How To Care For Backyard Orchard Fruit Trees | 'BACKYARD ORCHARD CULTURE' @ Dave Wilson Nursery

So here we are now at the Dave Wilson Nursery in Hickman, California, and what are we going to do today? Good morning, Charles. Good morning. Nice to see you again, and today we're going to review our backyard orchard style planting here at Dave Wilson Nursery. We have hundreds of acres of orchard trees out here on the nursery, but we dedicated this one plot, about 2,700 square feet, to creating a backyard style orchard. Trees on closed spacings, multiple budded, multiple grafted, multiple planted, hedgerow, espaliers. We have all the different backyard techniques demonstrated in this orchard. Yeah, I saw during our preview, I saw that there's about 100 trees, and I'm looking forward to hopefully getting to see all of these trees planted in such a small area. So let's get started. Okay. Thank you, Tom. Hi, I'm Charles Malkiew, biologist and plant expert with Ivory Organics, where we grow cool plants, and today we're here with none other than Tom Spellman, the spokesperson for the Dave Wilson Nursery, who is the largest distributor of deciduous berry fruit trees and nut trees in the country, and what an honor to be here with you today. Well, thanks for coming today, Charles. I've been really looking forward to hosting you through our mini orchard here, and showing you some of the things that we've been doing over the last six years in this in this block. I can't wait to see it, and for those of you just watching us for the first time, I just want to share with you that Tom Spellman and I, in just the last 30 days, we've done a lesson on general fruit tree care, and I'm going to put all of these lessons down below in the comments. We also visited the high chill apple orchard in the low chill growing zone of Irvine, California, and then we also did a tour of the Zager farms, where they're growing some hybrid fruit trees. These are non-GMO fruit trees, but these Zager genetics are basically deriving the superior flavors between fruit trees and creating, you know, what are the next best fruits for tomorrow, and a lot of those amazing fruit trees we're also going to see here today, and the Dave Wilson Nursery is the exclusive distributor of the Zager fruit trees in North America. In North America. Yeah. That's wonderful. Well, let's get started with the backyard orchard culture lessons, and where should we start? Well, let's start right here. We're standing right in front of our hedge row of pluots and plums. Okay. So these are six varieties of pluot and plum that are planted in about 36 feet. Got it. And they look pretty big right now, and they are. You can see that they were all pruned down to about this point last winter, but now they've grown out six, eight feet. So as we start our summer pruning, this is mid-July, we'll be starting here in the next couple of weeks, we're going to bring them all right back down to about the seven and a half or eight foot mark. Now, some of these still have fruit on them. In fact, this variety here happens to be splash pluot, which is one of our nice little varieties. So once we get the fruit harvested, then we'll come in and do some pretty aggressive summer pruning. Here's a nice one. I got one right here. This is a great little variety. Super sweet. The commercial growers looked at this and they said, you know what? We like the color. We like the flavor. We like the consistency. It's too small for a commercial piece of fruit. So they were going to scrap the variety. Mike Tomlinson and I looked at it, Ed Livo, some of our other people that evaluated fruit over the years, and we thought, you know what? This is too good to waste. This is too good to let go. And what's the name of this again? This is called Splash. Splash. And it's a pluot again. It's a pluot. So it's a plum apricot hybrid. Yeah. So it's got that yellow interior and it's got the kind of plumish purple, but it's actually more towards the pinkish. This one really represents the true forms in both apricot and plum. So with this Splash pluot, I've noticed that all the fruit are within reach. So even though my reach is eight feet, so all the fruit are within eight feet or less, but the tree is about twice the height. So it's 16 feet tall. And I know most people would look at this and say, how come there isn't fruit 16 feet up there? Great question. And here's the reason. Because we've maintained this in a backyard orchard style now for, since it was planted five, six years ago, every year we're bringing it back down to our chosen height. So all of our fruiting wood, all of our spur wood, all of our flowering wood is all down in the lower structure of this tree. So the growth that's come out since it broke dormancy back in the spring, that's all new wood. And if we left it on there for a season, we would absolutely get some fruit off of it for the next season. But we don't want it up there. We want it down here where we can get it. So every year in the summer and every year in the winter, this tree will be pruned and that high branch structure will be removed. We'll never leave it there long enough for it to actually become fruiting wood, but we're always encouraging the fruiting body down below. Makes sense. I appreciate that. Well, let's continue the tour. Okay. So where are we now? Well, this is our Estellia row. And so we have, this is a sweet treat cherry plum. We have Aprium Flavor Delight. We have a couple of peach varieties. We have Burgundy Plum. So these are all planted on a post and wire system, four wires high, and they've been structured to grow the main stem up a post and then the laterals out along the wire. So what we're seeing right now, this is all the growth that's come out since January when it was winter pruned. This is a sweet treat cherry plum, the pluary that we were talking about. And actually most of the fruit has been harvested. Here, if you want to come in, you can actually zoom in on here on the fruit. See all that? And we still have some real nice fruit on the tree. So we will begin our summer pruning effort here shortly. Thank you. On this variety. But this is just, this is one of my favorite new introductions. It's a low chill variety. It probably only requires 200 chill hours to produce fruit. It's also very high chill adaptable. They're growing it up in Boise, Idaho. So it's done well in almost every location, pollinates readily with other plum and pluot varieties. But you can see this is on a standard rootstock and it's pretty aggressive grower. So what we want to do now, once we get this fruit, the rest of this fruit harvested, is we'll come in and we'll just look for vigor. So I can see this branch that's grown out four feet since this tree broke dormancy. And I'm going to go all the way down to the lower point of that branch and take that off. I can do the same on some of these that have grown out. So I'm going to go follow that all the way back down to where it comes off of the structure and take it out. So this is all this year's growth that we're cutting out? This year's growth. So you can see that we still have a lot of small, tight growth down within the structure. And that's going to be our fruiting wood for next season. Did you see that all of these smaller branches will stay for next year? The longer, more vigorous growth is being cut back so that we maintain what I like to also call is a freestanding espalier. Exactly. So, and then I also want to highlight, what is this system called here again? With the wires and the... It's just a simple post and wire system. Post and wire. So I want the viewer to hopefully see, we've got the post over here, and then there is these wires, one and two. Is there a third? Yeah. And there's a third wire that runs across and the primary branches are bound to it. And you can see that they've got now a structure that's only about maybe a foot and a half, less than two feet wide. Yeah. And you're pretty much growing it, I'm thinking like a grape lattice. Exactly. So that thin of a structure. Once we get this plant pruned out, it will be essentially 18 inches wide, 10 feet long, and about seven feet high. Fantastic. That's great. And literally producing hundreds of these wonderful little fruits. In a very tight space. Again, dimension-wise, what are we dealing with? How many feet by how many feet? Well, I think we heard it was like 90 feet by... The whole project here is 90 by 30. Okay. And we originally planted, I think it was over a hundred trees in the project. So a hundred trees in a 90 by 30 area. 2,700 square feet. And you got a hundred fruit trees. Yeah. So basically 27 square feet per tree. And you're picking fruit starting like what month? We start picking early varieties of peach and nectarine in the end of April or the 1st of May. Okay. And we're harvesting all the way until dormant season. So the apples, the persimmons, the pears are coming out all the way up until mid-December. Wow. So there's only about four to five months with no fruit. Yeah. And the rest of the year you're harvesting fruit year-round. All the time. I can come out here every day for five or six months and pick fruit. That's fantastic. No problem. And what's the next one we're going to do? Let's walk down a little bit. So where are we at now? So this is our Flavor Delight Aprium. Okay. And you know, these trees were put in, these trees have been in since the inception of the project. So they've been in for six years. You can see the main trunk. You can see the lateral branching. You can see the amount of vigor that we've had on it through the season. It's an early season ripening variety. So the fruit was ripe from the end of May through the month of June. So we just missed it. It's July now. It's done. So now... I want to highlight the... I guess we'll highlight the lateral branches after you prune, because it'll be more obvious. So now we can come in and do a little bit of summer pruning. I don't have to get real aggressive. I can just take, again, look for some of this vigor. I don't need this branch growing right out in the area where I want access. So we can take some of those off. We can just clean it up a little bit, so that we have a nice light exposure with a nice air movement. Now I fit in here too. Absolutely. And really, in a system like this, where we have a fairly uniform structure to begin with, it literally only takes minutes to come through here and do this type of summer pruning. So I just want to highlight now, again, here's the primary trunk. I'm hoping you can capture this. Primary trunk is over here. All of the growth, and there's even some new growth, the smaller branches are reaching out less than 12 inches away from the primary trunk. And then you've got these lateral branches. You can see they were trained on these wires. This here is the wire. And the branches have been trained to go in both directions. And the same was done over here with these lateral branches as well. And this here is the lower level with primary branches. So we've got row one, row two, and row three with these smaller branches that are coming out and ultimately supporting the fruit from year to year. So, you know, again, in a very small amount of space, 18 inches wide, seven feet tall, maybe eight or nine feet in width. And we have the whole tree contained. All the fruit is reachable. We can get to everything from standing on the ground. And this just makes, if you want to use this as a screen or a divider, you know, in your backyard, if you want a little privacy, something like this works out perfect. Doesn't take up a large footprint of space. Again, we said about 27 square feet per tree in this project. Some maybe a little more, some maybe a little less. Yeah, there is a lot of empty areas too, I see. So it's not that they're not just necessarily all crammed. Well, we've taken out a few trees and we'll be putting in a few more. That's one of the nice things about a backyard project is if you grow something and you decide, hey, you know, I really didn't work out. I really don't like that fruit. Then you've got an opportunity to do something different. That's great. So, you know, we're constantly changing our backyard orchard style schemes. And I think we talked in one of the last videos about my philosophy of 80-20. So 80% of the varieties in here are tried and true varieties. I'm always going to dedicate 20% of this space to trying new things. Your experimental part. Good. So we've already taken out a few things so that we can put in some new varieties again this winter. That's great. I want to also emphasize on the fact that with these deciduous fruit trees, particularly peaches, plums, apricots, apples, that the fruit buds, the blossoms are all going to happen on last year's wood. So we've got to preserve wherever we prune. Those buds that are left this year will be the flowers for come next year's spring. So here's fruiting wood for next year right here. Got it. We've got lots of little tight buds on here and we're going to get lots of flowers from this section. But when I look at a branch like this, it's too vigorous and in the wrong direction. This is just vigor. There's no real fruiting wood on this branch right now. So by removing this, now I'm opening up the air movement and the light exposure to the smaller secondary growth that has our flowering wood on it and allowing that to establish and mature more through the rest of the growing season. And I can have more fruit, better quality. Absolutely. Fantastic. So I see a lot of fruit at the next stop. What's there? This is actually another Zager variety. This is a peach-plum hybrid called Trilite. Awesome. And so it looks like a... Looks like a peach. A basic white peach, but it does have a little bit of plum parentage in it. Check that out. Originally was rated as a very high-chill variety, but we found it to be very low-chill adaptable as well. So one of the nice things about some of this backyard orchard experimenting is it's allowed us to take a lot of these varieties out of the realm that they've been dedicated to grow in, and we're expanding those horizons a little bit. We're able to say, hey, you know what? We rated it at 800 hours originally, then we downgraded it to six, and then we downgraded it to four. And you know what? We can probably downgrade it to two. That's great. Now, a commercial grower might not think along the same lines, but they have a completely different expectation than a backyard grower does. For sure. So I can take a higher-chill variety, grow it in a lower-chill location, and still get good quality fruit on most varieties. That's wonderful. While we're talking about the commercial versus the backyard orchard growers, such as the home gardeners, such as myself, the commercial growers, we were with a few at the Zegger farms yesterday, and I know that they're checking for firmness and how it pulls off the tree, and they're looking at how fast it's going to be to farm it, store it, transport it, and they're tasting these fruits. Some of the things, I mean, it tastes amazing, but I know we're picking them about, what, a week or two early? At least two weeks before what I would consider their peak ripening. And so why are the commercial growers doing that when I know in my backyard orchard, I'm always feeling it for, I want it to be ripe, and I want maximum flavor, sweetness, and health that I'm going to capture by eating it the same day compared to something being transported over the course of two weeks. Right. So what's the difference again? What is the commercial grower looking for? Well, the commercial grower cannot ship a tree-ripe piece of fruit. You know what a tree-ripe peach does. And if you set it on the kitchen counter for two or three days, it turns to mush. Yeah, you got to dare to. So a commercial grower is not going to be able to get their crop to market in two or three days. So they need something that has a firm consistency, that they can process it, they can wash it, they can grade it, they can cold store it, they can get it out to retail locations, get it displayed on a shelf, and then it still has to have that shelf life. Yeah. So they absolutely have to pick a couple of weeks before peak ripeness. Another thing I noticed also yesterday with these commercial growers is they're looking at color. They're rating color more of value than flavor. Yes, yes. Like in size, like that was another like factor. Like it could be smaller as we did with the original tree we just sampled, where you said it's too small for the commercial grower. Right. But the flavor was something maybe superior to a bigger piece of fruit. Exactly. And you know what? I'll eat three. I'm okay with that. Yeah, same here. But from a commercial perspective, when you go to the grocery store and buy fruit, you're buying with your eyes. You're looking at that fruit and saying, boy, that's beautiful. It's large. The skin is perfect. The color is beautiful. You're not tasting it in the store. You're not allowed to. No, you're not. If you stand there and eat a peach, they're going to get a little upset with you. You're buying with your eyes. So it has to look its very best. And that's one of the key points. They're looking for that size. They're looking for the exterior color. They're looking for a nice, complete piece of fruit that doesn't have blemishes on it. So those are all commercial attributes that are extremely important to their marketing. That's great. So what's our next stop? Well, let's walk down the road. Let's do it. So now here we are at the end of the row of the freestanding espalier. And what is this fruit tree that's covered in so many fruit? Well, Charles, this is one of my favorite varieties. This is Burgundy Plum. Okay. And Burgundy Plum is reliable everywhere I've seen it. It just seems to produce like a madman. We've already picked probably two-thirds of the fruit off this tree. And it is still literally just loaded with all this fruit. And it suffered a little bit. We didn't thin it. So the fruit is smaller than normal. But you remember my philosophy. I'm okay. If it's small and tastes good, I'll just eat two or three. For sure. So this variety was included in the project here because we have so many other pluot and plum varieties planted around it. This is one of our best varieties for cross-pollinization. Oh, great. Blooms for a long period of time. It hits the early, the mid-season, and even some of the later blooming varieties. So I always like to include Burgundy Plum in a backyard-style planting. And plus that, the fruit's absolutely delicious. That's good to know. Let's take a look at it. Here's the exterior. And let's take a bite. Check out that flesh. Such a beautiful and delicious tasting piece of fruit. So I noticed yesterday while we're at Zegers Farms that a lot of the commercial growers that were there were there with their pole pickers reaching for the tallest fruit instead of just reaching, you know, to the fruit that were within reach. Why were they reaching for the tallest fruit? Well, those trees are fairly large. You know, most of the trees in Zegers Orchard are probably 15 feet tall, maybe some even larger than that. So the commercial guys, their philosophy is that they're going to have better air movement and light exposure and more mature fruit higher up in the tree than down lower in the canopy where it's more shaded all the time. So better piece of fruit, better quality. Those guys were there. They're picking fruit yesterday to take back to their decision makers and say, hey, we can use this variety. We can do this variety. So they want to bring the best possible fruit back to their organization for evaluation to get, you know, the best possible results. Makes sense. So they're being consistent that way. Yeah. Anything about sweetness? Well, theoretically, the fruit that's higher up, if it gets more light exposure, if it gets more air movement, it should develop sugars a little more rapidly. So I heard a little bit of a buzz about it's sweeter up there. So I don't know if that's been proven or what. Okay. So behind me, I see that we've got a peach tree. It's got some orange fruit in there. It's got some pink fruit in there, and we've also got some green fruit. What's going on? Well, this, Charles, is an example of a multiple budded tree. So this is our production variety that we're actually growing. We call it the Zeger Pride multiple budded peach. So it has five varieties grafted onto the tree. Oh, wow. We do May Pride that was harvested in May. Eva's Pride that was harvested about three weeks ago. Mid Pride is our next variety. It's the one that has the nice red color. This is August Pride. It'll be ripe about a month from now. And there's also a June Pride on here that was ripe a few weeks ago as well. So excessive ripening fruit from the middle of May until the middle of August. I want to highlight what you've accomplished here. And without getting into too much detail, if you take a look down here into the canopy of the tree, what I want to highlight here is you're going to see that there's one tree trunk. You can see some names around it that Tom just mentioned. I see June Pride and August Pride, and we talked about May Pride. And these are all, again, Zeger farm varieties, right? Right. They're all large-sized fruit. They're all freestone, yellow-fleshed Alberta-style peaches that ripen one after the other. And so you can see, again, one tree trunk, five flavors of peaches, and we're enjoying peaches off of this tree for about four to five months out of every single year. At least three months, yeah. That's wonderful. So I see a sad story over here. There's peaches that are all over the floor, clearly too many fruit, and there's a broken branch now behind you. Absolutely. What happened? This is another example of a multiple-budded variety. So this is a four-in-one white-fleshed peach and nectarines. We've got white-fleshed peaches and nectarine varieties grafted together. Again, successive ripening. One of the things that we find in working in a backyard orchard, got to pay quite a bit of attention to it. We came through and did some thinning on these trees, but obviously on this branch, we didn't thin enough. So this is an example of what happens if the branch isn't supported or the fruit isn't thinned enough. Got it. Believe me, I make as many mistakes as anybody else. I'll never be the one to jump up and down and say, hey, I'm 100% successful. We always have issues. I haven't even been in this orchard now in about six weeks. So it's not your fault. You're still at 99. See, I'm not taking blame, but I'm just letting you know that these are things that'll happen. But it's a reason you've got to visit your backyard and you've got to spend time with your trees. Spend time with your trees. The more time you can spend out here, the more you're going to be able to correct a problem like this. We could have come in and thinned a little more aggressively. We could have put a prop underneath that branch to hold it up. So had we been here paying a little bit more attention to it, we would have saved it. But, you know, I'm trying to do this in the style of an average backyard grower. This is not something that's professionally handled. This is something that I don't have a crew of 10 people that can come in here and do thinning and pruning and things like that. They're busy growing trees. They're not going to spend time working on my pet project. So if I'm not here or, you know, the other guys aren't here paying attention to it, we're going to have issues like this. So how are we going to correct this then? Well, this fruit for the most part is it's getting close to ripe. There's still some small fruit on here. So I think what we're going to do is we're going to thin some of the smaller fruit off and we're going to put a prop underneath it. And then we'll decide later on in the season. The branch is cracked, but it's really not broken. So we'll decide later in the season whether we want to save it. But if we do save it, we'll be reducing it aggressively by 75%. And more than likely, the way we do things in this project, we'll probably just remove the branch. Okay. You know, it's shown us that it overproduces anyway. If I cut it off at the crack, I would still have the bud initiation and I could probably still regrow some new canopy from that. So you mentioned the beginning successive ripening and just now it caught my eye that this fruit over here, and I'm hoping you can capture this as well. So you can see that this fruit over here is fuzzy as would be peaches, but right behind it on the same exact tree are these smooth skin nectarines. And you said the word at the beginning, successive ripening. Yes. And I know that's a critical word in accomplishing the backyard orchard culture that you've been teaching for a couple of decades now. What is successive ripening? Well, successive ripening, the philosophy there is most people don't have a commercial expectation of the fruit that they're going to harvest out of their backyard. If I was a commercial peach grower here in the San Joaquin Valley, I'd be looking for 300 to 400 pounds of fruit per tree. So what is the average homeowner going to do with 300 or even 100 pounds of peaches? Yeah. That's an intimidating amount of fruit for a family of four or even six or eight to use in a couple of weeks period of time. So if I plant three or four varieties or graft three or four varieties in the space of one, now I have a variety that ripens early and early mid, a late mid and a late. So I can harvest out of that space for an extended period of time, smaller, more usable crops for my family. So just to reiterate what you just said, the goal is, you know, with this one tree in the space of one tree, instead of enjoying fruit over a couple of weeks or a month, I can now enjoy fruit over maybe two to three months. Exactly. And so here we are now with the Dapple Dandy Pluot, another Zager success story and one of the best sellers for Dave Wilson Rister, right? Absolutely, Charles. This variety, Dapple Dandy, was one of the very first releases of an interspecific pluot from Zager. Probably came out within the first 10 or so that they released well over 20 years ago. This variety has been marketed both commercially and also sold as a backyard tree. Oh, wow. Commercially, I've seen it in the produce markets and farm stands and they've called it dinosaur egg or dragon's egg. Wow. So it has a modeling, modeling to the exterior and also a modeling to the interior, which kind of gives it that speckled look kind of like an egg. You want me to share that with you? So that's the speckles that we're talking about with the reddish pink and green coloration. And let's take a look at the inside here. Check that out. That's an amazing piece of fruit. And I would say these really aren't ripe yet. These probably need a couple more weeks on the tree before they really are at full flavor and character. But the nice thing about most of the pluots is unlike the old-fashioned plum varieties, these will hold on the tree for three or four or sometimes even five weeks. Oh, that's amazing. And they just get better and better as time goes on. That's great. So the traditionals would probably last how long on the tree? A traditional plum? Yeah. Oh, two weeks usually max. So they've doubled it. Yeah, they absolutely have. And, you know, great piece of fruit. That's excellent. Let's take a look at another lesson in the corner of your property. So behind us here is what appears to be a huge tree. There's no fruit on it. Here we are at the mid-July. So I'm assuming you already harvested the fruit. All of them were within reach. But what is this gigantic tree? Well, this, Charles, is a representation of a three-in-one, multiple-planted combination. So there are three distinctively different varieties, but they're all in the apricot family. So we have a traditional apricot. We have an aprium. And we have a pecatum that has apricot parentage in it as well. So pecatum, aprium, and then a regular apricot. So all within the same genus of fruit trees, you plant in the same, basically, grow zone. And let me share with the viewer here that we've got three separate tree trunks coming out of a hole that's measuring about 24-inch square. And I know with the backyard orchard culture, the goal is to plant anywhere from two to, I guess, the maximum is four trees within about a two-foot square area. Yeah, we want to try and get, you know, compatible varieties together that will cross-pollinate with each other and give us successive ripening fruit. So out of this combination, we had the aprium that came in early season, probably around the middle of May to the end of May. The apricot that came in early June to mid-June. And the aprium that was mid-June into first of July. Wow. So now we've got three to four months of fruit. Three to four months worth of fruit out of the space of one multiple plant combination, which takes the footprint of one mature orchard tree. So the key with successive ripening is to get, you know, pretty much the same amount of fruit, but over an extended period of time. Got it. So, you know, I can't use 600 apricots in two weeks. No way. I mean, unless you're making 100 quarts of jam or apricot pies like you can't believe, then I like to eat fresh fruit. So I just want to go out, pick fresh fruit off the tree, share some with my family, share some with my neighbors, and make good use of it. So to have this successive ripening concept in play works wonderful. You know, one week I can harvest this variety. Ten days later, I can go into this variety. Next, I can go into this variety. So you're getting a little bit of a fruit over an extended period of time. That's awesome. And it makes it enjoyable for that backyard orchard culture grower to visit their backyard frequently over many months, not just those two weeks. Right. And continuously enjoying the fruits of your labor. Yep. Again, spend some time with your trees, you know, that way you know what's ripe and you know what to pick. And you're taking advantage of the best possible tree ripen produce, you know, every week of the year. That's fantastic. Well, let's get on to our next lesson. Okay. So here we are now alongside a cherry tree. And something I wanted to point out is a lot of the trees that you buy from your local grower will be wrapped sometimes with these Dave Wilson Nursery Tree Wraps. As we can see here with this particular cherry tree, you can see that it's got this protective paper that I know a lot of growers, when they take them home, the first thing they do is take it off and then plant their tree. What can you tell us about the tree wrap? Well, the tree wrap, these trees have been in the ground now for two years. The tree wrap was put on just as initial sunburn protection. So while the trees are young, you're protecting the lower 18 inches of the trunk. As the tree sprouts out and develops ahead, it's theoretically putting shade on the rest of the trunk that you can see. So we're shady here, but then we're still sunny down here. So that gives us the initial sunburn protection that we need. At this point, these wraps only last, you know, 18 months to two years. We would remove that wrap and then get some whitewash on these trees so that we can protect them ultimately. These are some stock trees in the orchard here that we take budwood off of. And we like a little bit of a higher trunk on the cherries. So we would typically come in at this point and get a good whitewash on these. Okay, what can you tell us in regards to whitewash and protection and whether you're planting in spring, summer or fall or winter? You know, how fast does sunburn happen to a tree? Well, honestly, Charles, on some of the more tender tropical material, you can have irreversible sunburn damage in as little as a day. So if I was planting a citrus or an avocado or a cherimoya or some of the different tropical fruits and even deciduous fruits, my philosophy is the day it goes into the ground is the day it gets its first whitewash. Oh, that's wonderful. Well, let's demonstrate whitewashing with the cherry tree just next to us. Sure, let's go right down to that next one. So over here is a cherry tree that doesn't have the protective wrap on. It's a little younger. The canopy hasn't quite yet been developed. And there's quite a bit of light coming into, you know, the lower story of the tree. And it's always going to be being here in the northern hemisphere on the south southwest facing side of the tree. That's going to be the side that's going to receive the most sun. And instead of whitewashing, which is a gardening, you know, concept of, you know, protecting your plants from the summer sun. And in the winter, sun scald being, you know, that damaging sun when the tree is otherwise unprotected by its canopy. Instead of using latex paint and paint was designed, you know, to pretty much guard your houses. And 100 years later, your house is still painted. But the tree is going to continue growing. And that paint is going to shed. And especially for the organic gardener, the organic orchard, they're now prohibited from using chemical latex paint in the orchard. And so what we're going to use today is the Ivory Organic. It's a three-in-one plant guard protection against damaging summer sunburn and insects and rodents. This three-in-one plant formula has the added benefits of these oils, which include castor cinnamon, clove, garlic, peppermint, rosemary, and spearmint. And these oils, which also, you know, with the added diatomaceous earth, is going to serve as added protection against damaging insects and rodents as well for any exposed prune surfaces or grafting wounds as well. So what we're going to do today is simply going to stir the solution up, which is also, I want to highlight, it's OMRI listed as well for organic use. And we're going to simply take our paint brushes and let's get to painting. Well, I think it's just great that we, you know, we now have a product available that's an OMRI registered organic so that, you know, these organic growers can absolutely protect their trees against the sun damage issues and still be able to maintain their trees organic. I'm going to have Isabel step in here and she's going to help you finish with the painting. Okay. There you go. Hey Isabel, we doing okay? Yeah. You have to consider we're not painting a house, so it really doesn't have to look perfect. We just want to get a good coating on here, especially on that southwest side. So I'm going to move around here to the other side a little bit. This is the side where the sun damage typically happens. So we want to make sure we have a good coat on this side that faces that hot afternoon sun. And once we get up into this structure, we don't really need to paint up in the canopy. We'll paint right up to it though. So we make sure that we protect that tree well. So here we are now in the city of West Lee, California. And I could tell just driving down the street that these are all Dave Wilson Nursery fruit trees that were just recently planted. You can see that the sleeve has been kept on all of these thousands and thousands of fruit trees throughout the entire orchard. Have the protective sleeve protecting the trunk from damaging summer sunburn. If you don't have this protective sleeve, it's important to whitewash using the brush-on technique. A nice thick coat to protect that tree trunk again from damaging summer sunburn in the summer. Also winter sun scald in the winter. And then what's also amazing, we've been teaching this for years, is the value of whitewashing the entire plant structure with a foliar spray. Take a look again at the leaves, take a look at the stems where you can't come in with the whitewash technique with the brush. You can actually come in with the foliar spray and protect the entire leaves and stems. And again, all of what's going to be the future primary branch for the tree has also been protected with the foliar spray as that brush is going to be a little bit too complicated. And that just goes on and on and on and on and on for these thousands and thousands of Dave Wilson nursery fruit trees that are here on this planting that we found in Wesley, California. How amazing is this? So another question I get asked often is on irrigation. And I was curious as to in your backyard orchard culture practice, how do you water your trees? Well, the key with irrigation is be thorough. You want to make sure that if you're going to put on a cycle of irrigation, that you're going to make it count. So lawn water, five minutes, ten minutes isn't going to do you any good at all. The system that we've chosen here using these what we call orchard spinners, these put on a gallon and a half to about two or maybe even up to three gallons an hour. Oh wow. So when we run this system, we basically run it for 24 hours. Got it. So we want to make sure that we're penetrating the first eight to 12 inches of soil. And we want to make sure that we're doing it with no runoff. So the mulch and the configuration of the land is important. And we want to get a good thorough saturating irrigation on when we put it on. I don't want to do it every day. I don't want to do it three times a week. I want to do it once every week or once every 10 days, once every two weeks, depending on the time of year, but put down a fair amount of water so that the tree can make use of it for several days or a week. So going into the summer, probably irrigation once a week? I would say in general for established trees, that's probably a good pattern as long as you know what you're putting on. Okay. So you want to make sure you understand how much water is going on in a full irrigation cycle. Anything less than 50 gallons isn't really going to do you much good on an established tree. And you're probably looking at more like 75 to 100 gallons per shot. Got it. And remember these being your words when it comes to irrigation that you want to make sure that you water and then allow the soil to dry, but never bone dry. So the goal is to kind of get that happy median when it comes to watering. Exactly. So I always recommend that you check your soil with a moisture meter. Check it in several spots under each tree and use your average. Okay. So a moisture meter is really just a simple 9 inch or 12 inch probe and a gauge. And the gauge simply reads wet, moist, and dry. So if it reads wet, you're good. If it reads moist, you're good. Once it goes down to somewhere between moist and dry, you want to do a full cycle thorough irrigation and let it go back down to that point before you irrigate again. Got it. So moisture meter for a $10 investment, that'll make you the master of your irrigations. That's good to know. And then I just want to show the sprinkler when you take a look at it. What's the name of the sprinkler called again? They're just orchard spinners. And there's all different configurations of these that throw different patterns. This one happens to throw an 8x8 pattern. Okay. So we've got these orchard spinner sprinklers and you've got it strategically placed between two fruit trees. And I've noticed even in the orchards that we visited that they've kind of got the same pattern. That between the trees, they'll have one spinner strategically spaced between each of the trees within the entire orchard. So they'll pretty much have one drip line, irrigation system like hose that'll run across. And then with a spinner placed on each side of the tree with the goal of as one of my friends, arborist Lisa Smith, likes to educate on mimicking rain and watering that entire root zone. And that's what you can accomplish here with the spinner. Exactly. Is you're watering the top soil and the middle soil. And by leaving it on for 24 hours, you're soaking that entire root zone with zero to no runoff. As you said, you've got it timed so that the soil drinks it all and none of that water is going away. Exactly. And I love that term, mimic the rain. Mother nature has been doing it for a lot longer than we have pretty effectively. So anytime we can look at a pattern that happens in nature and mimic that pattern, like the mulching, like the mimic the rainfall concept. I love it. I think it's great. That's wonderful. So here we are at a farm just outside of Hickman and behind me are some almond trees. And a couple observation I want to share with you with a lot of these deciduous fruit trees is that they've got them all planted up on a mound. You'll notice that they're all kind of raised off of the ground level. And then notice that that runner sprinkler drip irrigation line kind of looks like a black rope that's running between the trees has a spinner head sprinkler between each of the trees that it's just spraying. And as Tom explained, about a gallon, maybe two gallons per hour, and then just running it for hours at a time, soaking that entire root ball and then not watering it until the area pretty much dries out. We never want the soil to be bone dry, but that's a better practice than watering for, let's say, 10 or 15 minutes. And now you're just only watering, you know, the top quarter of an eighth of an inch. If you were to only water with this type of sprinkler system for only 10 or 15 minutes. So they run these for hours soaking and you can kind of see it kind of looks like a pond or a lake around the trees. But again, because they're elevated, the primary roots that are coming off the tree are still elevated and they're not getting waterlogged and resulting in phenomenon, which are also damaging the trees known as root rot. So by keeping the roots elevated, they're getting their moisture, but they're also still getting the aeration necessary and important for a healthy, productive tree such as these. Check out all those almonds. So a quick bonus to those subscribers that had some questions for Tom, and I was hoping you can help answer those directly to them for me. Oh yeah, let's do it. So the first one comes from Cameron Akrami of the Busy Gardener YouTube channel. And his question is, with backyard orchard culture, why is it important to plant similar species together? What are the downsides of planting different types of fruit in a two, three, four in one planting? Well, you want all the varieties in a combination to be as compatible as possible, because you can expect varieties that are planted 18, 24, 36 inches apart will eventually pleat together underground and that the root systems will grow together. So if you have varieties that aren't compatible, you're not going to get that. But if they're all grafted onto the same or similar root stocks, they can absolutely live compatibly together. Makes sense. So that's the reason for making sure that you're within the same genus. And also, likewise, maintenance. You know, if I planted a lemon and a papaya and a cherry together, they all three require different types of maintenance. And I'm going to have to try and do something different to each plant that's planted close by another one that's encroaching on its growing space. Makes sense. The watering, the fertilizing, the pruning, the whole care, the whole system is going to be different. Makes sense. The next question comes from David Rowland, and it's kind of related to this last question where he asked, can multiple varieties be grafted onto one root stock versus doing the two to four trees in one hole, you know, within that 24 inch square area? Oh yeah, yeah, no doubt. You know, I think both options are good. In fact, we looked at both types of plantings today. We looked at multiple grafted trees and we looked at multiple planted combinations. So which one is better? Well, you know, I don't know that either one is better. It's whatever fits your space and fits your needs. We do a lot of multiple grafted combinations, and I think we've done a really exceptional job of coming up with successive ripening, cross pollinating, compatible varieties that can be grown all on the same root stock. But in turn, if you're looking for something different and you don't do your own grafting, then multiple planting is the answer. You can buy, you know, say I planted the Zager Pride peach combination and I've got my May Pride for May and I've got my Eva's Pride for early June and my Mid Pride for late June, early July and my August Pride. Well, what if I take vacation every year in June? I don't need that variety, Mid Pride on there. So I could plant my May Pride and an Eva's Pride and skip the Mid Pride, put in an August Pride and put in a Cahuilla, something that's a little bit later. So now I have four trees growing in the space of one and I don't have fruit in that season when I'm not there. Makes a lot of sense. So again, consumers can go to Dave Wilson Nursery and find those local nurseries that sell Dave Wilson multi-grafted fruit trees to have, again, that one root stock that supports the multiple varieties of fruit. Or, again, you're saying that either or, there's advantages to both being they can also plant two to three, even up to four varieties of fruits that they can't find the multi-grafted variety or maybe they're lacking the grafting skills to accomplish it. The multiple planting option just gives them that as an option where grafting might sometimes just not be the most applicable. Sure, and as you saw today, we have both in this mini orchard. Yeah. I have both in my collection and a lot of people have crossovers between the two. But the nice thing about those multiple grafted or multiple budded varieties, you can do a four-in-one apple, you can do a four-in-one plum, you can do a four-in-one peach, you can do a fruit salad tree that has peach, plum, nectarine, and apricot all grafted onto the same tree. So we grow hundreds of thousands of multiple grafted trees every year. We're probably the largest grower in the country of multiple grafted selections. And I think we've done, like I said, a great job of coming up with compatible combinations that are successive ripening and all work together. But either way works fine. Either way absolutely works fine. That's great. The next question comes from Adrian Lamb. And this person asks, do you know if Tom imports the ladybugs and mantis or are they wild and native? And this question stemmed from when we're at the High Chill Apple Orchard in Irvine, California. We're talking about the importance of sometimes keeping the aphids on your trees because those are the food and the prey to the predators, being the praying mantis and ladybugs. And that's where that question came from. So do you purchase and import these ladybugs and praying mantis into your orchards or where do they come from? Well, I've never had to import any myself. But with the multitude of experimental projects going on at the research station there, we have a reproductive population of ladybugs, lacewings, and praying mantis that are there pretty much all the time. Just a natural phenomenon that's happening in the orchard. The last question comes from Ellen B. And she asks, in which, we're talking about fertilization and how to fertilize in a prior video. And she's asking in which eight to nine months of the year should we fertilize container trees? And is it different for citrus than for persimmons? She lives in the San Diego area. I think it's pretty much across the board. You're feeding during the growing season. So in Southern California, I start feeding my container material end of January, first of February. And I try and do it monthly until about the end of September or the first of October. And we're talking very small amounts. I'm talking tablespoons, not pounds like you would use on a tree in the ground. Got it. So a little bit every month for eight or nine months will keep up the nutrient levels in that container because the elements are going to leach out of that container much more rapidly than they would out of the ground. So where I may feed two or three times on a tree in the ground, six, seven, eight, nine times for a container tree is not unusual. Good point. So you're fertilizing two to three times more frequently. Right. But a lower dosage. Using much less for the container plants. Exactly. That was awesome. Well, thank you so very much for all of these educational lessons. And if you've enjoyed this educational moment brought to you by our beginners, be sure to give us a thumbs up. And most importantly, don't forget to subscribe and hit the push bell notification. I'm also going to be sharing the links to get connected to the Dave Wilson Nursery website and YouTube channels. The Dave Wilson Nursery is the number one American distributor of deciduous fruit trees and nut trees, again, in the country. And you can go to their website. They have a lot of education for the commercial grower, as well as for the backyard orchard culture growers such as myself. And you can find all those local nurseries that supply Dave Wilson Nursery fruit trees. And I believe between this year and next year, you said you're going to be pushing out close to 14 million fruit trees going around the world and helping to clean our air and cool our planet and offering the most nutritious and delicious fruits for all of us to enjoy. Isn't this a great business? It is the best business. And absolutely love to be part of this. Thank you again so much for having us and looking forward until next time. Thank you for the opportunity, Charles. Thanks, Tom. As always, keep growing with Ivory Organics and wishing you all happy gardening.