The annual winter meeting of the PA Backyard Fruit Growers was well attended and focused on the topic of growing organic apples in the home garden or orchard.

The main speaker was Michael Phillips author of “The Apple Grower,” an incredible book loaded with information related to ecological apple growing. Also on hand to present a lecture on cultivating organic apples was Greg Krawczyk of the Penn State University Organic Research Program.

I met Michael at last winter’s PASA conference where I listened to him lecture and picked up a copy of his book. Michael tends an apple orchard called “Lost Nation Orchard” in New Hampshire and shared a wealth of knowledge about organic apple growing.

Brief highlights from Michael’s lectures included the following apple growing tips and information:

• Healthy apples reflect soil health, tree health, and eco-system health. Nutrient density and flavor in fruit is the result of life density in the soil.
• There is an essential role played by microscopic Mycorrhizal Fungi in the growth and health of an apple tree. These important fungi can be introduced through commercial mycorrhizal inoculants or by incorporating a sample of soil that is respectfully gathered from an established wild apple tree.
• Orchard Floor Diversity – the use of companion plants and herbs such as comfrey, red clover, buckwheat, and goldenrods in the orchard to promote strong, healthy trees and fruit.
• Tree health and vitality, fruit storage quality, incidence of disease, and other factors are all tied to the balance and levels of nutrients maintained in your soil.
• Holistic gardening philosophy – A reverence for all life in the garden is important because there is so much that we don’t know about the interactions that take place in nature and between various insects.
• The advantages of applying gentler organic sprays that employ pest specific toxins (such as Dipel and BT) or insect repellent attributes (such as neem, garlic, and Kaolin clay).
• How to control insect pests with physical barriers such as kaolin clay, white sticky traps, mesh guards around tree trunks, and red sticky spheres.
• More of the gardener’s time should be spent on strengthening their tree’s immune systems rather than to concentrate on killing every bug in sight.
• Organic elements such as neem oil, neetle tonic, horsetail tea, garlic extracts, horseradish infusions, compost teas, and seaweed extracts that can promote immune support and stimulate the natural defenses of your fruit trees.
• Recommended Orchard Fertilizers include carbon-rich unturned compost, calcium sources such as rock dust, azomite clay, kelp meal, greensand, gypsum, and unpasteurized fish products.
• There is something special about growing food that has a way of enlivening the “spirit,” and we can not separate health from the way in which our food is grown.
• Everything that we do in the garden has ramifications throughout the garden and beyond it!

Additional apple culture information covered included the growth cycle of apple tree feeder roots, the big three insect pests in the apple orchard, alternatives to fungicides, and other critical management issues for orchard health.

If you are interested in more detailed information related to growing organic apple trees in your backyard garden I highly recommend that you visit Michael’s website: Herbs and Apples, or pick up a copy of his book; “The Apple Grower.”

It used to be that the new vegetable seed catalogs would start to show up in my mailbox sometime after New Years. Well times have changed and guess what arrived in my mailbox right around Thanksgiving? Yep, the first new vegetable seed catalog of the year.

Not that I’m complaining… I’ll confess to actually reading through a vegetable seed catalog as if it was a favorite magazine subscription. What else is a frustrated gardener to do during the cold sometimes snowy days of a long northern winter?

What Gardener Doesn’t Treasure a Good Seed Catalog?

And don’t act like I’m the only one around that collects seed catalogs or gets excited by the sight of a new one in the mail. I only wish I had held on to some of the classic old seed catalogs that were produced by pioneering companies like Seeds Blum that helped to spark my interest in growing heirlooms in the vegetable garden.

More than just sales brochures, some of the old garden seed catalogs were informative, entertaining, and hand crafted by people such as Jan Blum that had a passion for growing rare and unusual edible plants. And while the catalogs may have been printed in black and white, with simple illustrations instead of high resolution photos, they still qualified as artwork in my book.

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Would you like to grow an edible crop in the garden that was prolific as grass in that you could cut it down once, and cut it again, but it would just bounce back and continue to grow and yield additional harvests of delicious produce?

Well that’s kind of the idea behind the veggies that are classified as cut and come again crops. Usually found in the form of leafy green vegetables, these baby veggies and micro-greens will provide you with the convenience of multiple harvests from a single planting.

Enjoying Multiple Harvests with Little Effort

Like the lush blades of grass growing in your lawn, these leafy greens can be sheared down almost to ground level and they will turn right around and re-grow additional leaves for your next harvest.

Unfortunately the cutting can’t be maintained as indefinately as a lawn, but you will be able to enjoy at least three or four harvests from each planting. And you can go from sowing the seed to your first harvest in just a few short weeks.

Another advantage is that vegetables raised as cut-and-come-again crops can be planted much closer together than you normally would since the veggies are not going to be maturing into full sized plants before harvest time.

It’s better to stagger your plantings into small blocks so that you can maintain a continuous supply of harvestable leafy greens, rather than wind up with more than you can use all at one time. These cut-and-come-again crops are also great for extending the garden into the fall or for raising extra early spring produce. (more…)

The November issue of the Gardening Secrets Newsletter has been published and distributed to all the gardeners on the subscription e-mail list.

The feature article for this month’s newsletter is a review of a selection of great gift ideas for the home gardener. Regardless of the budget or style of gardening engaged in, there are suggestions for choosing an interesting gift that will please anyone who loves to grow plants in the home or the garden.

Request Your Free Gardening Newsletter Subscription

If you didn’t receive a copy or haven’t subscribed yet you can do so by visiting this page: http://www.mygardeningsecrets.com/optin.html.

Tips covered this month include steps that you should be taking now to protect and maintain some of the borderline hardy edible plants and herbs to ensure that they make it through the winter months. There are also a few recommendations to help improve your successes with those plants that need to be brought indoors for their winter vacation.

If you had been patiently awaiting the arrival of a new issue of the newsletter, you weren’t alone. One subscriber’s inquiry regarding her missing gardening newsletters received a frank confession on my part, along with a couple of tips to help  make sure that you never miss an issue.

Additional Info in the Gardening Secrets Newsletter

Other topics discussed in this month’s newsletter include a charitable organization that provides assistance to the less fortunate by supplying them with knowledge, training, and the equipment necessary to use agriculture and gardening as a path towards self sufficiency.

A visitor to the Veggie Gardening Tips blog also shares an interesting account of how a six inch bay laurel plant matured into a full-sized tree that has withstood the outdoor conditions year-round in her northwest garden.

Subscribe today to secure your access to all of the information provided this month, as well as in future issues of the Gardening Secrets Newsletter. It’s quick, easy, and it won’t cost you a dime, so take a second to sign up, then sit back and enjoy your first issue of the current newsletter.

A recent article shared a lineup of unusual and uncommon fruits for the home gardener; today we’ll add a collection of rare heirloom apple varieties.

All of these interesting antique apples were on display and available for sampling at the Pennsylvania Backyard Fruit Growers annual fruit tasting that was held a couple weeks ago just outside of Lancaster, PA.

If you’re not familiar with heirloom apples you’ll be surprised to discover just how many different varieties of apples exist and can still be found growing in local orchards and backyard fruit gardens. Following is a partial listing of the heirloom apples being cultivated in Central Pennsylvania landscapes.

Super-Sized Heirloom Apples – For those that like jumbo sized apples, there was a score of gigantic fruits, some that appeared capable of producing an entire pie from a single apple. (more…)

A recent article here about rare backyard fruits described my first experiences with the uncommon jujube fruit, which is also known as the Chinese Date.

No, I wasn’t impressed with this odd tree fruit when I tasted it for the very first time. But despite the so-so encounter with that initial jujube fruit, I was determined to keep an open mind about the worthiness of planting a jujube tree in the backyard orchard or landscape.

Growing Support for Jujube Fruits

My optimism increased when I received a favorable jujube comment from Ben, a member of the California Rare Fruit Growers who painted a rosier picture of the jujube and suggested that the fruits which I had sampled may have been well past their prime. So I figured that I would give them a second chance but hardly expected that the opportunity would arrive as soon as it did. (more…)

I can’t imagine why Ben Franklin left that one off his list in the first place. After all, any gardener will tell you that frost is just as certain as the other two, at least it is if you garden anywhere close to my Zone 6 growing region.

Sure, I heard the freeze warnings that were broadcast over the weekend, but who pays much attention to the forecaster’s predictions these days? Besides the leafy greens and fall vegetables that occupy most of the garden have been anxiously awaiting a satisfying frost to stimulate and sweeten their cold hardy leaves for weeks as it stands.

Who’s Afraid of an Itty Bitty Frost

In fact, the only plants left in the garden that would even flinch at a wimpy little frost are a few pepper plants that have been on notice for a while that they were living on borrowed time. So it wasn’t much of a shock or disappointment when I looked out the window this morning to discover a thick, white coating of frost covering the lawn and greenery.

If you live in a tropical climate without frost, count your blessings, but then again you’ll probably never harvest a tree ripened apple, peach, or other fruit that requires a winter slumber. Or even discover the appetizing difference that frosty weather can make in enhancing the flavor of greens, root crops, and even garlic as they are transformed by the exhilarating experience of exposure to cold temps.

Let the Frost Fall Where it May

On many levels the sting of fall frost, like the approach of winter is just part of a Master plan rather than a crisis out in the vegetable garden. At least we were already blessed with a few weeks of warmer than normal growing conditions to extend the harvest of those frost tender summer crops. And according to my records, this season’s first frost occurred exactly one week later than last year’s chilling and sobering event.

So while it does mark a somewhat gloomy milestone in the life of the garden, fall frost isn’t traumatic, it’s just another certainty, like death and taxes. On the other hand, an unexpected late spring frost striking after you’ve transplanted your prized heirloom tomatoes out into the garden in June… now that’s an entirely different story!

While we’ve been enjoying balmy weather and an extended summer season here in Pennsylvania, I’ve started noticing reports of fall frosts striking gardens in other regions.

I knew the unseasonably mild temperatures couldn’t continue much longer but it sure has been nice to see tender crops like sweet bell peppers producing fruits at the end of October! The leafy greens and other fall vegetables are doing great and hopefully I’ll be harvesting them well into the winter months.

Things are slowing down and some of the garden bloggers have closed up shop for the winter, but here are a few interesting links form around the Internet: (more…)

The PA Backyard Fruit Growers Association held their annual fruit tasting this past weekend. Once again the event was hosted by White Oak Nursery, an Amish farm and orchard just outside of Lancaster PA.

While the most common fruit at the tasting was the apple, there were a number of rare and unusual types of fruits available for sampling including; paw paws, cactus pears, ju jube fruits (aka Chinese dates), home grown nuts, hardy kiwis, and assorted varieties of persimmons.

These fruits may sound foreign and exotic, but they were all grown and harvested from the landscapes and gardens of the association’s members, or in some cases picked from trees growing wild in the local countryside.

In Search of the Wild Paw Paws

Paw Paws grow wild in Pennsylvania and I took advantage of the opportunity to try this unusual fruit for the first time. They resemble a small, elongated mango and the fruits contain a custard like flesh that is extremely sweet. I was surprised by how much I liked the taste of the Paw Paw fruits. (more…)

Ever since an earlier article about a couple of Goji Berry plants that I purchased for the garden, there has been a lot of interest and more than a few ideas exchanged on this site related to growing Goji Berries.

Here’s a recent question that I received from Terry regarding winter care for his gojis planted in Southeastern Pennsylvania, along with an update on the Goji Berry plants growing in my garden:

The Perils of Growing Goji Berry Plants Outdoors

“I have an eight-month old Goji Berry plant in my yard, I planted it in spring. Do you think I should dig it up and pot it, and put it indoors for this winter? If I do put it indoors would I need some sort of heat bulb? How much light do you think it would need?”

“It is about 3 feet tall, and lost a lot of it’s leaves, thanks to rabbits! I saw that you had a rabbit attack as well and laughed to myself. Rabbits love Goji leaves.”

“My brother bought a Goji plant online, I forget what nursery, but his plant is doing VERY WELL. It is 4 feet high and about 3-4 wide. It flowered this year but no berries. It is actually has sharp thorns and everything on it. Very nice looking plant!” (more…)