What I Learned After 7 Years Of Growing Fruit Trees In My Garden

What's going on growers? It's James Pergione coming to you live from Jersey. Just the other day we had our first real frost, which meant the end of a lot of the annuals. But the fruit trees, they're still holding their leaves. So now is a perfect time to take you through, show you the trees, both in the seven-year-old fruit forest and the new one. A lot of the varieties, the diversity we have in here, and just show you how the face of the forest has changed basically overnight. Let's go. As I walk into the seven-year-old fruit forest, I'm just blown away by how big the trees have gotten. They're massive. And you can see that peach tree right there, a nice large one. That's one we put in a number of years ago. This moonglow was put in at the same time, a little smaller, but that's typical because pears grow a little smaller. Look at all the tip growth just from this year though, and that had great production on it. That's the moonglow. Here's a Santa Rosa plum, and this one hasn't done great production-wise for us in the past. We talked about that in previous videos, but look how much the growth, oh my gosh. This one we're really hoping for big things on next year. I think it will. You can see where I pruned it last year, right there, and all the insane amount of growth as a result. So next year, I'm going to prune it down even more. I'm not afraid to take it down because I know it'll just come right back with more vigor than even last time. As you see right here, we've got a nice rainier cherry, beautiful one. And I phased out this nectarine tree. You guys probably saw that. I'm going to phase out a lot of these raspberries as well. I'll bring you along for that. We phased that out so we can get things like this cherry here opening up, producing. That's what we want. That back there is a white doyenne pear too, a new one we added. Really happy with that. That black tartarian, that's that cherry. We've got a fig back there, brown turkey, a good hardy variety right next to our greenhouse. We're going to be growing in there and heating the bottom of it. So that'll help keep the fig warm. That's why we planted over there. There's our super reliable Asian pear, multiple varieties. One of my favorites. That's a chajuro in the 20th century pear. Right here we've got a honeycrisp apple that's relatively new. So I talked about in the last video the importance of variety selection. So huge, so huge. Right here is a red delicious I put in a number of years ago. I got this one for cheap. I went cheap on it like I told you guys, you shouldn't. I learned my lesson now though. That's how I replaced it with a good honeycrisp, a bare root one. One that we invest a little more money in to get the right variety. Same thing with here. We've got a nice liberty apple and that's a great variety as well. Excited to get that one bigger. And I'm not afraid to plant new fruit trees and phase other ones out because I may have made a mistake, but I'm going to learn from that like I did. Here's a new cherry tree, a gold cherry. And here's a tree right here. Another one, a $7 tree. I put in a golden delicious apple. This was put in the same year as that Bing cherry right there. Look at that. Look at the size difference. So we're definitely taking this tree out, this apple. We've got a number of better apples to replace it. As the years have progressed and they have so rapidly, I think I've gotten better at being able to look into the future, be able to like project myself and the trees and the forest into the future further and see kind of what needs to be done. So if I realize that I have a fruit tree that isn't producing well, I'm doing a good job of planting fruit trees around it locally that can grow up, that can replace it in the future while still also getting production on the other one. So it's kind of like that perennial mindset that I often talk about. One of the things I've learned a lot from too is profiting and learning from my failures. That's been huge. All my mistakes have actually learned and taught me and guided me and really have been my best teachers without a doubt. So learning from others is big, but learning from your own mistakes is huge. One thing I wish is that I learned from other people's mistakes about variety, about getting the right trees in the first time. So that's one of the reasons I'm making this video and I make all these videos. I want to be open and I want to be relatable with you guys and I want you to know that don't waste your time. Spend the money and get the right trees the first time, the right varieties. Do your homework inside so you're not going to be out there pulling out old trees upset with wasted time. Let me take you into the new food forest though. Now that I've done this one, I've learned from it. I've taken what I've learned and I've brought it to the new food forest. That one's even better. Let me bring in there. As I move into the new food forest you can see we've got some hardy greens in here. That did well through the frost. Some aging greens in the front, radishes and we've got some arugula, that nice nutty delicious flavor. And in here I've done a lot better with the spacing and getting the right trees in the first time. So right here we've got a beautiful looking pear tree and a lot of times I've heard this saying and I love it so much. People say the first year the fruit trees sleep, the second year they creep and the third year they leap. So I find that to be pretty typical. This one has just sat in really nicely. I think it's going to put on a lot of growth next year. This is the highland pear. And I'm excited to see the progression of that one. Right here we've got the Suria, another Asian pear. I love the Asians. So delicious and they do well for us around here. Straight ahead as well right there we've got the one that I mispronounced so wrong the other day, Sulia pear. And you can see it looks funny because we had the beans growing up it but those beans died. Now we're just left with the leaves of the pear tree which is still holding on and it hasn't had a lot of growth this year but again it's set its roots in and I know next year it's just going to leap. Actually it's probably creep a little bit. The third year it should leap but I don't know I think we might have a leap on the second year. But the peach trees have just done magnificent and I brought you guys along when we first planted these early. I cut these things back pretty heavy. Some of you did not like it. I know you were cringing but look how far we cut that back all the way down all the way down here and we've got some beautiful growth out of it. One of the ideas of cutting that back young was we weren't going to waste a lot of the growth because we wanted to get the shape early. We've got that open center early. We're not going to waste all that growth hormones on just branches we're going to cut away in the winter. So we'll come back and prune that as the year progresses and you can see here we've got another apple tree. Here's the enterprise apple. Small one we got it but that's all right. We're patient here. We're not trying to get fruit the first or second year. We're willing to invest the time so we can get the right trees. Here we've got a roadside plum so that should be fun. It's kind of more of a local plum. We've got a jersey plum up front too. Right here we've got a an apple tree. There's a young looking one on a nice little whip and here's one we'll prune back probably next year. We've got a bella. A lot of these are disease resistant and they're ones that I've done some research on and ones that I think are going to perform well for our local environment. Here's another apple tree and the tag fell off that one. I forget exactly I think that might be the shea. I'll let you know in the I'll put I'll put it right here though just so you can see what variety it is. You can see the the eggplant they finished up. Still got some red and yellow ones in there though and I'm sure they're not soft. Here we've got another apple tree. This is the Williams pride. A popular super popular one. I'm sure you guys have heard that one before. Then we've got the shea. This is the shea over here. So the other one wasn't the shea. Here's the shea apple doing well. One thing to note is these trees since I put them in the ground I watered them when I first planted them. I haven't watered them since. We've got the right system. We've got a thick thick wood chips. Look how thick the chips are here. You know just to give you an idea I can't dig through the whole thing. Here's something planted into the ground right there and that's a chip. So I got to say that's at least six to eight inches of wood chips holding the moisture providing a nice environment for the trees with a lot a lot of fungus. We want Here's a new peach tree performing well. Another one we pruned down small. This is the frost peach. Pretty common disease resistant one. We've got some new blueberries we put in. Elliot. Everything in this food forest was planted just a couple months ago. Actually probably a year from now. A lot of strawberries on the ground. We just love encouraging strawberries underneath our fruit trees. One of our favorite things to do. Look at this peach performing beautifully. Man I love these peaches. So peaches have done well for us and and it pears so we've planted a lot of them. Here's an Avalon pride peach and then we've got another peach in the front that's really performing well also. Strawberries just looking so happy at this time of year. Here's the Betty peach I believe it is looking really nice and this is a tree that's actually going to be phased out. I might get a new one because it's a good healthy tree or the good healthy variety. The grabenstein it's just a bad graft on the grabenstein. That's not something we want to try to like heal and fix. We're just going to get a new tree and put it in there. So that was most of the varieties in the new food forest. I have other varieties of different kinds of trees rare ones throughout the property too. Stuck in different locations. Let me bring you through and show you some of those and then I've got that secret one in the front that I can't show you because it still has fruit on it. I'm still waiting for it to ripen and I really really really want to show it to you when it has ripe fruit and it's a tree you guys have never seen on this property before. I know that for a fact. I'm in the chicken coop now just looking at the food forest and it absolutely blows me away. I remember when this was all grass. The amount of solar energy conversion that has just gone on this year the previous years. The amount of fertility we've grown or harvested it's amazing. We're going to drop all that down and we're going to continue to feed the soil which is going to feed our trees. Left to me here I've got a new Japanese raisin tree that we just put in a couple years ago and it finally really set its roots in and I'm hoping for some fruit on that one. I haven't seen many people grow in the Japanese raisin so I think it'll be fun to bring you guys along when we get some fruit and I just look into here though and I see so much work and that's fun for me. So much pruning that needs to be done but you know what pruning is one of the things I love love love to do and I'll be able to get a lot of apple wood and stuff for the smoker if I want to cook some food up this winter. I'm over by the front yard food forest now and we've got a beautiful tree here. This is the thundercloud plum. So a lot of the plums we have planted here are more of wild plums. Ones that do better in our particular location because without using a lot of sprays and stuff it's tough for us to actually get plums here locally. Here we've got a goji berry and it's got some berries in the back but not a huge producer. I've got a friend in Royal Utah. Jake is his name but his YouTube channel is Royal Utah. He told me he cuts these basically back down to one stalk so we're going to be pruning this way different in the future. And we've got a premier plum right here. This is a local jersey plum. I had two of mortared but the company backed out because they didn't have any left so we've got one in and we're going to be adding more in the future. There we've got the food forest that I'll bring you guys through a different day. I just don't have enough time today. In the seven-year-old fruit forest again on the back side of the greenhouse we've gotten a connie apple here. Just put this one in last year and it's doing real well. Hoping for big things on that one too. Excited. Here we've got I believe it's another actually liberty apple and I like the liberty so we planted a couple of those and you can see this peach tree is just beautiful. What a healthy looking tree. Leaves dropped a little early but it's an earlier producer for us. Concord grape is doing really nicely. We just need to open more light up to it in the future. We're going to be doing that. Here's a pear tree that came up from seed and if I don't see any fruit on it this year I'm going to take it down because it's starting to take up some of our space. Over here we've got a prigioni apple and I love this one so much. I'm going to prune this one top it really heavy to try to encourage a lot of fruiting and we're going to have to take out this golden delicious. One that I put in another seven dollar tree that it just needs to be phased out. Not enough space and it's not doing it for us. We're not afraid to cut things out anymore. This coming year we're going to take much more of a hands-on approach to things. I'm going to be out here a lot more. I'm going to work with nature even more than I have in the past. I'm going to help guide things more. I'm going to get my hands dirty even more than I have. In the past I've set up the system and let it work for itself a good amount. Now I'm going to set up the system and work with it even more. I'm excited to bring you guys along for that as we start to take day-by-day progression towards that. I'll bring you along for the greenhouse stuff too. We're going to be growing in there all winter because I can't stop growing. I love doing it. That's today's video growers. Thanks for watching. I know this video wasn't as refined as some of my other videos but I think it was important and can give some value to some of you who are growing fruit trees. Who are new to it and or maybe some of you who haven't even bought ones yet and you want to just go buy cheap ones for seven dollars, eight dollars, end of the season, as I would call pretty crappy trees. I want to tell you do not do it. Let this food forest, the seven-year-old one, seeing some of the trees that I'm going to be removing, let that teach you a lesson. And seeing that new seven-year-old one, all the nice varieties, right in the ground, looking healthy, looking beautiful, having the wood chips down, in my opinion that's the way to do it. That's why I'm so excited about the new food forest. I'm excited about this one too. I love the seven-year-old one but I don't know, the new one is going to be even better. So that's what happens when we could take the six, seven, however many years we've been learning and take all that knowledge and invest it in the next year. That's what I'm trying to do, trying to grow and trying to have fun doing it. Well I am having fun doing it. If you guys enjoyed the video, hit the like button, hit the subscribe button, share with your friends. Don't forget to check us out on Steemit. I know saying those things like what I just said, sometimes it almost like becomes routine because I say it every video but truly it helps out the channel a lot. When we see those likes, it encourages us because it lets us know that we're bringing you value and you guys are enjoying the videos. When we see the comments, we read them and especially when, you know, when we feel like maybe we're down a little bit, like what we're doing doesn't have enough meaning or enough purpose, you guys always hit us with kind comments. It's encouraging and it keeps us going. Thank you so much and we'll be back at you guys real soon, hanging out in the greenhouse, growing because you know we can't stop. Dreams for Joanie and Tuck.