Orchard People

[00:00:00] Introduction and Host's Fruit Tree Preferences
Susan: Hey everybody and welcome to the show today. If you've been following this podcast for a while, you know that I'm a little bit picky
about where I
buy my fruit trees. Usually I will buy fruit trees from specialist fruit tree nurseries. I feel like they've got great quality trees. There's a really wide selection. But, maybe I'm a little bit rigid because fruit tree nurseries aren't always cheap. Sometimes you can get bargain trees if you know what you are looking for.
And so that's what we're gonna talk about in the episode today. In the show.
[00:00:37] Meet the Guest: Josh Davis, Master Gardener
Susan: My guest is Josh Davis. Josh is right here. Hi Josh.
Josh: Hey.
Susan: So Josh is a master gardener. He's a fruit tree grower in South Carolina, and he's known on social media as Uncle Josh Gardens. Josh has managed to pack hundreds of fruit trees into just a few acres, and he buys his trees from all sorts of places.
Yeah, sure. I'm sure he gets some specialist fruit tree nursery trees, but he also gets them off Craiglist off the side of the road from big box stores.
[00:01:11] Secrets to Finding Healthy Fruit Trees Anywhere
Susan: So we are going to hear his secrets as to how to choose a really healthy, wonderful, productive fruit tree, wherever you go. And some creative ideas about how to get lots of wonderful trees at a good price, or even free. So we're gonna talk about that in just a moment.
[00:01:30] Engaging with the Audience
Susan: But first, if you are watching us on YouTube, I'd love it if you could hit like, subscribe, and drop your questions and comments in the chat box. Hopefully Josh and I will, for sure I'll be there, but maybe Josh will also monitor the chat and answer your questions, because we really like to have an interaction with you and hear about your ideas as well as to where you have found your best fruit trees.
Josh, welcome to the show today.
Josh: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It is truly an honor. I'm very excited to be here. Talk about fruit trees.
Susan: Oh my gosh, you clearly like fruit trees. You have lots of them. You share wonderful information on your social media accounts. You're always there showing us things, giving us wonderful tips in these wonderful little nuggets.
I really enjoy your Instagram posts, so thank you for that. I appreciate that. Yeah.
[00:02:25] Josh's Fruit Tree Journey
Susan: So tell me a little bit about where you started in terms of your fruit tree adventure, because were you always a fruit tree guy or is this more a new thing for you? I.
Josh: Ever since I was a kid, first of all, I'm just so excited to be here and talk fruit trees.
This is gonna be, this is gonna be great. But ever since I was a kid, I've always liked fruit in general. I would climb my mother's 30 foot Granny Smith apple tree to the very top and probably endanger my life as a young child, just to get that last apple. So when I was older, and I work in IT by day so I'm behind a computer all day, and I just really wanted to get out into nature and really improve my health by not sitting in front of a screen all day.
So I started gardening, I planted a few fruit trees, a couple turned into more. I thought this is fun. I'm gonna do container trees. And then all of a sudden now, somehow, I got a hundred trees really quickly, and I thought this is turning into quite a lot.
Susan: So tell me, where are you getting your trees from?
Josh: I get my trees from all over and it started as a hundred. It's probably in the couple hundreds now, but I am constantly looking online.
Craigslist, Facebook, OfferUp. Those are three of my go-tos. I also frequent a lot of the big box stores, Lowe's, Home Depots, Tractor Supply's here in town, and then obviously my local nurseries and online, always looking for sales. But I've gotten so many good deals. Even though I have hundreds of trees, it hasn't cost me tons of money because I know what I'm looking for and I know, okay, don't buy that one.
Buy this one. And that's why I wanna share that information with everyone else.
Susan: Okay, so let's dig in a little bit right now. In terms of big box stores, I have had such bad experiences. I told you when we were chatting before this story of, actually it was a garden center, I needed a tree last minute.
I needed an apricot tree, and I went and I saw that they had lots of apricot trees and they were packed together. And they had canker, so they were diseased trees. Like I looked for one and there was oozing canker and there was another oozing canker and they're packed together in a small area.
So I picked up one of the trees and I took it to the guy at the garden center and I said, this tree has canker. And he said, oh, don't worry, put it back with the others and take another one. And I'm thinking, first of all, they all had it. Second of all, as soon as you take a diseased tree and put it right beside another, even a healthy tree.
The disease will spread. So am I just unlucky in this situation or can you actually get healthy fruit trees from garden centers and big box stores?
Josh: I believe you can, and I've seen it both ways. So first of all, your experience is justified and I'm thankful that you actually talked to them because somebody needs to tell 'em.
And I ran into this the other day. I saw some Santa Rosa plums at, I won't mention the big box store. I don't wanna get 'em in trouble. But they were all purple leafed. And I was like, these are not purple leafed. And they had little holes in 'em. And I was like, what is wrong with these plums? And I looked it up.
It's plum leaf shot disease, like all of them were infected with it, and it was clear. So I went over, I talked to the guy. I said, look, I've seen Santa Rosa plums at this place for 10 years. I've stopped by and seen it. They're always green and they don't have holes in the leaves. You need to do something about these.
So if you didn't know what you're looking for, you might buy that and think, oh, that's cool. An ornamental sort of weird looking plum leaf. But really it was a diseased tree. That was very unhealthy and had spread through all of that batch of trees.
Susan: So you, did you tell them and did they take them away and stuff like that?
Josh: I told them. I'm not sure they took 'em away. I'll be honest, but all you can do is your best and then educate. And I use that to educate others to say, Hey, go look for this thing. Don't buy that, do this. And there's a lot of things that you can look for in trees, but I've honestly, I've bought more than half of my trees on sale, probably half of them from big box stores in some way, shape or form.
Susan: Okay. We're gonna go into that as well, but I just wanna also throw out an interesting point. I think sometimes you get mislabeled trees. I was working with somebody, I was doing a consultation with somebody with a multi fruit tree, and it was various types of cherries.
And so there were like, I dunno, Bing cherries and all sorts of sweet cherries. And then there was a sour cherry branch grafted onto that. And it was a multi stem. So I think it was a mistake because I'm not sure that you can actually graft together sour cherries with sweet cherries so, successfully in the long term anyways, so again, a lot of things to be concerned about. When you go to a big box store and you're poking around, what are you looking for? How do you check to see that this bargain tree, maybe it's an end-of-season tree or maybe it's just on sale, that it's a good tree to take home with you?
Josh: That's a great question. There are a lot of things I look for.
[00:07:37] The Importance of Pruning and Tree Shape
Josh: The biggest thing that I look for is bigger is not always better, right? I don't want a 10 foot tree that's got all the limbs straight up, really old, it's thicker than an inch thick. That's gonna be so much work to retrain back to an open form or 45 degree angle.
So the first thing I look for, is I look at the younger trees, I don't look at the really old trees, but then I'll actually pull it out of the pot. I know that might be controversial, but I'll pull the tree out of the pot.
I'll look at how the roots are. Are they encircling? How rigid are they? How long has this been in the pot for? One of the biggest things most people miss is, the base of the tree is what's called the root flare, and if that root flare is buried down, you can have roots that grow and girdle the tree if you don't know what you're looking for.
And sometimes it's as far down as four inches below the soil line and it should be level with the soil line. And that's really important because if you just plant that tree not knowing what you're looking at, it's gonna grow those roots around that point, and you really have to dig those roots off the top.
So those are just a few of the things. Obviously broken branches, obviously diseases, but definitely you want a tree that's got good branching structure, smaller so you can train it better.
Susan: And I love that you say smaller trees, because you think that a bigger tree is better because you think it's going to produce fruit quicker.
And at some garden centers, you can actually buy a fruit tree that has fruit growing on it, which means it's gonna be at least three years old. And you think, great, I get a harvest right away. What people don't realize is that this somewhat mature tree has its roots packed into a pot. It's gonna be in total shock when you plant it on your site, and if you were to buy a little young tree, it would catch up quicker, get stronger, live longer, and have a healthier, more productive life.
By planting that little guy, the little tree versus the big tree. I always feel so sorry for the big trees because it's like adopting them. They've got their stuff. They're gonna have more of a challenge adjusting to your environment. I think it's really important.
Do you ever find trees that are so young at garden centers that you can do a whip cut, which is like a, the cut that you do on a very young tree where you're basically cutting off all the branches? Will you ever get anything that young that you can really start shaping it right from scratch?
Josh: I have. First of all, I love that you personify trees like I do. Like they have feelings. It's like trees are people too, right? In a way. So that's fun. I've gotten some young 1-year-old seedlings online. There's a guy, I forget his name, but he sells a bunch, and I got pawpaw, I got persimmon, and he does a lot of like native things.
He grows from seeds, so I'll get those really small and then I'll graft onto them. I've never gotten any where I've grafted on directly and done like a whip cut right off of a big box store. I've gotten a pretty small, maybe pinky size, where I might do a multi graft, like top dressing, but I've never done anything where I've just cut the whole thing.
Now I do cut the whole thing off, but that's for another reason, which is to form low scaffold branches and a lot of people get shocked about that.
Susan: Yeah. To me, the whip cut is your very first pruning cut that you will ever do, and it's your way of shaping the tree. Deciding where your lowest scaffold branches are so you get to create the shape of the tree. You don't inherit a shape that just doesn't work. And I always wonder those companies that do grow fruit trees for nurseries that are older.
Do they prune the trees? What strategies do they use? Or are they pruning it more for, a decorative shape or something? Because I look at the trees in the nurseries that are older and I look at the shape and I'm thinking, that's not going to be an open, nice, good air circulation structure with lots of sunlight penetration.
I'm like, what were they thinking? Or maybe they don't prune them at all. I don't know. But, yeah, so those are my hesitation. Like I said at the top of the show, maybe I'm a little rigid. I just love when you can do it right from the start when you can shape your tree right from the start, it's super. But like you say, you choose a young tree and then you can use your knowledge about pruning to create a wonderful shape.
So that's all good.
Josh: You mentioned the whip cut. I've never heard it called the whip cut. I've always just called it an initial heading cut. So I always think of it like, Hey, I'm gonna cut this between knee and hip high. And I do that for every deciduous tree that I plant so that I can form low scaffold branches.
And a lot of people are like, when can I do that? I have so many questions around when can I make that cut? Is the tree too old? What if it already has branches? And I've done it as thick as an inch, the tree an inch around. I did a cherry, sweet cherry tree. I got that was 10 feet tall. I did it probably about 30 inches off the ground and it's already sprouted out, like tons of leaves, adding tons of new growth. So you can do it when it's a little bit older still.
Susan: Think about it Josh. It's interesting, it's called a whip cut because we're doing it on a whip, which is a year old tree, which is a tree that was grafted a year before.
It's just got roots, roots in one little branch. So your first cut at knee height, let's say, is the whip cut. But what you said was very interesting, because I know of an orchard, where basically they had certain type of an apple tree producing apples that are no longer popular, and they wanted to switch out the trees, so they had mature trees and they basically cut it off at the trunk.
And then they grafted, bark grafted branches on to change the cultivar. So trees are very flexible. And if you have a healthy tree, even if it produces fruit that doesn't taste very good, don't throw it away. Don't dig it out. You can switch it. And I love what you said about, using this quote unquote whip cut on slightly older trees, but I suppose sometimes you get a tree freak out where the tree is like, Hey, I don't have leaves anymore. I'm gonna die, so I should produce shoots and leaves so that I survive. And then you just get this big hairy tree with lots of water sprouts, and so you really have to know what you're doing or what would you say?
Josh: Yeah, you're right. It's gonna produce a vigorous, drastic response. It's gonna put all this growth out. Every bud's gonna put out three little branches on one bud because it's trying to get leaves out. And I'll actually go in and pull those off by hand. So instead of snipping 'em, I'll just snap those little new growth off when they're really young and green and let that come back out to form a well distributed branching structure.
So it's preferable to do it when it's younger, it's gonna heal better. You're not gonna have this big one inch hole that's gonna have to slowly close up. It's better to do it when it's younger, for sure.
Susan: I think this is great. This is pushing me totally outside my comfort zone in terms of starting with a young tree.
But I'd like how if we personify our trees, you're saying kids, you guys can do this. You got this. I've adopted you a little bit older, but I know we can work together to create a beautiful harvest. And I believe in you. Whereas I'm like taking the little babies and saying, I'm gonna sculpt you right from the start and we're gonna work together.
So yeah. Okay.
[00:15:30] Josh's Bargain Hunting Stories
Susan: So tell me a little bit more about some of the bargains you've gotten over the years. Now you've got a citrus tree story that you wanted to share.
Josh: That's a great story. I've gotten so many bargains and, at first, I didn't know what I was looking for and I went out and this guy posted on Craigslist, Hey, I've got all these citrus trees, I don't know, it was like 25, 30 bucks each.
And I was like, oh, cool. I had already gotten my first citrus tree, which was a free lime that I got off Craigslist, somebody was giving away. I had no idea what I was doing. And so this second set was the kumquat, and I believe it was like a Meyer Lemon. So I was like really excited. This is a kumquat tree, Nagami kumquat, which is like a standard type.
I get it home, do some research, oh man, this thing's really thorny. These leaves have three lobes. This is not a kumquat. And what had happened was the rootstock had taken over and it was a trifoliate orange rootstock, and the rootstock took over the whole tree. Now, fast forward a few years, I'm like, I'm not gonna throw this tree away.
I'll just grow the rootstock. I grew it in a pot and then I air layered off a branch of it to have its own roots. I planted the mother rootstock , along my fence line right above my blackberry. So it's a 15 foot trifoliate orange tree, and I have the limb of it grafted into a pot.
I grew that as rootstock for another tree, which I call my Frankenstein tree. And my Frankenstein tree is 11 different citrus varieties grafted onto one tree, and every year I graft three more as the lower limbs grow. And I'm up to about six feet now and 11 varieties. And they're all cleft grafts, which is pretty easy.
But they've all taken, and so that's how the tree has evolved from, oh crap, I bought something I didn't know. I should have gotten something else, to let's turn this around and turn it into something special.
Susan: I like that lesson. And for those people listening who are beginners who might be a little confused.
So fruit trees are almost always grafted. You've got the rootstock, which is one type of tree. Then you've got your compatible fruiting wood, and they're grafted together. And I love this story of saving the rootstock. It's useful. And in trifoliate orange, do you grow it for the fruit as well?
It was a rootstock, but it produces fruit, does it not?
Josh: It does. I don't think you could eat it. You might could make a marmalade out of it with enough sugar, but it's thorny so it makes for a great barrier if you wanna plant it as a hedge.
Susan: I see. Okay. So your idea there is if you've got some grafting skills or if you've got a friend who has some grafting skills, you can save that plant.
Now let's go for the story of your fig tree. You've got a fig tree story as well. Tell me about that.
Josh: Yeah, this is when I first started out, I went to Home Depot. They have these cute little boxes on the shelf, and one of them was a fig tree, and I had never grown figs before at this point, very early in my journey.
So I bought this $10 box tree. It was like a stick with a couple roots on it, put it in the ground. I actually planted it in a raised bed with some cedar logs, which was really cool. And I found out a very interesting side lesson here. The ones planted in the raised bed and the ones planted in the hard clay ground. It was like five x growth in the raised bed compared to the same age plant in the ground. No joke. It was huge difference in terms of just richer soil, better drainage, and it was only like a six inch raised bed. Anyway, so fast forward, I decided to redo my entire backyard. I had too much shade from these pine trees. I had done a container garden at this point and it was all landscape fabric, which is another nightmare. I will never use landscape fabric again 'cause weeds grew up in a year and a half, and I spent more time weeding the landscape fabric than I would've spent weeding an actual garden.
Anyway, so then I rip this all out and I have to move the tree. So I rented a bobcat, moved this tree. It was six feet tall, producing hundreds of figs per year, and it lived. Until the deer ate all of it, because I planted it outside of my fence line. So the deer defoliated the entire tree a year after it had already taken and lived.
So I lost the tree, but I had saved cuttings, multiple cuttings. In fact, I gave 'em to multiple friends. So now I have three friends that are growing trees from cuttings from that mother tree. So it lives on in infamy, which is really cool.
Susan: Yes. Oh my gosh, how wonderful and how I agree with you on landscape fabric.
I have the same problem. I have not had the get up and go yet to go into my garden and rip it out and replace it with like wood chips or something. So yes, warning to all, avoid landscape fabric at all costs. Not my favorite thing. Okay, so we've got this fig tree that lives on to eternity because everybody's got cuttings.
That's great. What about things like, do you ever get things in end of season sales or half price sales? Tell me about that.
[00:20:42] End of Season Sales and Negotiation Tips
Josh: Yeah, actually I brought some with me here today. First one here is you can't beat a $3. blackberry, right? That's pretty low price.
This is your Walmart special from $12. But you can see, it looks a little rough, right? But it's doing okay and it's just got a little bit of dieback on one branch. So I'm gonna prune it out, probably cut it at the base, put it in some really good soil. It'll live on. That was a good find.
Another one is this. Variegated Minneola Tangelo. I actually went up to the manager. I was like, man, these are looking a little rough. Can you gimme a discount? I asked him, he said, you know what, we're towards the end. I'm gonna give you 50% off. He slaps this sticker on for me, and then I was like, can I get another one?
He's I'm only gonna give you 35% for the other one 'cause it looks a lot healthier. So what's the 35% sticker on? Anyway, but the point is that you never know until you ask. if the tree's looking rough, you can go up to 'em and be like, Hey. can I get a deal on this? This looks a little rough.
I've had that happen five or six times. One time a guy said, look, we're gonna be closing the store in a couple months. Why don't you just take it, just take that lime tree. It was a, I forget what it was. It's a Key lime. He said, just take it. You're gonna take better care of it than we will, and we're closing soon.
So just take the tree.
Susan: I love it. Negotiation is great. That's fantastic. Here's the thing, though, I actually teach, I've got an online course on choosing a fruit tree, and we go through everything from pollination. You get this bargain tree, you plant it. How do you know it's gonna produce fruit?
It may be a cross pollinating tree or disease resistance. You're a new grower, you don't wanna use toxic sprays. When you go to the garden center with an encyclopedic knowledge inside your head of the types of cultivars that you're looking for in order to have a successful experience? Or are you just ah, let's give it a go?
and I'll deal with the problems when I encounter them.
Josh: That's a great question. There's a lot of insights in that question that you asked, which is, is this tree disease resistant, is this tree actually gonna produce fruit?
And, chill hours are our real problem here.
[00:23:03] Understanding Chill Hours and Pollination
Josh: We're right on the edge, like seven, 800 chill hours where I'm at in South Carolina, and there's a lot of 1200 chill hour trees out there that are sold at local nurseries. So they're gonna sell a tree that's never gonna produce fruit here. And it really upsets me when that happens. So I think knowing your chill hours is really important.
Knowing pollination requirements, they're not always listed accurately. They're not always listed. Apple trees are probably one of the more complex when it comes to cross pollination. So I'm always pulling out my phone and looking up, all right, what do I have another one? Do I need to buy two, do I need to buy three?
Just to get the right pollination for these. So there's a lot more to it than just, oh, that's a cool tree. I think I'll go try that, 'cause five, six years later, you may never get fruit. And that's sad.
Susan: And I think that's the big difference. You've got a large space for people, and I've seen this over and over again.
If you have a small garden, you have room for maybe one tree or a small, a small espalier or something like that, and you put all the love and care into this tree. Maybe it doesn't cross pollinate with anything, so you never have fruit, or maybe it's always sickly.
So you know, if you've got space for one tree. Think carefully. Do your research. Probably source it from a fruit tree nursery where you can sculpt it right from the start into the right shape. But if you've got more space, go for it.
On the other hand, are there some things where there is less of a risk, berries or certain native trees grown from seed?
Where is the less risky opportunities in terms of discount and inexpensive trees?
[00:24:46] Low-Risk Fruit Trees for Beginners
Josh: Figs are probably the least risky because figs want to grow . They will reach far and wide, don't plant them up against your house 'cause they can mess with your foundation. But figs will reach far and wide and they will always produce fruit quickly.
Early, they're very reliable. You don't have to cross pollinate. So that, I'm a big fan of that. Mulberries are another one that put out a lot of fruit. They grow really fast, they're vigorous. We struggle with raspberries. It's almost too hot for raspberries.
But if you plant a blackberry here in the south. It's almost hard to kill a blackberry. In fact, I've tried that where I'm like, oh man, I planted a thorny one amongst all my thornless varieties. Oops, I'm gonna cut that down. It keeps coming back every year. I'll cut that down and it'll still come back.
So berries, especially the type of berries that do well in your area. So knowing which ones do well, is really important.
Susan: So it brings us back to research. You and I, think made a lot of mistakes as we went along. I know I've made a lot of mistakes and I've learned from them.
So let me put it over to you. What are the biggest mistakes that you make and the biggest lessons that you can share with listeners?
Josh: There's so many. I'm not really sure where to start. The biggest mistake that I made in general with growing is I went too big, too fast. I got eight raised beds, and then I got overwhelmed with weeding. I planted all these apple trees, but I didn't know how to prune 'em yet. So I made some pruning mistakes early on that I'm still paying for.
I planted some varieties that really suffer with fire blight and I have to deal with fire blight every year on those specific trees because I didn't know what fire blight was or if that's an issue here. I planted a row of cedar trees near my apples not thinking about cedar apple rust. So there's a lot of mistakes that I've made, but the biggest one is, and it turns into advice, is don't go too big too fast.
Start small, get a couple trees, get a small garden. Learn some lessons and build that knowledge over time, 'cause if you go in too big, it's gonna really demotivate you more than motivate you when you're overwhelmed and you don't know what you're doing.
Susan: Oh, I think that is wonderful advice. Wonderful advice.
[00:27:10] Pineapple Guava: A Gardener's Delight
Susan: Okay, so let's just see. Also, I noticed that one thing I had asked you to share some pictures of some of your favorite plants, and one of them is something I know nothing about, pineapple guava. Tell me a little bit about that.
Josh: So pineapple guavas probably my favorite fruit. Hands down, favorite fruit. I love all fruit, but it is my favorite and here's why. It's an evergreen bush. You can grow it as a bush or a tree, so it keeps the leaves year round. So it makes a great landscape bush, especially against your foundation.
The leaves are really dark green, glossy on the top, but silvery and light colored on the bottom. So beautiful leaves, beautiful foliage.
Then it puts out these flowers. They're the petals are edible and they taste like marshmallows. So you can eat the flower petals and still get fruit on it, if you pull 'em off carefully and don't mess with the fruiting portion, and then they set these egg shaped guava fruit and you cut them down the middle and it tastes like a mix of kiwi, pineapple, minty.
They're so good, and I will get maybe, several hundred off of one eight foot by eight foot bush. No joke. And it's, and all my friends love it, but you have to wait till the fruit falls to the ground 'cause that's when it's ripe. If you pick it off of the bush, it's gonna be hard. Firm. It's not gonna be gelatinous inside.
So you gotta get it on the ground before somebody else gets it.
Susan: And how does that work? I always wonder with sanitation, I guess you're not eating the skin, so it's safe to pick them up off the ground.
Josh: Correct. Yeah. and I put a heavy layer of mulch so they're not very dirty.
I'll go out there and check it in fruiting season once a day, sometimes even twice a day. Say, okay, let's go see what's fallen today, and then just rinse it off. I'm pretty brave when it comes to eating things that may not be washed off. Little dirt's not gonna hurt you.
Susan: What about cultivars?
Is it a certain cultivar or, yeah. Is it grown from seed? I have no idea.
Josh: There are cultivars. I don't have them. I think Coolidge is one of the most popular types. They can be grown from seed, but most of the time they're grown from cuttings. They're very popular in New Zealand. In fact, I've had so many people from New Zealand reach out to me over social media and say, we have these growing on our street.
They're everywhere. We love them. We have a pineapple guava club. No joke. Somebody just look it up. People have written books about it. It is more of a movement over in New Zealand than it is here in the States.
[00:29:54] Growing Fruit Trees in Pots
Susan: One thing that I also noticed about you is, while you have a lot of property, you still grow a lot of trees in pots.
Tell me why you do that.
Josh: Yeah, I love growing in pots for trees that don't grow well in our area, through the full year. So we do get 15 degrees, we got this last winter and so most citrus are not gonna make it down, almost all citrus are not gonna make it down to that temperature. So I'll grow things in containers and then roll them in.
I actually built these custom carts four foot by eight foot. Carts really heavy duty, and I'll get 6, 8, 10 citrus trees on. I'll roll that into my garage whenever it gets below 40 degrees overnight. And then I've got some grow lights in there. And sometimes they'll stand in there for two, three days, but because we're on that edge there, I'll be able to pull 'em out intermittently throughout the winter and they'll get enough sunlight so it allows me to grow. I probably have 30 citrus trees growing in containers, just that I bring inside and outside in the winter.
Susan: Wow.
Josh: All right, Susan, time for me to flip the script and ask you a few questions. What is your favorite fruit? Both to eat and to grow.
Susan: Oh my gosh. Oh, that is such a hard question. It depends on the time of year. I think peaches. We don't grow them in our park.
They're iffy in Toronto, though we can grow them in different parts of Ontario. But peaches are my absolute favorite fruit. They are delicious and juicy and sweet, and I can, like during the season, I will just buy lots and eat them.
And in the winter I love apples, but I am very disappointed with supermarket apples. Not interested. And so when I have an opportunity to go to a farm to get interesting varieties to go to the farmer's market. Now we grow apples in our park. My favorite that we grow is Pristine. The problem with growing them in our park is, it's a public space and the apples are usually eaten up by the park visitors before they even ripe.
Or they taste them and they say, Hey, this doesn't taste good, and they throw it away. So in our park, we have challenges enjoying our own fruit in our park. What we do have that we very much enjoy is beautiful cherry trees. And we have a community harvest every year where people bring their children and everybody harvest all the fruit into bowls, and then at the end, we share it up so that everybody goes home with a bag of cherries.
At first, Josh, it was funny because it wasn't pleasant when we had our community harvest and all these people came with their bags, and they were fighting each other to get the best cherries, and it was really not humanity at its best.
Josh: Like a Black Friday sale for cherries.
Susan: Oh my God, yes. It was like a Black Friday sale. And so we decided that everybody, the rule, is they come at 7:00 PM we finish at 8:00 PM everybody harvests into bowls. We weigh our harvest, and then we divide them up into paper bags and share it. And then everybody goes home with this beautiful positive feeling about humanity, about nature, about sharing, and they have delicious cherries as well. So I would say peaches, cherries, apples. They're my faves.
Josh: Those are all excellent choices. All right. And then one other question I had for you. If I was a fruit tree, a new grower, I wanted to plant fruit trees, I don't know anything about fruit trees, what advice would you give me as a brand new, excited, but don't know anything newbie?
Susan: Oh my gosh. I would either sit with you for an hour and give you all my tips, and the tips would be: plant the right fruit tree, do your research right, and I really feel like it's worth doing a couple of hours of research in advance so that you get the easier to grow trees. I would teach you how to feed the trees.
Mulching is best with compost in the early spring. Give them the energy they need. I would teach you about pest and disease. I would teach you what to look out for so that when you see it, you can catch it right away. And I would teach you the importance of pruning those trees from the early years.
And the funny thing is, Josh, that you asked me that question. Because I wrote my book Grow Fruit Trees Fast for exactly that person, and I made sure it was a book. It's a tiny little book that you can read in about an hour, maybe an hour and a half. And so now what I do is I say to people, guys, please just read the book.
Then come to me and ask your questions. And they're like, oh, I get it. After reading the book, they can decide, do I even want to plant fruit trees? And often they say yes, but they know what they're up for. And back to what we were discussing before about the way I look at trees, I look at trees as beings. Almost having a baby, right?
I get a little attached to them. So when I have to take them down, I feel really bad. But, you wouldn't go and have a baby without knowing about diapers or whatever you need to know to have a baby, right? You gotta take care of it. You need a crib. I guess you need some baby music, I don't know.
But the same thing with trees. If you just take a little bit of time to research a few basic things. And then you're ready to have your trees and then you know what you're doing. And once you know what you're doing, you won't make the mistake of buying too many trees 'cause you think, I'm gonna have to care for all these trees and water them and feed them.
And do I have the energy to feed a hundred trees?
Maybe I'll start with two or three, So that's the answer.
Josh: That is excellent. Do you have an audio book version of it? 'cause if not, you should.
Susan: I know I should. And I'm with Grow Fruit Trees Fast. I'm halfway through. I've just come down in the morning.
It's gotten to the point where, I just published my fourth book, the, pruning book, it's called Fruit Tree Pruning, the Science and Art of Cultivating Healthy Fruit Trees. And it was such a push that I have a desk piled up with papers and I have all this admin for about a year that's piled up.
And so every day I come down to my desk and I'm like digging through all the admin, but the goal is to get
Grow Fruit Trees Fast up into an audiobook soon, and maybe in September it'll be an audiobook.
I'll tell you when it is.
Josh: Tell me when. 'cause I definitely wanna get it right away.
Susan: Oh great.
Thank you so much. I love audiobook. Thank you. That's great.
[00:36:38] Final Tips and Advice for New Growers
Susan: Alright, one last piece of advice. I love your suggestion, that people start small and experiment. Don't go to town right away. Don't say, Hey, I'm gonna start an orchard.
Let me plant 300 apple trees and see what happens. Is there any other tips that you can share with people in terms of going out and shopping for your first fruit trees and getting started or expanding your collection?
Josh: My tip is always ask somebody that knows more than you do, and that's how I started out.
I went and I reached out to some people online. I said, Hey, I want to plant some fruit trees. Do you have any recommendations? Or I would go to local nurseries and say, who's the most knowledgeable person at this nursery about fruit trees? They'll say, oh, go talk to so and so. He's worked here 20 years. He knows everything.
And then you ask them, you say, Hey, do you know what is growing really well in this area, what people struggle with? Whenever I did that, I got such amazing insights that I never would've known about just by talking to local growers. I even talked to local orchardists and said, Hey, what varieties work well?
And I've gotten, okay, Liberty, Enterprise, these are some apples that do really well in the south. And then in the back of my mind, I'm writing that down thinking, okay, don't buy these other types, get these types. So my advice to people is, ask someone that knows more than you. That's why I became a master gardener so that I could help other people and be a resource for them with what I have learned.
Susan: Fantastic.
[00:38:06] Conclusion and Additional Resources
Susan: Josh, how can people learn more about you? Get more of your advice? Tell me how they can find you.
Josh: You can find me anywhere on social media. I go by @theplanttechie on several platforms. That's because I am tech, no technical by day and plant by night. And I also go by Josh Gardens. So if you just search either of those terms, you'll find me on all four platforms.
Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, all the major ones.
Susan: Wonderful. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Josh: Susan, thank you. You are truly a wealth of knowledge and you have so much experience to share. I'm just really, it's a privilege to have been a part of this and thank you so much. I.
Susan: Thank you so much.
So thanks everybody for tuning into this show and you, if you wanna learn more, we will create an article on orchard people.com where we'll get all the content from this interview and I may add some more content. I'm gonna ask Josh some more questions after this interview. So go to orchard people.com/articles and you will find the article related to "how to find and source great fruit trees at a bargain price."
Also, if you wanna learn more about Fruit tree care, you can check out my book Grow Fruit Trees Fast, which is available on Amazon and my other books on pruning and other fruit tree care topics. You can subscribe to Orchard People on YouTube, and that would be great if you did that right now.
So every time a new video comes out, you will know about it. You can listen to this show on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcasting app and you can sign up to my newsletter and that's at orchard people.com/sign-up and you'll get up updates on new episodes, articles, and free webinars and other classes.
So that's all for now. I hope you enjoyed the show today. I certainly enjoyed this conversation and I hope you will join me again next month when we're going to dig into another fruit tree care topic. I'll see you then. Bye for now.