3 Fruits Every Beginner Gardener NEEDS To Plant IMMEDIATELY That Will Feed You For Life

What's going on growers? It's James Prezioni coming to you live from Jersey. Today me and Tucker are going to share with you the three fruits that every beginner gardener needs to plant immediately. Let's go! I have been growing fruit in my backyard for over 10 years now and if I could go back in time and tell myself the three fruits that I should put into the ground immediately, the first one without a doubt would be strawberries. I know this seems like an obvious one but I think that's one reason that it's a good choice because it's something we all love. So when you're growing your first fruits and you're first getting started with growing fruit you want to make sure you put something in the ground that's super delicious so it encourages you to get out here and work on them but you'll also want to grow something that's easy to grow. This way you get some nice harvests. I will grab some strawberries here, some beautiful ones. Even though it's late in the season look at these fat guys, still absolutely delicious. And when you grow them yourself it's nothing like the flavor from the store. Homegrown strawberries are incredibly packed with flavor, they're super juicy and look at look at all that. It's just incredible. Let me uh let me taste the fresh strawberry. So sweet, so good and we even got tucked down here letting us know how delicious they are. One thing that's great about strawberries especially if you're a beginner gardener is that you can get fruit quickly. So if you put a strawberry plant into the ground in the spring you can expect a massive harvest come next spring which is really quick compared to other kind of fruits like apples and stuff. So when it comes to gardening what we love doing is harvesting so if we could get harvest quicker I think that's really great and really encouraging especially for new gardeners. Another thing great about strawberries is that you can either get the plants for cheap or for free. So if you know someone with a strawberry patch you could just go to that patch take some of those runners and then root them then bring that back to your garden and then create your own strawberry patch also. But if you don't know someone with strawberries you can order some great disease resistant strawberries from a nice nursery and you can get about 25 plants for only like $20 and I'll tell you what that'll provide you strawberries for life. Also when it comes to growing strawberries they're not super particular about the kind of soil that they grow in. So you could plant strawberries in a relatively poor soil and still get a decent harvest. I bet if you go to a spot you could put a strawberry plant in the spring not do anything for it and then come back about a year later and there might be some strawberries on it. I'll tell you that would never happen with an apple tree. So if we do a little simple comparison between growing apples and growing strawberries this is what we come out with. Strawberries take about one year to get fruit from. Apples take at least four years. Strawberry plants are either free or like you know maybe 20 bucks to get started. Apple tree is $50 for a good disease resistant bare root tree. When I think about it I kind of think of uh strawberries as like that analogy where first you need to walk before you run. So growing strawberries is like walking and then growing apples is like running. Another thing about strawberries is they're self-fertile which makes it super easy and convenient. You can get by with only one variety of strawberries but if you want to grow apple trees you need at least two different apples to pollinate one another. So then you actually have to be stuck with growing ordering two different trees. So it's going to get a little pricier for you right there too. Before I move to the next fruit I just want to let you know if you want to grab some of the summer merch it's only a limited time thing. Grab some at jamesprigioni.com. By far my favorite design. If you want to support the channel looking for the summer grab a shirt. Before we go though I want to grab Tuck some water. He's working hard out here. Want some water boy? So let's get him some fresh water. This guy is definitely a leader of the channel. If you love seeing Tuck in the videos then hit the subscribe button and spam some hearts like I always say down in the comments for the boss. This guy's uh always out here always working hard even on a hot day. Still out here. Still dedicated. Yeah maybe he digs some holes underneath the raspberries and stuff but we'll let that go. The second fruit that all beginner gardeners need to get into the ground immediately are raspberries which are some of the most flavor-packed delicious fruits out there. Raspberries are often treated as gourmet too and it's not because that they're hard to grow or anything but it's because they don't ship well. Which doesn't really matter if you're someone like us who grows them fresh. We can just come out here and get the berries right off the plants. Look at that. Beautiful. These are some of my favorite varieties too. The yellow ones they're so sweet so delicious and so flavor-packed. Nothing like getting into fresh uh raspberries. Let me take a bite. Very little seeds in these varieties too. Another reason why these are great for similar to the strawberries is you could get your raspberry patch going for either free or for super cheap. Just like strawberries. If you know someone with a raspberry patch you could go out there to their patch and take some of the plants that have shot out because if you come down here you'll notice that raspberries grow suckers. So this thing grew out of the ground it will be its own separate raspberry plant. If you were to take this to your garden and plant it it would start building your own raspberry patch also. If you don't know someone who has raspberries though you could order a good variety something like the fall gold. A variety I love right here from a good nursery and only like seven or ten dollars to get it started. So you could pay seven dollars ten dollars to get a raspberry patch growing that will feed you for life. Another thing about raspberries is that they'll grow in relatively poor soil and these things grow like weeds. They're actually easy to grow. Super easy. So your issue might be maintaining the raspberries because they're spreading so much as opposed to actually trying to make them grow. Raspberries are so awesome and so fun to grow because they come in so many different colors and we have both summer bearing and fall bearing raspberries. So in some locations of the country you can actually be harvesting raspberries from like summer all the way up until frost. So I showed you some of the yellow raspberries which are so great because not only that are they super sweet but since they're yellow they actually don't attract as many birds which is really convenient. These are the black cap raspberries. This is one of my favorite flavored raspberries that there are. The black caps are the summer raspberries and these ones are more drought tolerant than the fall raspberries that I showed you. So these ones are again so flavorful. They're more flavorful than the yellow raspberries and they pack this just tangy punch to them. Let me try one right here. This sweet tangy bounce so delicious. They have a few more seeds than the fall bearing raspberries do but man you can't compare with fresh fruit. The flavor it's just incredible. All I hear down below me is just a little huffing uh humming and hawing by Tuck. He loves building digging his holes under the strawberry patch I mean under the raspberry patches. So one issue that we've had with the raspberry this year is the Tuck pest. This guy needs to cool off. There's no way he would abandon us and go inside. He's got to be out here with us but you know it might be pulling a little bit of water from the raspberries. They still seem to be doing quite well though. So if we were to compare something like growing raspberries as opposed to growing apples we would notice that the raspberries fruit much quicker. They only take about two years to get nice harvest from. Also raspberries are self-fertile so you only need one variety to get fruit as opposed to like an apple where you need at least two varieties. Another thing is they basically grow like weeds so they're incredibly incredibly easy to grow. So when something is easy to grow and provides big harvest we know that's great. Another thing I love about the raspberries is they're a great plant to learn about pruning when it comes to your fruit. So in order to get good fruit consistently on raspberries you need to know how to prune each kind of raspberry. So this is a great introduction to how pruning fruit fruits actually affect their overall harvest. And raspberries are a great thing to start your pruning process on because they're incredibly forgiving. If you mess up your pruning on an apple tree when it's young that issue is only going to compound as time goes on. But if you mess up your pruning on a something like a raspberry bush that's fine because you get a reset next year. So it's a great introductory plant for pruning fruits basically. The third fruit that all beginner gardeners need to get into the ground immediately are blueberries. Now blueberries take a little longer to fruit than something like our strawberries or our raspberries but they're easy to grow and they're also relatively pest resistant. I think one of the reasons they're so easy to grow especially for me around here is because they're native to North America. Another thing that's great about them as we grab a few and you just see how huge this plant is. So it's nice that these bushes remain relatively small. Because they remain relatively small they're pretty easy to just take something like an insect netting or a bird netting and just covering them up. Because if you don't if you just allow these things to just be open without a cover I'm telling you the birds will harvest a lot of years they'll jack a lot of your harvest and that can be a bit inconvenient so you make sure you get an insect netting especially on a huge bush like this one. Even though blueberry bushes are a little more expensive to get started than something like your raspberries or your strawberries I still think they're incredibly worth it. Because when you grow blueberries yourself not only do you have fat plump berries but I'm telling you the flavor is incomparable to the ones in the stores. So the blueberries in the store have a little bit of sour or tart a little bit of sweet flavor but the blueberries you grow themselves they have their they have more of the unique blueberry flavor and it's it just hits you like a ton of bricks when you actually taste it. Another great thing about the blueberries is after you put it in the ground this thing will produce fruit for you for like 50 years. So you can be expected that the blueberry plant that you put in now will essentially feed you for life as well. Another great thing about blueberries is that they're pretty easy to prune so it's a great fruit to learn how to prune because pruning especially when you're a new gardener can seem counterintuitive but blueberries can help show you that actually removing some of the plant will result in a bigger harvest rather than a small one because when we cut off some of that old growth and allow new growth we can get more fruiting areas. So it can help you understand how pruning actually increases your harvests. One downside to growing blueberries is that they don't really reach full production until about their sixth or eighth year. So one way to get around this is to order a blueberry bush that's about two to three years old. This way you can get to that full production much quicker. Another downside about blueberries is that they're not not self-fertile so you need at least two varieties to pollinate one another. If you're in a spot that doesn't have a lot of space then you could do what I did here plant two blueberries essentially right next to one another and they're both as you can see producing well and doing well. Blueberries are another one of those plants that you could put it in the ground and then not do anything for like a year and come back and there could still be blueberries on it. That would never happen with something like apples or peaches. My goal is to get as many of you growing fresh fruit in your backyard as possible but what I don't want is some beginner gardeners to just plant a bunch of peach trees, apple trees, and pear trees and then three years later they're left with no fruit and they're discouraged. There's a saying I heard and I think it rings pretty similar with this and it's keep it simple stupid. So that's what I think you guys should do when it comes to growing fruits. That's what I do. Start out with fruits that are super easy, delicious to eat, and that will give you fruit quick. Then after you get good at growing those you'll gain some momentum and then you could take on some of the tougher more expensive fruits because there's not like some weird thing where it's like the harder the fruit is to grow than the better the flavor is. That's just not how it is. Blueberries are probably my all-time favorite fresh fruit to eat and they're not that hard to grow so just keep it simple. Fruit trees on the other hand are much tougher to grow for a number of reasons. For instance this honeycrisp apple right here. In order to get fruit on this we need more than one variety to pollinate one another. We're not going to get fruit until at least the fourth year. It's much more expensive to start these fruit trees. They're harder to propagate. You have to stay on top of pruning in order to get a good consistent harvest. And another thing that's huge is these apples they're going to have to remain on the tree for months until they ripen. Your strawberries, your blueberries, and your raspberries they ripen quickly on the plant leaving less opportunities for issues to come and steal your harvest. That's today's video growers. Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got something out of it. This in no way was a video trying to discourage anyone from planting fruit trees because I want everyone to have a whole food forest like me and Tuck do and to get as much joy out of planting fruit trees and growing trees as much as we do. We love nothing more. This was more a video to like guide you to stay encouraged. We want you to start like we said walking before you run. So start out with some of the simpler fruits. This way you can get those harvests from them and you could like realize how great it is to be able to grow your own food. That will encourage you to get those fruit trees in that are a little harder to grow. Because like I mentioned just because it's hard to grow doesn't mean it's going to taste better. So be smart and plant the things that are going to taste the best and do the easy and are easiest to grow. This way it gets you that that good momentum and stuff. You'll notice also in this video that I didn't share some of like the more obscure fruits like currants which I have a bunch of and gooseberries too. Even though I love those so much they just they don't they're on a different level. They're way tier below something like strawberries blueberries and and raspberries. So don't get tricked into trying to grow rare things because you think they're going to be better. I'm telling you there's nothing better than fresh strawberries fresh blueberries right off the plant. I mean it's actually incomparable. So before I let you go me and talk the boss right here wanted to thank one of our new channel members which is Sea Cress. Thanks for being a part of Team Grow. Thanks for being a member and thanks for like having your hand directly as a contribution to you know all the things we have growing in here. It's truly a great place to be. Just take a quick look around and and look how much food is being produced in this backyard. So I'll tell you what it's a big contrast years ago from when it just used to be grass. Not only is there so much food growing but there's so much life just buzzing about in here. So every time we turn around there's a different fruit a different veggie and something else in season. So there's always a reason to get out here. That's why we want you guys to start simple because if you start simple and expand you will always be encouraged to take more on and then you'll be able to grow more food and that's just the whole idea. You know who knows like us you know after a certain amount of time years you look around and you don't even know how it happened but you're surrounded by food and you're just thankful that it did happen. So we want you guys in that same situation. Before we let you leave though make sure to check out the new summer merch at JamesPregione.com. This is a limited time thing. Grab your summer merch, support the channel, sport it around town and let everyone know that you're part of Team Grow. James and Tuck the boss. We'll be back to you again real soon. We out!