Actually it is one of the most mainstream American pastimes. A 2020 gardening research study by Scotts Miracle-Gro and Wakefield Research found that over half of the country (55% of American households) engage in gardening activities and another 20% are planning to do so in the near future. The study also found that 67% of adults are growing or planning to grow edible plants, including vegetables (52%), herbs (33%), and fruits (31%).
If anything the age of Covid exploded people’s interest in gardening.
@don1357, I think she was specifically referencing grafting and pruning of fruit trees, not gardening in general. While this forum is bursting with grafting and pruning aficionados, I doubt that it extends that far into the general public.
@BobVance and @marknmt
Don’t forget this wise bit of advice . . . (also from someone’s mother, no doubt.)
“Less is More”. !
I have learned (the hard way) that it doesn’t pay to let a fruit tree get crowded with un-thinned/pruned branches and un-thinned fruit. After letting my new young apple trees, especially, develop too many scaffolds and leaders and JUNK(!) because I was afraid to make a mistake - taking something off . . . Well, I ended up with a mess!
I bit the bullet last winter - (a little less the winter before) . . . and got serious about removing crowding and competing branches. I have more to do this coming winter - and height control as well.
The result was significant. I had ‘less tree’ when I finished - but ‘more fruit’ come summer.
I can’t quite ‘throw a cat through my trees’ yet . . . but the air and light seems to get through just fine. And that is what matters.
When it came time to thin the fruit - I left one or two tiny apples, per cluster. I intended to remove the second apple in each cluster . . . but sometimes decided to try to leave two - especially if they didn’t seem as though they would touch each other. The extra I kept for insurance - in case #1 had problems. Next year - I think I’ll abandon that plan and go with one apple per cluster.
I also made mistakes by grafting “not close enough to the trunk” and ended up with spindly growth at the ends of nice strong branches of the host tree. I have decided to again - Bite the Bullet - where these are concerned. I’ll take scions from these and graft further ‘back’ into the tree so that I’ll hopefully have an entire scaffold branch of the grafted variety.
In a few cases I am ‘taking the opportunity’ to remove grafts of varieties that I see are struggling in my climate. I’d rather replace it with a new graft of an apple or pear that ‘likes it in VA’ - and not always be fighting as it limps along. This will create more space for air and light to penetrate.
I am a bit ‘dense’ when it comes to really getting some of these principles and executing them in reality. Eventually the fog clears - and I start to ‘get it’. But, it helps me to watch pruning videos. Sometimes there is ‘assorted advice’ . . . so I try what makes sense to me at the time - and am slowly finding what works best for me in the long run.
Take those saws and pruners, come Feb/March . . . and repeat this mantra:
‘Less is More. Less is More. Less is More!’
Great sentiment… one I need this season as well… The drought has brought out the aggressiveness in a couple of deer that used to ignore my fenced orchard… I’ve spent the last 3-4 weeks nursing those wounds and seeing what trees I can salvage… Ah well, at least I have berries and other things to keep me occupied…
Great advice. I am in the same boat as you were. I need to just do it and get out and do the pruning and thinning and let whatever happens, just happen.
I just wanted to say I’ve thought a lot about your post the last few weeks. It really resonates with me. So much of what I do as a grower is trying to control the outcome. Plant the perfect cultivar in the perfect place with the right amount of water, sun, fertilizer, control weeds, control pests. Why? Because I imagine in my mind a perfect day where I’ll have a perfect fruit. I’ll taste it and be happy.
Then you do it and you realize, you’re not the boss at all. Nature is, with her weather, her pests. You do the best you can, and sometimes the most disappointing harvest can be the best. I just finished some grapes that I picked from my vines, my first ever grapes. They tasted good, but I expected great.
I looked at the picture of the grapes again and thought, “I grew and ate my own grapes.” That’s pretty cool. As growers we need to remember to appreciate every harvest, no matter how meager, and remember that we don’t have much control. Whatever you get in the end is usually good enough. At the end of they day, you get to grow and eat your own fruit. Not everyone gets to say that.
I drive from orchard to orchard that I manage every day and even when my own orchard has a bad year there are often ones I manage that have decent or good ones. This time of the year I’m constantly sampling fruit, especially peaches. Drought and day after day of blue skies make the peaches this season very sweet, but at a certain point the thrill is gone. I reached that point today, although it will probably come back.
The point is that if I lived in CA at a site without bears and ground squirrels often stripping fruit and got “perfect” fruit every year in quantity that perfectly matched my labor, the results would not be as enjoyable in the long run as the unreliable rewards I get growing fruit near the east coast.
Maybe too far in either direction is bad. I get discouraged by frequent failure with sporadic success. It’s gotten better since I’ve planted fruit at a bunch of rentals- as you note, in each year, something will work somewhere.
Part of the reason I like jujubes (aside from high brix) is that they don’t have any issues with disease or bugs. And most of the time the animals don’t know they are food. At a few sites, in a few years, they figured it out part-way through the harvest and wiped them out, but haven’t seemed to remember the next year. That really removes a lot of variables. It’s still possible to get too little sun, plant the wrong varieties (I’ve been doing a lot of testing), have a hurricane at the wrong time, or a crazily-late frost (hasn’t happened here, but Cliff England has hit very hard in 2020). Mostly, just focus on fertilizer, weeding, water when needed and occasional grafting and pruning. That’s plenty of challenge for me.
Maybe I’m not that ambitious. In sports, I’m perfectly content to win 21-2 again and again. I know people could be upset by losing that badly, so I don’t try to set up such a match-up, but if someone else is feeling ambitious, I don’t mind winning .
But, I just finished the last Loring peach and they were great. Large fruit with brix from 15-18 and a decent amount of acid. I don’t think I would object to getting such fruit each year. Or for that matter, all year long, though that would bring even more challenges.
I work for people who can buy anything they want and have it delivered to their door within about 24 hrs, including perfect fruit from careful small farm fruit growers in CA- these are not the world’s happiest people as a group.
I believe that human beings are not wired to enjoy things that they can always have as much as things they wait for and are sometimes deprived of. I lived in S. CA, although in a place close enough to nature to be a struggle to keep fruit from coons and ground squirrels, but I can tell you, I sure took those sunny perfect days for granted. I appreciate and experience such days much more deeply now that there is a lot of contrast day to day and season to season.
However, if you feel you enjoy your reliable crop brings you the same pleasure as the one I sometimes am deprived of, I’m happy for you, but even you have seasons when selections are limited.
Every year we have a bountiful crop the harvest has lost it’s excitement by about mid-Aug for me. It becomes a job picking and dealing with the surplus and my taste buds have had their fill.
I said that tongue in cheek, my perfect fruit are from my garden however, not store bought, those don’t count. I do agree you lose the excitement after picking a lot of fruit. I’m at that stage with figs.
I get what you say about growing things that are not easily attainable, like I grow peonies in SoCal, I do get a lot of enjoyment out of them. I wonder why I like peonies vs Roses, especially when they only bloom once in the Spring, while roses do rebloom reliably here. Maybe because they are more finicky than growing roses here.
There should be an emoji for eye twinkle. Text always encourages literal interpretation- not that I would have been offended if your comment was entirely serious. .
It is also hard to get motivated and enjoy gardening when all efforts go to nothing when still unripen fruits are all eaten by squirrels. Need to find that motivation again somehow and get rid of these fat animals.
Replant peach trees and retrain other species to a 5’ straight trunk before first branches. Check my pictures on the recent squirrel baffle topic I posted. Then only birds and insects can stand between you and a successful harvest.
I remember watching a permaculture video from miracle farms on pruning. They recommended not pruning at all but planting at enough space for a maximum tree spacing and train the branches. I guess they weigh the tree branches down to train them instead of pruning. I grow a fig and frost seems like it will be more of a issue here than insects. Strangely enough insects and deer ignore my fig all together even though it is small. I have switched to mostly growing fruit that stores well. I grow a Pakistan mulberry in a pot but assuming it lives the winter it should stay small enough in a pot it does not get big. That means I will likely get only a reasonable harvest from it. I have both euro and will have a Japanese plum, will have pluots though pluots seem to be known to hanging well on the tree well, I have persimmon which can hang well through the New Year, euro pears which store for months, apples which store for months to a year, cherries can be frozen I suppose, I have peaches which I am hoping I can can because they are white peaches, I have a sweetheart apricot from Stark Bros, have 2 Chinese sweet pit coming and a Montrose apricot coming all of which I hope I can eat the apricot and store the pits, blackberries, tayberries, raspberries, asparagus, have seaberry coming, I have a serviceberry, I have hazelnuts, a almond (lost the label) and butternuts which store well while not cracked open and plan to get a walnut tree as well. Some like the plums, peaches cherries and apricots may not store as well. My goal is to get many different varieties of trees and many different cultivars so just in case one fails all don’t fail. If the cherries fail around the same time I have donut peaches, if both of those fail I have Japanese plums, during mid summer I can snack on raspberry and blackberry, early on I have strawberry, honey berry and asparagus to consist on if any of those fail, late season through winter I have pears, apples, persimmon etc. All fall season holds so well it can last me through a good portion of winter with proper storage. Generally if you go with as many things as I have a fair amount of those will not fail. Issue is the space to have all of those items. Also multi grafted trees help because that extends the season and lessons the chances of losing all blooms.
I’ve watched all his videos. I like the early ones the best. Before he had someone touch them up and add captions. I initially planted my orchard somewhat as trioles. I thought his videos were really inspiring.
He has a lot of information on them. I just wish they were a little more condensed. A good example is with the walnut video he talks about jugalone and plant tolerant trees but I would have hoped he would have talked about spacing more. There are also some plants he talks about planting I would not plant myself like currants. I think part of that reason is he is in USA zone 3.
That is probably the reason he does a lot of things, including, perhaps the manner in which he prunes, although the overall quality of the fruit would have to suffer, particularly under a weaker sun, if only the very outside of the tree gets good light. The best fruit usually comes from the best lit parts of a tree. However, in the very cold regions trees grow smaller. Perhaps not cutting branches also makes them more cold tolerant.
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