Tips and tricks it took to have our most successful harvest of the best tasting red grape we grow. For years animals were steeling the homegrown grapes before we picked them. We finally outsmarted all the orchard pests.
Buying Bareroot About five years ago, I purchased two fruit trees, a Weeping Santa Rosa Plum and an Ultra Dwarf Blenheim Apricot tree at OSH on clearance at the end of bare root season. Discounted plants are rarely worth the trouble and I probably should not have wasted any money on it, but I am really glad I did. In a weird way, I kind of enjoy taking the risk. And a few of my favorite plants have been clearance…
The past couple of years I have been received lots of questions via email regarding how to prune Bababerry plants, a variety of everbearing raspberry that grows well in Southern California and other low chill – warm climates. Managing Baba raspberries is much the same as any other everbearing or fall bearing raspberry variety. Most folks are able to pick fruit the first year they buy and plant an everbearing raspberry, including Baba. That is not the case on summer bearing…
I actually didn’t get as many new edible plants and trees this winter or spring as I have in past years, but I still probably got more than I really have room for. Basically, my small urban backyard is getting too full and the family isn’t ready to give up the front yard lawn yet. Since many of the neighbors on the block are changing over their lawns in the city’s Lawn to Garden program, our front yard has become…
This past growing season, despite the fact we only had a half dozen male flowers on the Kiwi vines, we still had a bountiful crop of Vincent Kiwis, way more than the previous year when we only had two male flowers for cross pollination. Since we are limited on our cold storage space here at Hanbury House, rather than completely harvest all the fruit at once this year, I decided to let the fruit continue to hang on the vines,…
Nestled in our backyard micro orchard is one of my favorite winter fruit trees, mandarin, that we planted in 2000. At the time we planted it, my toddler son and I were going to two different farmers markets a week during peak mandarin season because we both loved them so much, eating as many as 4 or 5 at a time. Now a days, it is easy to find “Cuties,” in the grocery stores, but they are nothing compared to…
I had the pleasure of helping harvest, along with a bunch of other volunteers, over 450 lbs of Bearss Limes, Valencia Oranges, and Satsuma Mandarins this morning with SoCal Harvest, a local charity group. While finishing up, one of the harvesters mentioned her orange tree at home was covered in what looked like road dust, soot, or black sticky dirt. Based on her brief description, I told her it sounded like her tree may have a fungus commonly called sooty mold. She…