Orchard People

[00:00:00] Introduction to the UK's Fruit Tree Heritage
Susan Poizner: In the United Kingdom, every region has its own fruit tree story,
and each area has developed over hundreds of years their own cultivars and their own orchard styles.
During my recent trip to the United Kingdom,
I was lucky enough to visit
a town called Ludlow,
and this is a beautiful old market town that has those
old fashioned narrow lanes.
Buildings that are so historic
from hundreds of years ago,
and even an old castle
from the Middle Ages,
I went on a walk through the town and
found myself in an area filled with gorgeous old homes, and on one of the brick walls outside the homes, it said.
Apple trees.
right beside that was a vintage garden chair, metal, white garden chair, and there was a box of apples on it
and the box had a sign saying, please help yourself.
So these were homegrown apples that had been grown in the garden of this house.
It reminded me that, in England, fruit trees aren't really just part of the landscape. They're part of everyday life.
So in this episode,
I'm taking you on a journey and we're gonna explore
how fruit tree culture continues to thrive in the United Kingdom,
from formal collections of fruit trees, to
regenerative orchards,
and even to community farms.
[00:01:27] Exploring Wisley RHS Garden
Susan Poizner: Our first stop is
the Wisley RHS Garden in Surrey.
It's home to one of the country's most impressive collections of apples, pears, plums, and figs,
and that includes heritage cultivars and modern cultivars as well. There, I met Jim Arbury, who's cared for these trees for more than 40 years.
Hello.
Jim Arbury: Hi.
Susan Poizner: It's really nice to be here. Can you start off, just tell me what is your name and what do you do?
Jim Arbury: I'm Jim Arbury. I'm RHS horticultural specialist, essentially, fruit specialist. So I particularly deal with a lot of the technical issues with fruit, and do some instruction for students and visitors and staff.
Susan Poizner: How long have you been doing this job?
Jim Arbury: Came in 1982. When things were different, control of pest diseases using pesticides and sprays. That gradually changed as we went more into what you'd call integrated pest management. And the last few years, they've stopped actually using pesticides altogether and fertilizers.
Susan Poizner: Tell me about the main fruit collections that you have.
Jim Arbury: We have apples and pears and plums of tree fruits, so some of them are freestanding orchard trees as bush trees, and some of those were planted in 1949 or 1950, when the collection was first established here.
Susan Poizner: The bush trees Jim talks about, are vase shaped with branches that start just a few feet from the ground to make them easy to harvest.
But the standard trees have a very different shape. Their first branches don't start until about six feet up the trunk.
Tell me about this structure. What kind of structure is this?
Jim Arbury: This is what we would refer to as a standard tree. So it's got a tall stem, six feet or more, before the branches start.
And they were grown in traditional orchards. And one of the reasons for the tall stem was because they'd be under grazed, often with sheep, at certain times of year. So you needed to get the branches up above the reach of the sheep who'd obviously like to eat the smaller branches and possibly fruit.
That's why they were originally grown that way. And they make a lovely tree.
Susan Poizner: But how do you harvest it?
Jim Arbury: Yeah. Eating and cooking apples, you'd need a long ladder. With cider apples, a lot of them are harvested by shaking the tree and picking 'em off the ground, or rather, using machines to pick them off the ground.
Susan Poizner: While both the bush trees and the standards are shaped for practical reasons, in another part of the garden, the trees are not just productive. They are living works of art.
Jim Arbury: The trained trees we're doing around the World Food Garden are actually based on some of the French designs. France and Belgium is where a lot of those were developed, but they have been grown in this country for a long time, particularly in walled gardens in the past, the big grand wall gardens.
But they're also really good for growing in smaller gardens because you can grow them against walls and fences. So when you've actually only got quite a small garden, they're ideal, many of them, to grow. So they've certainly got a very modern use, really, in our gardens of today.
[00:04:46] Holistic Fruit Tree Growing at Wisley
Susan Poizner: At the Wisley Garden, what inspired me most wasn't just the fruit trees and the extensive gardens. It was the passion and dedication of the people who nurture this place every day.
Annie Butler: Hello, my name is Annie Butler, and I am a former student of the Wisley Diploma. I'm now a full member of staff with the Edibles Team.
As part of my course, I made sure to be spending time with specialists here to really look at how can we produce fruit in a holistic way. How hard is it to grow fruit trees holistically?
I would say probably one of the biggest things that we've experienced at Wisley since we stopped spraying is that, not spraying means that you might have this real upsurge in your insect damage in one year. But we are looking at that integrated pest management. We are really trying to think about, okay, what if we go and pick some off by hand, but leave some of our native birds to pick off themselves?
And so, yeah, that's probably one of the biggest challenges, I'd say. And also how are you managing your orchard floor? So we are really into meadows here.
But it's really keeping on top of that management. That can also be a challenge in a busy time of the year.
Susan Poizner: For Annie, fruit trees don't exist in isolation.
Meadows, pollinators, and birds are all part of the orchard community. And she sees another kind of community growing, too. Between people.
Annie Butler: I worked with some charities in the UK, where I went to spend some time in their kitchen gardens and their allotments to look at how growing food together can build communities.
My area of interest was people seeking asylum in the UK. It's quite a big topic at the moment, and what I found is that you really can build some beautiful connections in between people who've just arrived in the UK and need to find their way, and also for host communities as well.
Susan Poizner: And what do you think it is about fruit trees and gardening that really helps people to connect with each other?
Annie Butler: I think that food is the great unifier. It is so important. When you plant a fruit tree, you're investing in your future. And so, if you've just arrived in a country and you plant a fruit tree, come on. I think that speaks for itself.
Susan Poizner: I really loved what Annie said. Planting a fruit tree really is investing in the future, and that philosophy also guides my next guest,
[00:07:48] Chiltern Heritage Orchards: A Regenerative Approach
Susan Poizner: who is Lindsay Engers
of Chiltern Heritage Orchards. Lindsay was a guest on a previous episode of this show.
After you listen to this episode, you may wanna go back and learn a lot more about his philosophy.
Lindsay's Orchard is a living example of how local cultivars and healthy soil can transform the way we grow fruit.
So tell me. Where are we?
Lindsay Engers: We're in the Chilterns in the UK and we're pretty high up. We're about 620 feet above sea level.
Susan Poizner: Okay.
Lindsay Engers: And as you can see, we're in a very sunny nook, and this is a certified organic orchard where we grow a mixed range of heritage, very rare, and maybe not so rare fruits for restaurants.
My name's Lindsay Engers. I'm the owner and founder of Chiltern Heritage Orchards. It started in 2016 with the idea of growing heritage fruit, in some form or other, for the public. And we thought, originally, we would start off with a cider and perry orchard, but we quickly realized it was much more likely we would sell heritage fruits to possibly restaurants and people that are interested in heritage.
So we launched that business and we planted lots and lots of really rare, almost extinct, but very successful in the past, fruit trees: apples, pears, plums, damsons, greengages, cherries. Enormous range.
Susan Poizner: Now, when you're planting these rare varieties,
Lindsay Engers: Yeah.
Susan Poizner: Often, they're considered harder to grow. So how do you deal with the challenges of growing fruit trees that are not modern, disease resistant, easier to grow?
Lindsay Engers: There are many myths in fruit growing, and one of the myths that we've busted, I think, is that different fruit trees require special treatment if they're more prone to a disease. What they all require is a really healthy microbiome and an organic systemic protocol, which they get.
So once they get that, there's not been a tree that we can't grow successfully. Even more difficult ones seems to respond equally well.
Susan Poizner: For years, we've been talking about, with humans, eat yogurt. You have these organisms inside your body that will make you healthier.
Lindsay Engers: Yeah.
Susan Poizner: And so, for a fruit tree, it doesn't have a tummy. It doesn't.
Lindsay Engers: No.
Susan Poizner: And so, its microbiome is in the soil.
Lindsay Engers: Absolutely. The root systems, and then within the plant itself, there's a microbiome on the leaves. There's a microbiome in stem. Even within the fruit itself, everything is full of fungi and bacteria, if particularly, if it's organically grown.
That's what makes it work.
Susan Poizner: How do you make the soil so welcoming so that it can support fruit trees?
Lindsay Engers: It depends where you start from. We started from unplowed land, which was pasture. It was just a pasture, really, for hundreds of years. So it's never really been subjected to disturbance.
So the less disturbance, the better. But if it has been disturbed, sow grass. I would grass it down with as many different diverse species as you can. I'd mix wildflowers in. And I would then very quickly start to plant it up with the protocols that we talk about: the rock dust and the friendly fungi that we add to the roots, and obviously the seaweed sprays.
And that's pretty much it. The ecology of the area will start to come in.
Susan Poizner: One of the biggest problems that people face is drought these days.
Lindsay Engers: Yeah.
Susan Poizner: It's an issue because, if it doesn't rain and you don't have an irrigation system, you're in big trouble.
Lindsay Engers: Yeah.
Susan Poizner: How do you deal with that?
Lindsay Engers: When we plant, we put a membrane around the roots, which we talked about in the podcast, and that semi-permeable membrane gives us between four and five weeks of drought proof. We've had an incredibly dry summer. It hasn't rained really for six months, from the end of February through to September.
None of the trees in this orchard, that are cropping, have been watered. Some of the very young pears around the barn have been, a few times. But nothing that's got fruit on that's actually commercially being harvested has had any additional water added to it. Yeah.
Susan Poizner: And I've also noticed you wander around the orchard, you see all the beautiful cultivars, the healthy fruit, healthy leaves.
Lindsay Engers: Yeah.
Susan Poizner: No codling moth, no apple maggot.
Lindsay Engers: No.
Susan Poizner: What's going on there?
Lindsay Engers: There's a number of things that are going on. Most important thing is that we have a huge number of predators that live in the orchard permanently. So we have them predating on the moths themselves. So the bats, for example, predate on moths.
We have dragon flies that fly around. They catch the adult moths. We have a huge number of spiders which catch the moths in their webs, particularly in the spring. We have predators that will capture the moths, if they're overwintering on the trees or if they're living in the soil.
Susan Poizner: What do you find is special about growing fruit trees here in this part of the world?
Lindsay Engers: I think what's special about the Chilterns in particular is the very high light levels that we have in the hills, so that makes a huge difference to the fruit quality.
We also experience very low temperatures compared to the rest of lowland England, so we can have much longer freezing periods. So we do benefit from that because that gives us a much longer sort of fruit chill, which we need about 1,000 hours of fruit chill. We get that quite easily.
We also have soils which are silica and calcium rich. So both of those nutrients are very important to fruit quality.
Susan Poizner: Okay. Piece of advice for anybody starting on their fruit tree adventure?
Lindsay Engers: Okay. Always try whatever possible to be as diverse as you can, but grow what works locally. Do your research first.
Read the books. Look back at the archives. Where you live has probably got a very interesting old fruit culture. Use that as your best friend. Don't try and use modern cultivars if they don't work in your area. Use cultivars that have been road tested.
You will find your way through much, much quicker.
[00:13:31] The Artistic Fruit Trees of The Newt in Somerset
Susan Poizner: From the scientific and ecological world of the Chilterns,
I headed Southwest to see how fruit trees can be grown as a form of art. I visited the Newt in Somerset.
This is a luxurious country estate that combines
history, design, and horticulture in breathtaking ways.
My tour guide was Arthur Cole, Head of Programmes at the Newt in Somerset.
Arthur Cole: We are here in the heart of Somerset. Deep Somerset.
This is Hadspen Estate. The, we have this Georgian mansion in the Palladian style. This was built between 1742 and 1747 and replaced a house that had been built in 1687 and was completed in 1690.
And so if you look immediately south from the front door down, you get this. avenue here. That's what we call the South Avenue. South Avenue actually was first originally planted in 1687 when the first person who got here, a London lawyer called William Player arrived and he wanted to show off that he was educated, sophisticated, a worldly man, a dedicated follower of fashion. So if you are gonna buy an estate in Somerset, in the late 17th century, you are going to put in a pretty French looking garden.
Susan Poizner: For more than 300 years, this estate was celebrated for its gardens, but it remains strictly private. That changed in 2013 when South African entrepreneurs Koos Bekker and Karen Roos bought the property and opened it to the public. They restored and expanded the gardens. They planted a cider orchard, and they added two luxury hotels and three restaurants and a number of shops. All of these things were united by one theme, according to Arthur.
Arthur Cole: We are a lot of different things, and to truly understand what that all comes in together as being, you have to think about what's our motivation, what's our intention, what's our driver? And that is creativity, that is imagination, and laying that out across this beautiful landscape that is Somerset.
Susan Poizner: So let's talk about the landscape. I've noticed that fruit trees play a huge role here.
Why are fruit trees important? What role do they play?
Arthur Cole: The first thing we have to look at is our climate. We are here in the southwest of England. We have a very moist and wet and quite mild climate. This does not lend itself to growing arable crops. So over the last few centuries, and probably even before, where they couldn't grow the cash crops of wheat and barley, we would grow what we could, which was grass and trees. So this is where you'll get the main part of your dairy being produced for the UK, and a huge amount of your apples being produced.
Susan Poizner: There is so much to see at the Newt, but at the heart of it all is the Parabola Garden, an incredible circular walled garden showcasing espalier apple trees in many shapes and forms.
Arthur Cole: Welcome to the Parabola. All right, come in, Susan. Here, we've arranged the apples in the Parabola Walled Garden by their counties.
Down at this place, down at this area, we've got Devon, and so you can see it laid out on these. So these are all Devon varieties.
We've got Dorset varieties as well.
Gloucestershire there.
And as you move through the maze, you move through the counties.
It's not done geographically. It's done alphabetically. So you won't find necessarily Cornwall next to Devon.
Susan Poizner: For anyone who loves espalier, this place is a dream. In the Hampshire section, the local cultivars are grown as step over trees. These are tiny apple trees planted just a foot or so apart, and they'll never be allowed to grow taller than knee height.
Despite their tiny size, they still produce fruit. It's a playful and practical way to edge a garden path or to line the walkway to your front door. Further inside the maze, near the water feature, the Somerset cultivars are trained into an apple tunnel. Then in the Northamptonshire section, the local varieties are woven into a Belgian fence, a precise lattice of crossing branches that creates an elegant geometric pattern.
And there's more. Across the Parabola Garden, you'll find apple trees trained into all kinds of sculptural forms, like a perfect globe or a three dimensional goblet.
Even outside the Walled Garden, espalier trees continue to appear. The circular walls are covered with fan shaped fruit trees, and as you wander towards the onsite shop, maybe to pick up a bottle of the Newt's own cider, you'll spot two whimsical designs. One espalier is shaped like a cider bottle, and the other one beside it is shaped like an apple.
Even the stone used to build internal supporting walls helps to support the health of the fruit trees, according to Arthur.
Arthur Cole: The structure we have in place, this is created with dry stone walls, so there's no concrete in here.
This is all a local stone called Forest Marble Somerset stone laid down, which was created about 160 million years ago, when Somerset was under a warm, shallow, equatorial sea. And this is made up of dead sea creatures that gives us a slightly alkaline soil, a calcareous soil.
And this seems to work pretty well with the apples. They seem to like it as long as we can give them enough space to move down into, and this is why these guys are looking pretty healthy.
Susan Poizner: Every detail here, even the soil, supports the health and artistry of these trees, but maintaining them is a huge task. All of the fruit trees at the Newt are grafted, meaning that the desired variety or cultivar is joined onto the roots of another compatible tree called a rootstock.
The rootstock determines the tree's eventual size and vigor. The European apple cultivars here are grafted onto a dwarfing rootstock called M.9, which helps to keep them compact. But the English espalier apple trees are grafted onto MM.106. This is a semi dwarfing vigorous rootstock that naturally wants to grow up to 15 feet tall.
Each tree was purchased as a one-year-old feather, a young grafted tree with a few side branches. But every year, these vigorous trees naturally wanna put on a lot of growth. Left on their own, they'd quickly shoot skyward. So, how do you keep these trees so beautifully compact and controlled? Arthur says the secret is simple: judicious and copious pruning.
Arthur Cole: We prune these four times a year. So these were planted as 1-year-old feathered maidens back in 2017, and now we're pushing 2026. They don't look like the biggest trees. That's because these guys are getting hit hard four times a year.
And we like to check that growth because it's part of the form. Some of these varieties are really vigorous. Some aren't. They're all on the same rootstock, but some of them will just shoot off. So you'll see our team in here four times a year, pruning these guys back, and trying to concentrate the fruiting spurs as low down the plant as possible.
We don't have any pesticides. We have no fungicides, and we don't have no herbicides. It's quite labor intensive, but it's rewarding as well. It means that any of the children can come in here and happily pick these apples without the fear of any pesticide residue.
Susan Poizner: The espalier designs reflect centuries of fruit training tradition. Every inch of space is used to show the endless possibilities of growing fruit trees.
Arthur Cole: So the designs that we are showing, in terms of the fruit training and the fruit pruning that is going on here, really show ,again, our intention. What is the purpose of having this collection? Is it just to hold on to old heritage varieties?
Not so.
As you've noticed, Susan, the form of these plants is clearly integral to what we're doing within this collection. The different forms of espalier, everything from Belgian fence to stepovers, single cordons, double cordons. We want people to come here and be inspired and be delighted, but also to understand what is our niche, as the Newt, within horticulture.
Nobody is the best at horticulture. There's no such thing. Even if you're Kew or Wisley. Nobody is the best at horticulture. However, you can be the best at a specific discipline within horticulture, and we want people, either in the Americas, Africa, the whole world to say, where's the best place to go for trained fruit?
The Newt.
After seeing
the artistry
of the fruit trees at the Newt,
I wanted to visit a place where fruit trees connect people, not just through beauty but through shared purpose.
[00:24:06] Community and Connection at Highbridge Community Farm
So I headed to Hampshire near
the historic city of Winchester to visit Highbridge Community Farm.
It's a grassroots project where volunteers grow food together, they share skills, and they care for the fruit, trees and gardens. As a community.
Andrew Ross: Hi, I'm Andrew Ross, and I was one of the 10 people who helped to start this community farm back in 2010.
Penny Velander: My name's Penny Velander, and I'm the Experienced Grower here, and I was one of the founding people for the community farm.
Andrew Ross: We were all members of Eastleigh Transition Network and we, in those days, we knew we had to move away from using oil because of its impact on CO2 levels.
Penny Velander: We found the site by writing an article for the local Borough newspaper, saying that we were looking for somewhere to grow some vegetables.
The local farmer who owns this land, he saw it, contacted us, and said he had one and three quarter acres, and would we be interested?
We came and saw it and said, yes, definitely. We're interested.
Andrew Ross: We produced a flyer, which we took round about 8,000 homes in the area, and we got over a hundred people who were interested and they signed up.
Penny Velander: Originally, it was just the one and three quarter acres, which is on the other side, and there was nothing there at all. The farmer had grown sweet corn on it every year and just dug it in. So he plowed it for us.
Andrew Ross: We split this area into 20 plots, and in the first year, we had 10 teams with 10 team leaders, and they were growing one crop each. So one crop group grew potatoes, and one crop group grew parsnips. Another carrots, another beans and peas. Courgettes did incredibly well.
Now, we had none of the infrastructure here that we've got now, the sheds and things. We just had one old army tent and, at the end of the first year, we packed that army tent with courgettes that have grown the size of marrows just 'cause we just couldn't get rid of them.
Penny Velander: We had very little experience. We had no watering system there at all. So if we wanted to water the crops we were growing, we'd come down to the pond with a watering can, fill the watering can up, and walk back up to the plots again. Which was okay if you were on the plots nearest to the pond, but if you were on the far end, that wasn't so good.
And over the last three years, we've been getting grants to make it a little bit more efficient for watering.
We have acquired the big plastic
containers called IBCs, and we had one on each plot. And we bought a pump, which we put into the pond and we pump water into the IBC, so that's made it much easier.
Robin: These are the roots of our courgette plants, so we cut the roots off and, because they take so long to mulch down, we actually put them underneath the fruit trees and they provide a nice mulch and a bit of a longer term fertilize.
Susan Poizner: So let's see you do it.
Robin: I'm Robin, and I'm from one of the Vegetable Growing Teams. There's also an extensive Fruit Team, and also there's a Soft Fruit Team. We've also got a Polytunnel Team and an A, we call 'em the A Team. They actually build all our structures here. So we've got polytunnels and all sorts of things like that, and they're responsible for that side of the farm.
We've got 20 vegetable patches here. We have teams, and each team looks after two vegetable patches. And this year, we've been growing, amongst other things, butternut squashes.
Susan Poizner: How does membership work here?
Robin: Altogether? At the moment, we've got about 120 stakeholders. A stakeholder can be a family or it can be a single person, or it can be two friends even.
And each stakeholder pays a stake at the beginning of the year. And for that, you can come here and the idea is that you work a minimum of 10 hours a month on the plots. Lots of people work many more hours than that, but that's the minimum for which you can buy a share of the goods that are produced, so it's a true cooperative.
Andrew Ross: We have the apple trees and other trees here. The top fruits. They came about right at the beginning in 2010 when, I was thinking when I retired, I would go and help an apple seller who sells trees to the public. I was there one day and he said to me, I'm going to clear this area of fruit trees. So I said, how you doing it?
He said, I'm gonna get a bulldozer in. I said, if I get my friends in from the farm, could we have the trees? So we went and over a couple of days, we dug up 200 apple trees of 60 different varieties, and we brought them back to the farm and we planted them in the Apple Avenue, an orchard at the bottom there, an orchard behind the pond over there, and an orchard in the next field.
And that's where the apples came. So they've now been in 15 years. They're doing fantastically well and we're getting marvelous crops.
Daniel: My name is Daniel and I'm in the Fruit Team. So basically anything to do with the apple trees from pruning, to harvesting, to anything that's got to be done.
Susan Poizner: And how many years have you been doing this?
Daniel: I retired in 2019 and I was looking for something to fill my retirement. And so I come here usually now twice a week. It's nice to get stuff that is produced locally, which is, we don't use any chemicals, and it's good for you to be outdoors. And I don't think it's heavy work. Sometimes a little bit. You do work a day, off a day, do a few hours, whatever you can do. There's people that come once a week, do a few hours, and then especially on a Saturday, we got all the produce there and you can see, you know, what is being produced.
It's lovely.
Anna: My name's Anna. I'm on the Soft Fruit team, but I joined the whole Fruit Team about eight years ago. We had an amazing man called Andy Waterman, who used to live six months of the year in New Zealand, and then six months of the year here. And he taught me how to prune the trees, but he said that I just needed to go and feel each tree and see how it needed to be pruned.
Once I'd learn the basics, I'd go from one to the other and I'd have to stand back, look at the shape of it, and look at the feel of it. Each one needed something different. It was really odd. This tree, we planted for Andy Waterman two years ago 'cause he died. So he liked to have a the odd drink or two, so we have planted a cider apple tree, especially in his memory, and it's doing rather well. We have a picture of him there. He is on the label, so we always remember him. We had many happy times in Winchester on pub crawls.
Susan Poizner: When you started this all those years ago, 15 years ago, could you have imagined what it has turned into?
Andrew Ross: No, I suppose not really. It's just kept going steadily. We wanted to be sustainable, so we didn't ask for grants from anybody because we want to be able to do it on our own. We could have had grants, which would've made things move quicker.
Robin: It's a great community. Everybody works together here and we share our knowledge.
So the people on the Fruit Team are incredibly knowledgeable. Our Experienced Growers are extremely knowledgeable, and they help the team leaders with anything that they don't know. There's so much that you can learn and you just keep on learning.
Andrew Ross: We have a sustainable community here, and probably the best thing about it are the benefits to the individual members of the community who get their fresh, organic fruit and vegetables, and also get exercise and companionship and friendship.
Susan Poizner: That community farm literally brought everything together. It is proof that fruit trees do so much more than feed us. They build community, they build connection, and they bring us so much joy
I met so many amazing people during this trip from the dedicated team at Wisley
I spent time with Lindsay, this amazing regenerative grower in the Chilterns.
I learned so much about the artistry and the approach of the Newt in Somerset,
and I was really honored to meet those behind the Highbridge Farm.
Each place showed me a different way that fruit trees can enrich our lives.
[00:33:52] Conclusion and Invitation to Join the Book Development Team
Susan Poizner: So that's it for today's journey, whether you have an orchard or a backyard fruit tree, planting a fruit tree really is an investment in the future, and it's one that keeps giving for generations to come. The UK trip really inspired me and I have been preparing for a while to write my next book. This one is on Fruit Tree Garden Design.
So if you are passionate about fruit trees and you'd like to be part of my book development team, I would love to have your help. You can sign up at OrchardPeople.com/newbook, that's all one word.
So what's involved is
you would get access to an early draft of the book. You will be able to ask me all of your questions.
I wanna make this book like my other books. I want them to answer all your questions before you even have time to ask them. And so I have literally dozens and dozens of people read my early copies. And I'd love it if you wanted to be one of them. If you sign up, you will get an early copy of the book and you will get a free ebook version of the book when it's ready to go and ready to publish.
You'll have the opportunity to be one of the first people to review the book on Amazon.
And if you sign up, you will get a series of
audio diaries from me, and that will be documenting my creative process as I make this book. So you'll learn all about the behind the scenes of what goes on when I am creating a new book.
So I'd love it if you could sign up, go to OrchardPeople.com/newbook and join me.
And by the way, I got really wonderful news recently. My recent book,
Fruit Tree Grafting for Everyone, just won
a gold medal for the best reference technical book of 2024 from GardenComm.
That's the garden communicators organization that I'm a member of, so I'm really happy with that.
So again, if you'd love to help me with this book, come and join me.
Go to OrchardPeople.com/newbook and sign up today. Get my audio diaries, get an early copy when it's ready. And thank you so much for watching today's show.
I'll see you next month. Bye for now.