Grow Your Own Mini Fruit Garden by Christy Wilhelmi Congratulations on your decision to create a mini fruit garden. What lies ahead is a journey of learning, experimentation, successes, setbacks, and delicious results. So let’s begin this journey together. What’s a Mini Fruit Garden? Not everyone is blessed with acres of land to cultivate and transform into a dream homestead. In fact, most aren’t. Most people live on a standard city lot with obstructions from nearby trees and buildings that make it challenging to grow fruiting crops. Factor in amenities such as swimming pools, play areas, storage sheds, and garages, and that doesn’t leave much space to work with. With even less space to grow, apartment dwellers make up a significant part of the population, ranging from 6 percent in Mexico, 37 percent in the U.S., to 46 percent in Europe. Those in apartments and condominiums may only have a balcony or porch to utilize. Enter the mini fruit garden. Here’s to Your Success! With a design in hand, you now can begin to prepare your site for planting. Gather your courage, garden tools, and muscle, and let’s get to work. This chapter will guide you through the process of selecting the right tree size, preparing the soil for planting, and setting up irrigation for a successful mini fruit garden. Choosing the Best Fruit Trees for Your Climate Whether you are a novice or an experienced gardener, the first rule applies to everyone: Choose cultivars best suited to where you live. After all, the goal is an abundant fruit garden, right? Planting a fruit tree that is appropriate for your growing region, microclimate, and chill hours is the key to success. What a shame it would be to plant a tree, and then wait five, ten, even fifteen years and never see a single fruit. It has been known to happen but is far less likely to occur if you choose the right varieties for your climate. Let’s dive into the checklist of fruit tree qualifications. Grafted Trees and Their Importance to Small-Scale Home Orchards You’ve already learned how grafting a desired fruit scion onto a selected rootstock restricts a tree’s mature size. But grafting is a technique used for more than rootstock. Grafting dates back thousands of years, and is, in fact, how many of the fruits we enjoy today still exist. Let’s Get Planting! Congratulations! You’ve done your research, made a plan, and designed your new mini fruit garden on paper. You’ve prepped your soil and tested for adequate drainage (go back to “Preparing the Soil” in chapter 2 if you haven’t done this). Now you’re ready to plant those trees. In this chapter we’ll cover the basics both of in-ground and container planting of fruit trees, cane berries, and fruiting shrubs. You’ll find individual planting instructions for berries later in chapter 6, so once you feel confident with the basics in this chapter, flip ahead for detailed planting instructions. Berries and Other Fruits This chapter is dedicated to growing cane berries, bush or shrub berries, and other fruits that do not grow on trees. This subject has its own chapter because planting, care, and maintenance for berries is different from fruit trees. You will, however, find information on berry diseases in chapter 9 along with fruit trees because some diseases equally target fruits that grow on bushes and vines as well as trees. Berries can be a wonderful addition to small-space gardens, and with a little planning, you can enjoy fresh berries on your morning granola for years to come. Let’s delve into the typical behavior and needs of berries. Caring for Your Home Fruit Garden Every fruit tree has needs, some more than others. With a foundation of healthy soil biology, in-ground fruit producers may only need to fertilize occasionally. In containers, however, fruiting plants require more frequent feeding. That’s why it’s important to learn to read signals from your plants to discern what they need. Pruning for Production, Size, and Structure Let’s admit it: Pruning is scary. It takes courage to pick up a pair of loppers and cut away living branches. There’s so much that could go wrong, right? Maybe not. As the old saying goes, knowledge is power. And in this case, knowledge also brings courage. If you tackle pruning in stages, it is much less daunting than you think. You’re a sculptor observing the lump of clay before you. The tree before you is the clay. Study it. See how the branches cross, trace the overall shape with your eyes, notice the flow of air in the negative spaces between branches. This tree is yours to mold. Managing Pests and Diseases Now that your mini fruit garden is growing, you may run into problems between planting and harvest time. Over the years, fruit trees can develop diseases or fall victim to a number of setbacks. Using integrated pest management (IPM), this chapter aims to find a balance between predator and prey, and to increase your chances of harvesting high-yields of delicious, pest-free fruit.
✔ Author(s): Christy Wilhelmi
✔ Title: Grow Your Own Mini Fruit Garden: Planting and Tending Small Fruit Trees and Berries in Gardens and Containers
✔ Rating : 4.7 out of 5 base on (114 reviews)
✔ ISBN-10: 0760370265
✔ Language: English
✔ Format ebook: PDF, EPUB, Kindle, Audio, HTML and MOBI
✔ Device compatibles: Android, iOS, PC and Amazon Kindle
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