Hey guys, welcome to Kellogg Garden Youtube Channel. Today, I'm going to be talking about part 2 in our Orchard series, and we're going to focus on fertilizing.
When do you know how to fertilize? What do you fertilize with? I will go over all of that.
So, make sure you hit the subscribe button, and if you love this content, hit the like button too.
All right, let's jump into it.
Okay, so we have here, this is a peach tree. This is a snow peach.
And, it's actually a desert snow peach, so it does really well in warm climates.
We're in Southern California, we don't get a lot of chill hours, so there's only a few types of, or varieties of, peach trees that do really well. This is one of them.
You can see I'm loaded with fruit. In fact, I have gone through and I have pulled off quit a bit of the excess fruit, and I need to do it again.
Because, there's really too much fruit on this small tree.
If you remember from part one, the reason why we pull off excess fruit, is we want to control the amount of fruit that a tree puts out,
so you get quality fruit over too much fruit that's not really good quality.
So, I'd rather have 20 really good peaches on this tree than 40 okay peaches.
So, by pulling off excess fruit, I can control where the energy goes.
Let's talk a little bit about fertilizing. It's a big question and it can be very confusing sometimes.
So, for deciduous trees, trees like peaches, plums, nectarines, that lose their fruit and lose their leaves in the wintertime,
you will fertilize in the spring. During the wintertime these plants become dormant,
and they don't need a lot of energy. They're basically in hibernation mode, trying to make it through the cold winters.
And then comes spring, when it's flushing out all this new growth and all this new fruit, that's the time when you're going to want to fertilize.
On our farm, we use fish emulsion that we actually put in 20-gallon buckets that has a very small hole in it, so it can drip irrigate and also fertilize at the same time.
That's called 'ferti-gation'.
We also use a granular organic fertilizer that goes around the base of the tree.
And, we put that in in the spring, underneath the mulch, and then we water it deeply in, so that all the nutrients cycle through the tree.
Now that's for deciduous trees or stone fruit.
Now things like evergreens, like this lime I've got here.
This lime tree is evergreen, meaning that it always has its leaves. It doesn't lose its leaves.
And, it has fruit and flowers that it puts on all the time.
You can see that I've got tons of baby fruit on here, and I've got fruit that's on the ground that I haven't even picked up. It just finished blooming.
So when do you fertilize something like this?
For us, in Southern California, we fertilize about every three months with an organic fertilizer.
Now, why so often?
Because, this tree is doing tons of work all the time. It's putting on baby fruit, it's flowering, it's trying to mature fruit that's still on the tree.
So by fertilizing regularly with an organic all-purpose fertilizer, specifically one that's marked for fruit trees.
You can guarantee that your fruit trees are going to be really happy and have enough food and energy to pump out all of this fruit that you will have in your orchard.
Okay, so let's talk a little bit about pruning. Now, I could do a five hour class on pruning, because it's a very complex subject,
and everybody has their different methods.
But, I'm going to give you some basic tips on how you prune fruit trees.
So, the reason why you prune a fruit tree is either to keep it to a certain size, so to keep it from getting to big, and also for the health of the plant.
So, when you're pruning a fruit tree, a lot of times you'll prune dead branches, or branches that have broken because they have too much fruit on them.
Another common reason why we prune is for crossing branches.
When you have a fruit tree that has tons of branches that are crossing every which way, branches that are laying on top of each other.
Those areas are areas where insects can gather, and you can get scale, mites, different things like that.
You want good airflow all the way through the plant, so by pruning crossing branches,
you're really going to increase the health of the plant by allowing it to fight off insects and different insects that will colonize inside those branches that are crossed.
So again, to review, you cut off dead branches, branches that have broken because there's too much fruit on them, or also branches that are crossing.
Now you can see this fruit tree, this was here when we moved in, and we haven't stayed on top of pruning it as much as we should.
Partly because we adopted this plant when we moved in and it was already in bad shape. So I've got lots of pruning that I could do in here.
And, "when do you prune?" Is the next question.
Well, you want to make sure that you harvest all the fruit off the tree.
Leaving fruit on the tree for a really long time is not a great idea. You're going to attract
different animals that are going to want to eat that fruit. And the fruit quality begins to deteriorate.
So, pull all the fruit off the tree if it's ripe. And then, I'm going to because I've got tons of baby fruit on here.
And, I don't need this many limes.
So, if I go in here and prune a little bit, I'm going to lose some of these baby limes, but I don't care because I only can eat so many of them.
So, right now is a really good time to prune.
We're in spring. You want to avoid, pruning in the hottest, most extreme times of the year.
That's because you're taking off branches that are shading other branches, and in our hot climate of Southern California, you're just going to leave the plant to have sunburn.
So, right now it's cool, spring. It's a good time for me to go in here and do a little bit of cleaning up.
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