's vegetative growth. That is the leaf and the shoot growth. And there's the reproductive growth that is the fruit and flower, that are coming from the flowers. So tree vigor refers to the vegetative growth how much the tree shoots grow, leaf growth, etc. Precociousness or precocity relates to the flowering and amount of fruit that grows, and in particular, how quickly it's produced after the tree is planted.
So obviously for a commercial grower they want to bear fruit fairly quickly so they can pay off the the huge investment in establishing the orchard and having income coming back so they don't really want to wait too long. So for apples that's probably year three after planting that they want to see fruit coming back to start to generate revenue.
So for us for home growers as well or for small scale growers, you can research and learn a lot about rootstock and the role that the rootstock plays in how big your tree is going to get, but also how quickly it's going to grow, how resistant it is to disease. Can you talk to me about a little bit about rootstock and what role that plays in this equation?
Yes, rootstock plays a huge role in the orchard. So maybe I should, first of all, explain what a rootstock is for those that might not know. When you buy a modern tree from the nursery, you're usually buying a tree that has two parts to it. One is the variety of the apple or fruit that you want.
For example, in Ontario, some of the popular apple varieties are Honeycrisp, empire, Mcintosh, Golden Delicious, etc. So that is the top part of the tree, but there's actually a different root system, and it's genetically different, and that's called the rootstock. And the rootstock is used for a number of reasons, but primarily to dwarf the tree or make the tree smaller.
It also does a number of other things that can benefit the grower, but that's the primary function of the rootstock to provide size control or control the vigor. Or control the vigor.
[00:09:10] Listener Questions: Tips and Techniques
Okay, so here we have, I have a few comments here, and this was originally from Facebook. So I put out on Facebook, I said, folks, what are the cultivars that grow fastest for you.
I've got a few interesting comments. I want to read them to you, John. This one is from Lisa in New Hampshire. She writes my Red Haven peach produced the fastest and most fruit. I have several varieties of peaches, pears, and apples. So that's interesting. So she's growing lots of different things on one site.
But the Red Haven beats everything. Does that say anything to you? Or is that an accident? Certainly, that's my experience too. We grow Red Haven at our research station, and peaches in general are very vigorous, and it's also important to add that not all fruit tree species like peaches and, more specifically, we don't have a lot of size controlling rootstocks for the peaches, so generally they grow a lot more than apples, where we have a huge range of rootstocks that provide size control. So I would certainly concur with your listener there from New Hampshire where Red Haven grows very quickly and vigorously. That makes sense. So basically, now I understand that what you're saying is these size control root S stocks, because they're designed to make your tree smaller, they may also be designed to get your tree to grow a little slower.
So maybe the smaller the tree, the less growth you get. The less growth, the less vigorous. Could that be? yes. That's actually the purpose of the rootstock. There's a lot of research on new rootstocks for sweet cherry and for peaches ongoing. There's also a lot of past and present work on new apple rootstocks.
And yeah, the primary function is to offer size control, but more and more important it's also to offer disease resistance, and in our climate cold hardiness, where we are at the dormant limit. So we want to make sure the tree can survive the cold winters that we experience here in southern Ontario.
okay, we've got a couple of emails here. Let's see. The first one is from Dawn, and Dawn is from Waterford, Michigan, and she says, Hi, Susan and John. Just saying hello today as it's the first time I've been able to listen to a live broadcast. And that's from Dawn. So thank you, Dawn, for that.
Now let's see who else here. Okay, this is from Eric from Hamilton, New Jersey here. For apples, we bend the branches down slightly below horizontal. And for pear, we bend the branches down too horizontal. This supposedly triggers the hormones of the tree to produce fruit rather than produce wood.
This is quite contrary to the crotch angles that are taught in the U. S. Wow, Eric. Thank you. What a great question. John, what do you say? Can you explain what his question is? Yes. The branch, we call this training of the tree training. And in modern orchards, branch bending is a technique to promote flowering and therefore fruiting. So when the tree is growing, when the tree or the shoot is growing vertical, it has a tendency to be vegetative. In other words, grow leaves and grow, compete with the main leader of the tree. If we want to switch it into growing fruit, we can. Do that by bending it and you bend it and tie it down with various techniques. So you can use weights or string, spreaders. There's various ways. There's no right or wrong way. And what that does is it changes the apical dominance of the tree. If you think of a tree, the very tip of the tree or the main leader is dominant over other parts of the tree and That's through a physiological process called apical dominance.
There's a hormone produced at the apex of the tree that's inhibiting the growth of the shoots down below. So the tree grows up tall and in a Christmas tree shape. Branch bending is a great technique to encourage the tree into fruiting earlier.
So very interesting. So essentially, by weighing these branches down, stopping them from growing upwards, we are actually switching our tree into a different mode. We're telling the tree, okay, it's time to produce fruit, don't mess around with too many leaves, we want some fruit as well. What a great question. Thank you, Eric.
We've got a few more questions here. So we'll go through this one is from Ashley from Knoxville, Tennessee. So Ashley writes just planted quite a few fruit trees, zone 7A so found your show of interest. Thank you for your work. And that's from Ashley.
Okay. And who else do we have here? Next we've got one from Carolyn. hello. My name is Carolyn and I reside in Edmonton, Alberta. I very much appreciate your email newsletter and your live radio shows. Could you please ask your guests to comment on this? I have noticed apple trees in my neighborhood hosting more than one variety of apple at the same time, likely from the owners grafting a new variety onto an established tree.
Can you comment? On if this is a recommended practice, how many varieties can be grafted at the same time? Thank you. So that's from Carolyn. Good question, Carolyn. And you're located in one of the most northern apple growing districts, probably in Canada, very cold winters. Yeah, a lot of the retail nurseries will sell trees that have multiple varieties grafted onto them, and this is done in the nursery using grafting techniques that they graft the variety into existing branches.
And there's really no limit to the number of cultivars that can be grafted. Probably it's only limited by the number of side branches that you can graft into and it's not done commercially. It's not very practical to do it commercially, but it's certainly great for the home gardener to experience these different fruits that might mature at different times, and it's certainly a great conversation piece. In a previous show, actually, we featured a person who has created the tree of 40 fruits. So this is a tree that he reproduces across North America, where not only are there different cultivars of one type of fruit, so like a bunch of different types of apples on one tree, he's got on one tree, various different types of stone fruits. So you may have apricots and peaches and plums all on the same tree. So that was an interesting conversation also on this show.
And let's see, we've got a question here from Jane. So Jane writes, good afternoon. Is there a rootstock that is better suited to clay soil? That's a good question, Jane. Really, we don't recommend any rootstocks for clay soil. There are some that can tolerate wetter soils than others. It caught me a little bit off guard, so I don't know which one necessarily to recommend. I'm sure you could find that if you Google under rootstocks, but generally, commercially, we recommend loamy soils or something with good drainage and clay soils generally don't have that. The apple trees really don't do their best in clay. I think that comes to mind Bud.9, B9, Budagovsky 9 is one that might tolerate heavier soils. But there are some that definitely don't so you want to avoid those. So Jane's job also may be to really work to improve her soil so that it will be more hospitable for apple trees in particular.
yeah. Now here we've got a question from Greg. Greg is from Bloomfield, Finger Lakes, New York. So Greg writes, I may send a question after I listen for a bit, but just reading the description and wondering about pruning, specifically aggressive pruning, and if it helps with fruit bearing time, the amount, and what kind of cuts would you recommend to get more fruit faster?
[00:18:50] Advanced Techniques: Pruning and Rootstocks
So that's Greg's question about pruning and how that can affect vigor and precocity. Good question, Greg, generally, anytime you prune a tree, it's going to reduce the size of the tree and it will delay the So it's not really a technique to speed up fruiting at all. Sometimes the trees get too vigorous, and as a rule of thumb, we generally do heavy pruning when it's dormant, like this time of year in the Northern hemisphere, and we'll cut probably no more than a third of the tree at one time, and then we would do more the next dormant period, and generally it's better to make larger cuts than a lot of small cuts if you're trying to thin out the tree, because anytime you make a cut, you're going to probably have regrowth. So bigger cuts will result in fewer locations where you're going to have a lot of possibly vigorous regrowth, but overall pruning is not going to promote flowering and fruiting. It's going to probably delay that. And what about over pruning? Because that's sometimes what you get. Pruning is important for the health of the tree, air circulation and things like that, but at the same time, if you over prune, then you can actually have so much vigor that the tree thinks it's going to die and it overcompensates.
Yeah. Over pruning, will generally lead to a very vegetative tree and it could suffer because it's not getting enough leaf matter or leaves to support the photosynthesis to grow with the tree. In most fruit crops, including grapes and tree fruit we want a balance. You need a balance of both vegetative growth and reproductive growth or fruiting flowering and fruiting.
And it's maintaining that balance is the secret, and unfortunately, it's not a one size fits all. It depends on the species, the cultivar, the rootstock, the soil, the climate, all those things come into play when you try to balance the growth with the flowering and fruiting.
So a couple more Facebook comments I wanted to share here. So Jesse in Sweden, Maine, Zone 4B, Jesse writes, Northern Spy is my most vigorous. tree. And Jesse says, and it only took nine years to set its first apple. He said last year, it was a good crop, but that didn't slow it down a bit. But nine years, what could be going on for Jesse that he had to wait that long for his Northern Spy to produce?
What is the Northern Spy? for those that are outside of North America, you might not know Northern Spy, but it's a very, old variety discovered in New York, and it's a very wonderful variety for cooking and baking, and it happens to be very vigorous as Jesse pointed out and it's also notoriously late to flower and fruit so those are very common characteristics of Northern Spy and some other varieties. The way to overcome that is really using a dwarfing rootstock. And we've done that in our orchards. We've used Malling nine rootstock, for example, and you can get flowering and fruiting and bring it down to about year three. So the rootstock itself can make a huge difference in both reducing the vigor and promoting flowering and fruiting much earlier. That's a great example. I'm glad we had that comment.
Now let's see. We've got another email here again from Carolyn. Carolyn writes, Thanks for attending to my question. Where can I find the podcast on the tree with 40 fruit, please send me a link if you are able. To happy growing. So Carolyn, all you have to do and I can send you a link as well. Go to orchard people. com slash. Podcasts. And you can scroll down and see previous episodes in the playlist. There's a playlist right there. And I think I did that show last year. It was so interesting. Okay. So hopefully that's helpful, but I will try and remember to send you a direct link to that episode.
Now a couple more comments. There are so many interesting Facebook comments here.
This one was from Tom in South Central Illinois. So this is what Tom writes. I have some Campfields, that's a traditional American cider apple, on M111, that's the rootstock that he uses, that have outgrown by far any other variety that I have planted in my orchard. All of the trees in my orchard are semi dwarf and they are mostly on the M111 rootstock.
On the other hand, I have some Harrison apple trees. And that's also a very old American cider apple tree. And the Harrison apple trees are also on M111. And they are the slowest growing of anything in the orchard. So Tom says he has three of each variety. Each group is planted within 75 feet of the other. They're mixed together. So he feels like the soil is all the same. The climate is all the same. So why would some of these trees, the Campfields that grow really quickly on the M11 rootstock versus the Harrison that's just so slow on the same rootstock. It's a very good question. I'm not too familiar with Campfield. I'm a little bit familiar with Harrison, but although I haven't grown that one, but I am familiar with some cider apples. M111 is quite a well classed as a semi vigorous rootstock so it produces a generally a fairly large tree relative to the dwarfing rootstocks. It could be the inherent vigor of those varieties. for example, Campfield may be more inherently more vigorous than Harrison. I don't have that information in front of me to know if that's actually true. If that's not true, some other possibilities are you do get a lot of variation in soil, even in short distances. That may play a role. Or you could have soil borne diseases in, for example, if you take an apple, if you remove an apple tree and put an apple tree in the same place, you can get diseases. We call it apple replant disease that could affect the growth of the new tree. So I'm just speculating on what it might be.
Another thing that can occur, and I'm not suggesting it's occurring here, but if you plant the union, where the tree is budded in the orchard, we call that a bud union, and that's the union between the cultivar or the scion and the rootstock. If that bud union goes underground, is covered with soil, the variety can actually develop its own roots, and that negates the effect of the rootstock. In this case, it would be M111. So it'd be like a seedling, a tree growing without a rootstock so that could make the tree grow faster. That's a possibility. You can quickly just inspect whether that union is above the ground. If it's buried, there's a chance that the tree has become scion rooted and that could explain why it's growing faster, but, those are a few reasons, they may or may not be the reason in this case. But I find it's a wonderful example because again, he's comparing them side by side, which I'm sure is what scientists you guys do, right? You need to make comparisons. Yeah.
Okay. One more comment, this is from Carl in Northwest Florida, and he writes, food forests imply shade, and that's something that must be considered. Also, I have gotten interested in the honey locust of the thornless types that allow a significant amount of sunlight to filter through. Carl is talking about people who grow their fruit trees in these beautiful food forests layered with native and other trees. And so I guess my question for you is, to what extent could shade slow things down or affect how your tree is producing if you don't even notice that you've got an overhead tree shading your tree?
It's a great question, Carl. If you think about any tree and particularly tree fruits, the driving force for any plant to grow is photosynthesis, and that requires sunlight. So intercepting that sunlight allows the plant to grow. So generally in fruit trees, if you're going to grow a fruit tree in a forest, you want a minimum of 30 percent sunlight. That's the threshold at which growers try to avoid. Essentially looking for, in a commercial situation, looking for about 70 percent interception of sunlight. The more sunlight, the better, but if you're growing a tree under a shady canopy, it will. A fruit tree on a shady canopy can grow, but it won't be as productive or grow as quickly as a counterpart growing in full sun.
And so he is mentioning one particular type of tree, the honey locust, which has very small little leaflets. Would they perhaps allow a little bit more sunlight through? Yeah, absolutely. I enjoy some Sunburst locusts on my property, and it provides a filtered sunlight and some light to get through.
I would think it'd be quite possible to grow a fruit tree under that. It probably will be much slower growing, but it may be able to bear fruit. Usually if you have too little sunlight, the first thing that will affect the tree is the formation of flowers and fruit buds. So I think you'll know pretty quickly the effect of the shading on the tree and its fruiting habit once you try that. An interesting twist to this question is in an earlier episode of this show, we talked about growing fruit trees in extreme climates like Arizona. And so in climates like Arizona, where it's like semi desert, they actually recommend planting your fruit tree With a little bit of shade, because he was explaining that it gets so hot that the baby fruit literally cooks right on the tree, so there are times when shade will be beneficial, depending on where you live and what your environmental conditions are. Yeah, that's a good point. Pacific Northwest and Western Canada had some extremely hot conditions this year and they experienced that excessive heat. Fruit trees generally, anytime you get above 30 degrees, photosynthesis shuts down or slows down and that affects the ability of the tree to cool and negatively affects growth.
So yeah, having some way for it to cool through shade or overhead irrigation can help the tree. Yep, that makes sense.
Okay, until now, we've talked about a little bit about the types of trees that maybe grow more quickly. Maybe they're a little more precocious. We talked a little bit about pruning.
So now let's talk about other ways that you can speed up growth and production.
John.
[00:31:42] Challenges and Solutions in Fruit Tree Cultivation
Is there times when vigorous growing fruit trees are not a good thing? yes, generally, as I mentioned before, you want a balanced growth on the tree. So excess vigor can lead to disease pressures. It can result in making the tree difficult to manage, to spray, to harvest the fruit, all those things that are not always good, and so controlling the vigor is important either through pruning or other techniques in the orchard. And also with regards to pest and disease. That's something that you brought up. When you work with commercial growers, I suppose that's one of their priorities because that would really slow things down, wouldn't it? And ruin productivity. Yeah, diseases and pests can have a huge impact, not only on the tree and the health of the tree, but also on the fruit and the quality. So growers are very cognizant of trying to control those, diseases and pests. And in our climate in Ontario, where it's a fairly humid and warm climate, lots of rain and moisture, some of those diseases are very difficult to control. For example, apple scab, much harder than drier climates like Washington state, more arid climates, they have an easier climate for growing organic fruit, for example, simply because of the lower humidity levels and lower moisture, lower rainfall events. So controlling pest and disease is going to be an important part of people's approach to having a fast growing and productive fruit tree, something that people have to think about.
Here we've got an email from Ellie. Let's have a look. She's in zone 4A in North Dakota on the edge of the Missouri Coteau. And so my soils drain extremely fast. Any recommendations for me as I go about planting my trees this year? I have about 100 fruit trees to plant all on standard size rootstock, but I have concerns about keeping them wet enough. Was planning on lots of mulch, but is there something else that I could do? Thanks. That's from Ellie. Yeah, thanks for that question, Ellie. Really, I think you've hit the key thing is mulch. There's various forms of mulch, wood chips, straw, that can play a huge benefit in maintaining soil moisture, especially in arid conditions. The other thing is regular irrigation. So if you have a very sandy soil, you want to irrigate a little bit, ideally through trickle irrigation, and frequent irrigation, so possibly every day, just to provide a good couple liters of water per day, if you have access to the water, or every other day. Certainly on a sandy soil, you want to do it more frequently than a heavier soil like a clay loam or heavier. Yeah, and I think that I'm suspecting the reason she's using a seeding rootstock is that's a cold environment and some of the dwarfing rootstocks don't survive very well in those cold environments and they probably the growing season is a little bit shorter. So I'm speculating that's possibly why she's growing them on a seedling rootstock. And some of those are extremely hardy rootstocks. Yeah, and I'm wondering in terms of so there is the standard root size. These trees will grow to be full size. They're not dwarfing at all. But maybe then if they managed to establish themselves, their roots to systems will stretch out so much that there'll be more surface area to collect the rain before it. Sort of sinks down into the ground water, right? Yeah, or they may actually penetrate deeper into the ground to access the moisture that is there. So that could be a good strategy for overcoming a sandy soil and an arid environment. I've always wondered in terms of the recommendations for sandy soil, you want to water more frequently.
And what happens? Either way, the water likes to flow downwards in sandy soil. It's going to go down fast. So why does it matter, why is it better to do a little bit every day than to do a lot one day a week? that relates to a relationship between what we call the soil water holding capacity and texture. So those sandy soils, if you have a really sandy soil, it just can't hold that water. It doesn't have the clay particles to prevent the water from just draining away from gravity, so that's why you have to supply a little bit of water much more frequently than heavier type soil.
I like to think of the clay particles as like a little storage. They have little cupboards attached to them. Somehow they managed to store a little bit of water and the tiny cupboards, whereas the sand particles, they don't store anything. No cupboards.
I want to make sure that we talk about fertility management as a home grower, as an amateur grower, you go to the garden center and they have all these fruit tree fertilizers designed for fruit trees. Maybe there's lots of nitrogen. I've noticed that all of them have different numbers for NPK. So to what extent is managing the fertility on your site and of your trees important in growing fruit trees fast and successfully? Commercially, nutrition or fertilizers are extremely important to the grower. And it's really no different for a home grower of fruit trees. Really, there are 16 essential nutrients in the plant. The most common ones we talk about are N, P, K, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium. Those are the, what we call the macro nutrients, the ones that are needed in higher amounts. And, really what we want to do is maintain an ideal level. We don't want to go below a minimum and we don't want to apply excessive amounts. And having a balance of these nutrients is important. So commercially, we do a leaf analysis. We'll collect leaves in a certain fashion, dry them down, grind them, send them to a lab. And they actually tell us how much nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, boron, zinc, iron, some of these essential nutrients are in the leaves, and that informs us whether we need to add more or less of a nutrient, and therefore, we're careful of the environment, we're not adding too much nitrogen that leaches into the ground. If we have excessive amount, if we have too little, then we have to apply more to get into these ideal ranges for the plant to grow and be healthy.
Yeah, that's interesting. So what you're saying is what matters is the nutrients that are in your soil, that there's no one size fits all. You're doing a test. You say you can dry up the leaves and send them for leaf tissue testing, but there is no one bottle of whatever that will solve all your problems.
That's correct. And really, a lot of researchers have investigated the forms of nitrogen and the forms of fertilizers. Really, it comes down to the actual element. these products vary in the way they're released to the soil. But when it comes down to it, it's really the nitrogen and the phosphorus ions that feed the root system that get into the tree. So sometimes the form is less important than the actual amount of actual nitrogen or phosphorus potassium that are applied either to the ground or to the foliage of the tree.
So I'm curious, in terms of your work, do you ever work directly one on one with commercial growers? Do you end up seeing success? Do you have rewarding experiences where you've worked with somebody or you know that your research is helping people to produce more successful harvests? Yeah, actually, that's one of the greatest satisfactions I get in this job, I do a lot of work with the commercial growers in Ontario. I do some studies right on their farms, and I do see enormous success by these growers, and they're working under extremely, sometimes difficult, situations with competition from outside of Canada. They're dealing with weather issues, increasing costs of production, but I do see a tremendous success, and some of our growers in Ontario and in Canada are leaders in the field, and it actually is a privilege to work with them, and I often learn so much from them just by being with them. They are a great teacher to me and I value that interaction. So it's a two way street. Everybody's bringing their expertise. They're experiencing. You're working together and you're saying, hey, let's own this. Let's make this go better so that we can produce marketable fruit that customers really want so that they don't have to import it from China.
Yeah. that's certainly my goal is to help Canadian and more specifically Ontario fruit growers. But I do work with organizations in other parts of the world and, yeah, the really goal is to produce sustainable fruit, locally, and we can do it here in Canada, in Ontario. And there's enormous potential for growth, but the economics are the other the challenge right now for many growers and the climate.
Yeah. Oh, climate change. Oh my gosh. Yes. Oh, are you seeing some challenges around that? We see much more variability in the weather. The main concerns with growing tree fruits is excess moisture or drought conditions. Some growers experience hail, cold winters. The tree is out in the orchard. It can't protect itself, so the growers have to find ways to overcome some of these challenges. They're dealing with often spring times where the trees are flowering earlier and that predisposes them to frost. So some of these issues are big and they're not easy to overcome. And every growing season, as they say, is different. And so each year, each growing season brings new challenges and often the weather's a big part of that. Amazing. I don't know about the rest of the people listening to you and this show today, but I just feel really honored to have the opportunity to work with fruit trees to let them teach me and show me their wisdom.
When you interact with the fruit tree, you realize it's not so simple. You don't just plant 1000 or 10, 000 trees and just wait for the payday, right? There's just so many things, delicate things to work on. That's absolutely true. It's really a package system. There's a system approach. There's many things that we learn to grow fruit trees successfully. Absolutely.
Okay.
[00:44:20] Conclusion: Embracing the Journey of Growing Fruit Trees
And it's funny John, because we're having this conversation today and I have been immersed in the question of what makes fruit trees grow quicker because so many home growers, if we grow anything, we grow a zucchini plant or something, where in the beginning of the season, you plant the seed by the end of the season, you enjoy the fruit and you have to adapt a little to fruit trees. You got to be patient. Yeah, so this has been a topic that I've been thinking a lot about, and so it has been wonderful to talk to you about it. And I really appreciate you coming on the show. It's been my pleasure, Susan. I'm glad to share this time with you and with your listeners, that's great. Okay, we are finished the show today, but if anybody somehow tuned in the middle of the show and you want to listen back to the beginning, there is a way you can do that.
All you have to do is go to orchard people. com slash podcasts. And once the live show is done. I edit it, I put it up there and you can listen back. You can also listen to previous shows and this is episode number 78. So there are 77 other episodes that you can listen back to where we talk about all sorts of topics around fruit tree care.
And if you want to learn more about fruit trees, you can go to orchardpeople. com where I have articles. There are videos. There's all sorts of good stuff that will help you. And again, if you are interested in my new book, grow fruit trees fast, just go to orchard, people. com slash grow fruit, and you'll learn all about it.
So that's all for today. I really hope you guys will join me again next month. And we are going to have another very interesting topic to discuss. So thanks everybody. And I'll see you next time. Bye for now!