092 FFF Honey Halo Nectarine. Palms. The Most Necessary Garden Task.
28:55
SPEAKERS
Debbie Flower, Neil Miner, Ed Laivo, Farmer Fred
Farmer Fred 00:00
Garden Basics with Farmer Fred is brought to you by Smart Pots, the original lightweight, long lasting fabric plant container. it's made in the USA. Visit SmartPots.com slash Fred for more information and a special discount, that's SmartPots.com/Fred.
Farmer Fred 00:20
Welcome to the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast. If you're just a beginning gardener or you want good gardening information, you've come to the right spot.
Farmer Fred 00:32
It's a peach without the fuzz. Of course, it's a nectarine. In this case, it's the Honey Halo nectarine, a sweet piece of fruit with a long harvest season. It becomes ripe when it's firm and crunchy. And then it can remain on the tree until it's rich and smooth and sweet with juice that's just running down your arm. Fruit tree expert Ed Laivo of tomorrowsharvest.com is back with all the juicy details. Plus, we solve your garden question about figs that split while they're on the tree. We also talk about cold hardy palm trees with a palm tree expert. Plu,s college horticulture Professor Debbie Flower tells us the most important garden task that you need to do, no matter what you're growing. It's all on episode 92 of the Garden Basics podcast, brought to you by Smart Pots and Tomorrow's Harvest. And we'll do it all in under 30 minutes. Let's go.
Farmer Fred 01:30
Here's a quick tip from our favorite retired college horticultural Professor, Debbie Flower. She mentioned this on an episode in which we were talking about potatoes, but took some scenic bypasses and looking for problems with plants. And she seemed, shall we say, very insistent that this is what you should be doing in the garden. And, that's to spend time with your plants. Is that true?
Debbie Flower 01:52
Absolutely. If I could give people just one piece of advice to have a successful garden, it would be to walk around their garden every day, get your favorite drink, whatever, put your gloppy shoes on and go out and walk around the garden and see what's going on. That's how you find the pest problems. That's how you find the thing that needs to be harvested, the thing that needs to be pruned, the thing that has fallen down that the animals at night have knocked over, whatever the issue is, you don't see that unless you will go out and walk through your garden. And why have a garden if you're not going to visit it? So visit your garden on a daily basis, and you will have a much healthier, happier garden and you'll be healthier and happier too.
Farmer Fred 02:34
Even if it's just a Zen experience for you. If you go out and you just stare at the garden. Yes, your neighbor will yell over the fence, "Hey, staring at it ain't gonna fix it!" Well, thank you, but sometimes it does because you get ideas. And absolutely think about it. And it's just a pleasant place to just stand and think.
Debbie Flower 02:56
Yes, when I was teaching I would walk around my garden after I got off for the day. And that varied because I had a varied teaching schedule. And now that I'm retired, I can walk around the garden anytime I want. But it is a good idea to go at different times of the day, if you have that freedom to do so. You'll see different sun angles. And if you're getting ideas, things like different sun angles, or where the wind comes from, where are the shadows, all are helpful in forming those ideas.
Farmer Fred 03:23
Spend time in your garden. Everybody benefits from it, you and your plants. Debbie Flower Thanks for the quick tip.
Debbie Flower 03:29
My pleasure. Thank you Fred.
Farmer Fred 03:34
It's Fabulous Fruit Friday and we like to bring back Ed Laivo of tomorrowsharvest.com., a service of Burchell Nursery. And Ed, what do you have for us tonight?
Ed Laivo 03:44
Well, I'll tell you what, Fred, I'm going back to the old donut styled fruits that you know, of course, Tomorrow's Harvest features and the peaches and the nectarines and this one nectarine is absolutely fabulous. And it's called the Honey Halo nectarine.
Farmer Fred 03:59
The Honey Halo nectarine. And you said it's a it's a donut Nectarine. What exactly is a donut nectarine.
Ed Laivo 04:19
The Honey Halo nectarine is a flat styled fruit with intense orangey yellow flesh with just a wonderful traditional nectarine flavor, just enough acid to make it interesting. It has this wonderful acid sugar balance that is just really traditional in most of your regular round nectarines. But this one has just just a great great great flavor.
Farmer Fred 04:45
The Honey Halo nectarine. When does it usually mature?
Ed Laivo 04:48
This is a mid season fruit so sometime around mid July.
Farmer Fred 04:52
All right. Is there such a thing as enough nectarines in existence to have a succession of nectarines throughout the growing season?
Ed Laivo 05:00
Oh, of course there is. At Tomorrow's Harvest we focused on a lot of these great varieties of flat donut style peaches and nectarines. So we have a really great collection of those and you can mix and match the peaches and the nectarines. But if you wanted to do just nectarines, you could have the early June ripening Snack Time, which is just a wonderful piece of fruit, and that's a donut style nectarine. Then Honey Halo would come in in the middle, and then you can end the season with that white October Snow, which is an amazing piece of fruit just in its looks. It's visual appeal is enough to make you want to just chomp the whole thing down. It's a wonderful flavored piece of fruit, white flesh. So I mean, just those simple ones right there would give you fruit literally from June to September,
Farmer Fred 05:50
And which USDA zones would these grow in?
Ed Laivo 05:53
Nectarines typically could stretch to USDA Zone six. But typically, I think they're like seven to nine.
Farmer Fred 06:01
All right, so the Sun Belt basically.
Ed Laivo 06:03
Yeah, yeah. Nectarines are not as widely adaptable as peaches. There's a few varieties of nectarines that have some outreach. You know, Mericrest is probably one of the most well known. Fantasia probably one of the most popular those that can sometimes do well in the right location into Zone five. But they're limited for nectarines.
Farmer Fred 06:30
And my apologies to all of you living in Zone seven that are not in the Sunbelt. I see you, Atlantic coast.
Ed Laivo 06:38
Yeah, and the Atlantic coast, of course has its own challenges. And nectarines can even be a little bit tougher to grow there as well, there's a few. Most of the varieties of stone fruit that you grew today, one of the things that you want to do is try to keep them low, you know, prune them low, so that you can cover them and you can offer different types of means of protecting them against cold against, when they bloom early, you can protect the blossoms or particular pests or diseases that may be prevalent, you can actually cover them and help to ward off those pests or diseases so size control on your fruit trees in the home garden allow you to impart barrier techniques. Covering your trees actually gets you more consistent cropping.
Farmer Fred 07:29
So in the case of the Honey Halo nectarine, a tree that would normally get what 15 to 18 feet tall, you could keep it easily at seven feet tall.
Ed Laivo 07:37
Oh easily. Yeah. I usually recommend you know, go for six to 10, somewhere in that range. Six to 10 feet, so that you keep the tree somewhere down where you can pick it while standing on the ground. And I know that people you know will say well, I have deer in my area and deer eat everything. But you know, it's funny. if you can keep them down and bush them and keep them in check, both width-wise and height-wise, it's really easy to just fence them. Then, when the plant tends to grow through the fence while the deer come in and prune the outside of the fence and keep them in check inside the fence area. We had done those experiments years ago and you know, watch the deer come in and help us prune inside these little columns, a tube of a fencing that we'd put around our fruit trees in deer prone areas but the fruit trees were nice and low and all you have to do is just leave one end open. We used to use just wire and just twist the fence together to twist off the wire, spread the fence apart, go in, pick your fruit, put it back together, you're done.
Farmer Fred 08:42
Honey Halo nectarine. The beauty of visiting the web website, tomorrow's harvest.com is you're gonna find out more information about the Honey Halo nectarine, but you're also going to find out which nurseries near you offer the tree for sale. And if a store doesn't have it, you can order it online from tomorrow's harvest dot com.
Ed Laivo 09:02
That's the truth. The Donut peaches and nectarines are selling incredibly well this year, as are all fruit trees. I mean, I can't tell you if there's a fruit variety that isn't doing well this year. Fruit just has hit this real high level of popularity that I don't think I've ever seen before in my career.
Farmer Fred 09:23
We talked about size control in backyard orchards, having trees, maybe six to eight feet apart and only six to eight feet tall. You can put a lot more fruit trees in the backyard now than you used to.
Ed Laivo 09:35
Those practices are now becoming more and more standard for home gardeners. But I got to tell you, and I'm sure you're aware of this, when you go online to all the different popular blogs and websites and things like that. I think there's still this lack of connection of a lot of people that are even writers that are writing on the topic that really they haven't made the connection of the importance of size control and recommending size control and understanding that, pruning in the summertime is absolutely a size control technique, specifically. Of all the people that this benefits, it benefits the novice gardener most of all. Prune in the summertime, you're never gonna make a mistake in terms of how you prune your tree.
Farmer Fred 10:19
Not only that, but the fact of the matter is, you're still going to get plenty of fruit off that six foot tree. That's the question that pops in their minds. First is, "I won't have as much fruit as I want." How many do you need?
Ed Laivo 10:33
You're so right, Fred. I mean, we did those tests back on the 40 inch Santa Rosa plum, that I grew for, what, almost 15 years. And we averaged on a 40 inch tall Santa Rosa plum, we averaged at least 50 to 100 pieces of fruit a year. And we also did some, you know, little makeshift tests on how many, Santa Rosa Plums does the average family of four eat. Okay, nowhere near 50. So, you know, the idea of having just enough, over having too much. I think that's an area that hasn't been explored as well. And keep in mind that if you want to have fruit for canning, and if you want to have fruit to give away, just grow it a little bit taller, 40 inches was an extreme, but I was trying to make a point.
Farmer Fred 11:23
Well, like you pointed out earlier, though, by maintaining a height of say six or seven feet, it makes it a lot easier to net to keep the birds out, it makes it a lot easier to protect if there's a sudden freeze coming up. So keeping a tree small has many, many benefits without the loss of fruit.
Ed Laivo 11:41
Yeah, without the loss fruit and spraying. But it also helps in areas where you get late freezes, or late rains or late inclement weather. If your apricot is low, or your pluot is kept low, you can throw a little bonnet of row cover over the top of the tree just to keep the rain from hitting directly on the blossoms, or just enough to cover the canopy of the tree to capture some heat so that the freeze doesn't affect your tree in bloom. And that's a technique that we, you know, explored a whole bunch in my past years and it works just fine.
Farmer Fred 12:17
People are writing with questions for you. We started answering questions a week or two ago, and all of a sudden people have glommed on to the concept of asking Ed. So this week's Ask Ed question comes from Carol who lives here in Northern California. And she says, "Hi, I have a fig tree in the ground that I started from cuttings about five years ago. Last year, I had a very good crop about 50 figs the year before less than 10. The problem I have is that some of the figs split while on the tree. One day, they're fine. The next day, they're split wide open. Is this because of too much water or something else?" I'll go with too much water.
Ed Laivo 12:58
Yeah, cracking figs is actually has a couple of different causes, and one is definitely moisture. It's going to be probably one of the most common ones. And especially too much moisture around the time the fig is just getting ripe, it's good to cut off water and don't give it a lot of extra water. When the fruits beginning to color up, I think you slow down your water. Because you know, of course, if the fruits growing and expanding, then the skin is you know, not very, very tight on a fig. And so it gets very, very susceptible to splitting. So that's that's a problem. But also, if you're in an area with high humidity, humidity can cause that as well. So that can be a contributing factor. Or just the variety. So for instance, a brown turkey fig, a very, very large fig. When it starts to get to be mature, the eye at the end, you've got the stem or the blossom end, is the opposite end where the eye is the bottom of the fig, that will expand very, very quick on certain varieties of brown turkey fig. And once that thing starts to expand, I mean it can actually just almost look like it explodes at the bottom of the fig.
Farmer Fred 14:16
At what stage in the fruit development on a fig is that water amount critical? At what age is that fruit or what month would it happen where you got to be very careful about watering?
Ed Laivo 14:28
I think you start looking at it when the when the figs start to color up. I think that's when you want to cut back watering unless you're in containers. I mean I've got some beautiful figs you know in my collection here that are in containers, some of them are quite old and in the containers. You really have to keep the water on them all the time that that's one thing. But in the ground, once they start to size and start show a little color, that's when you want to back off the water. You don't want to be heavy on the water then.
Farmer Fred 14:55
That would be a good topic for us to discuss in future weeks. The care and feeding of fruit trees in containers.
Ed Laivo 15:03
Yeah, we can do that.
Farmer Fred 15:04
Yeah, we'll do that next week.
Ed Laivo 15:06
Yeah, that's a great topic. I like fruit trees in containers.
Farmer Fred 15:09
But this week it's the Honey Halo nectarine. Find out more information by visiting tomorrowsharvest.com. We always learn a lot when Ed Laivo drops by. Ed, thanks for another Fabulous Fruit Friday.
Ed Laivo 15:20
Fred it was fantastically fabulous, and I'll look forward to the next visit.
Farmer Fred 15:27
on a Friday.
Ed Laivo 15:28
on a Friday.
Farmer Fred 15:34
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Farmer Fred 16:41
Do you like palms? Well, you can grow them, I won't say just about anywhere, but down to about USDA zone six or so. But here in USDA zone nine, palms are fairly common. But like all gardening is local, all palms can be local, too. We're talking with Neil Miner with Great Valley Palms here in the Sacramento area. Neil has a wonderful selection of many and varied palm species. And Neil, let's talk about some palm basics. Once people know which palm they want, if it's available and will grow in their area. Give us some palm care basics.
Neil Miner 17:15
Here's some mistake most people make with palms. They don't especially the Queen palms, Queen palms are high maintenance and I sell a ton of them. They need lots of water. Because there from from Brazil. It rains a lot in Brazil, it doesn't rain a lot in Sacramento in the summer. They need a lot of water. And I actually fertilize mine in April, June and August. And you gotta. It's very important to get that last fertilization in August, because I'm sure you've driven around town and see people have never fertilized their Queen palms, and they're yellow. So it's not chlorosis. It's just a lack of nitrogen or any kind of nutrient in that palm. You got to have a palm fertilizer that has all the micronutrients like boron, manganese, magnesium, that's very important for the palm tree to keep it green. And it's slow release fertilizer. Actually, it's really important for me because I have a lot of container stock. I probably need to do more in the container than on the palms in the ground itself. Like I do that with my queen palms. But the best thing you can do with your palm tree is mulch it. Like for anything else you can get, you know the free chip drop, they come down and they'll have all the chips you can use for free. They'll dump it in your driveway. 20 yards of it. If you have enough plants.
Farmer Fred 18:32
Here in the Sacramento area, we can get winter temperatures down into the mid 20s. But you have some palms here that can take it even colder than that. What are some of the most hardy palms that you have?
Farmer Fred 18:43
I am amazed at the number of palms you can start from seed, a lot of your specimens here have seed around the ground and were saying how easy it is for them to grow from seed.
Neil Miner 18:43
Okay, the three hardiest. Let's see, the Masari palm, which is from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, it grows in the mountains there, and it's super cold hardy down to like almost zero degrees. And then of course, Trachycarpus and either the Trachycarpus fortunei, Trachycarpus takeii or there's other Trachycarpusthat are more tropical in nature, they won't do as well here in the valley in the heat, they grow in more like a kind of a cloud forest mountain environment, almost like a San Francisco Bay Area type environment. And then the other one is this palm over here, the needle palm. This is one right there. That is native to the south in Alabama, Georgia, that goes down to like zero degrees, and it clumps and it's, you know, just super cold hardy.
Neil Miner 19:35
Yes, I mean, okay with the pindo palms. If you have your pindo palms, you have a nice big specimen, let's say eight feet of trunk, and it's real shady underneath it and there's lots of soil underneath or humus or anything, they'll fall on the ground and undoubtedly they're going to germinate. You'll see one tree out front that has 1000 of them around it.
Farmer Fred 19:54
And so you can just pick them up off the ground and then put it in probably some good palm media and you're good to go.
Neil Miner 19:59
Look at this Queen palm right here. If you look on the grass right there, if you go over there, there's Queen palm seedlings growing in the grass. So you can just dig those up. I could but I'm not gonna.
Farmer Fred 20:10
Alright, how much water do palms really need?
Neil Miner 20:12
It depends on the palm. You have some desert species, like talking about the Mazari palm, or the Brahea Armata, the blue hesper palm, that can get away with a lot less water than let's say a queen palm. But that doesn't say it doesn't need water, because in the wild, these palms only grow around springs and stuff and canyons usually. So when it gets 100 degrees here, they appreciate the water. Because I mean, if you don't water them, they're gonna look probably nearly the same. These desert palms are just not going to grow. So you put the supplemental water on them in hot weather when you get into summer and they'll push them out and it's kind of weird these desert palms because where they're from, they get those monsoons, you know, coming up from Mexico and the Sonoran Desert, they get the monsoons. So these palms, their seeds are viable for a long time in case they don't get water. And so they'll fall on the ground and then you know birds and pick them up because they have a fruity outcovering, eat them and they'll spread them places. And when you get that first monsoon rain, if they're in a good spot, they'll immediately because it's so hot there, they'll put down a long sinker and get it just to get established, and to start growing.
Farmer Fred 21:18
What sort of birdlife do these palms attract?
Neil Miner 21:21
Mockingbirds, this big Mediterranean single trunk right here. That is a bird hotel. Sparrows that is their home this spring and summer though. They have babies. They're like nothing can get at them there. You know, like the crows can't get them they they just get deep in there and it's real spiny. And the bigger birds like the scrub Jays can't get in there and get their eggs and their little nestling. So the sparrows like that that's like a hotel for them right there.
Farmer Fred 21:46
One more question. I get this question a lot. People want to plant a palm next to a swimming pool. I think you have some thoughts on that.
Neil Miner 21:53
It matters what kind of palm. You definitely don't want it close to a pool. You don't want a Queen palm because they're going to produce like prodigious amounts of fruit. You can't avoid it because they have bisexual flowers. So you only need one tree to produce any fruit. It's going to produce it, you can't get away from it. You you can plant a male Canary Island date palm because it won't produce the seeds. It will just produce the inflorescence and that's it. And so you won't have big seedpods dropping in your pool. That's important. Yes. Or this Bolivia mountain coconut. Perfect. It doesn't see till it's a little bigger. And then when it gets the big seeds, they're edible. They're the size of walnuts and you can taste just like coconut you can eat them
Farmer Fred 22:36
And that would be hardy in zone nine I would think.
Neil Miner 22:39
Yes. I that's that tree right there survived 18 degrees.
Farmer Fred 22:44
Neil Miner's with Great Valley palms, we learned a lot. It's definitely worth investigating. Neil, thanks for your time.
Neil Miner 22:50
You're welcome. Have a great day.
Farmer Fred 23:01
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Farmer Fred 24:20
Debbie Flower is here with a quick tip from our favorite college horticultural professor.
Farmer Fred 24:26
Debbie, we just heard from Neil Miner out at Great Valley Palms and he was talking about cold hardy palms. And one of the ones he mentioned that would be good for several USDA zones was the Trachycarpus and I guess the common name for that would be the windmill palm.
Debbie Flower 24:41
Yeah, they're actually two Trachycarpus that do well in cold zones, or cooler zones of the US. The Trachycarpus Fortunei, the windmill palm, and the Trachycarpus takil, which I'm not familiar with at all, the Kumaon palm. They can grow in Zones seven B and warmer. There are some other cold tolerant palms. One is the needle palm, or Rhapidophyllum hystrix. That one's native to the southeast US so you get a US native and it can go into zones as cold as five. Wow. Yeah. And there's also the Mazari palm, Nannorrhops ritchiana, is for zones six through 11.
Farmer Fred 25:26
And there's there's one with a real cold name, the Bismarck palm. But I don't think you can grow that in Bismarck, North Dakota. The Bismarck palm is a native of Madagascar but can take temperatures as low as 15 degrees, though it is better suited for zones 8B and up.
Debbie Flower 25:43
So there are palms for practically all of us in at least from the middle US south, to grow in our yard. And if palms are your joy, that's a that's a wonderful thing to be able to do that. There are also some cycads. They're not related to palms, but they have some palms in their name like the sago palm, it certainly will grow in a zone eight and warmer.
Farmer Fred 26:08
And we should point out to when we're saying palms, if you have the image of a tall, slender trunk with some leaves at the top that parrots fly from, palms, actually, and most of the cold tolerant palms we're talking about, are rather short growing specimens.
Debbie Flower 26:26
Right. And that's probably why one of the reasons that they are cold tolerant is that they can trap heat underneath them that comes out of the soil every night if they have a bigger canopy to do that. And that will protect them from several degrees of cold.
Farmer Fred 26:39
And then there are the palmettos, also known as the Sabal palms, and they can get down to what I think zone six B. Wow. And true to its name, the toughest is the dwarf Palmetto right. So there you go. Some of these specimens may only get five, six feet tall.
Debbie Flower 26:59
Yes. And so they're more of a mounding shrub than a tree.
Farmer Fred 27:03
All right, palm tips, cold hardy palms. If you're looking for that tropical effect. Some of these just might work for you. If you don't live in Bismarck, these might work for you.
Debbie Flower 27:15
Yes, zone five, B and above. So plant them in spring, so that they get established in March, April, May something like that. So they get a root system before undesirable weather. Whether it's drought or very cold hits. When you're transplanting, if you damage the roots, not to worry, they will regrow a whole new set of roots. That's one of the really miraculous things about palms. Just treat them really nicely. For the first two months. I'd say that they're in the ground, make sure they've got moisture there. They're stabilized, they won't fall over that kind of thing. You can fertilize them in April, June, August. So late spring through the summer use a palm fertilizer. They do show symptoms of micronutrient deficiency if you don't use the correct fertilizer and a palm fertilizer will have just what they need. And many of these shorter growing varieties, I would think, would be suitable for containers. Yes, almost all of them would be suitable for containers. Some of them are fast growers, some of them are slow growers and the slow growers tend to be the ones that are better for containers. But, you can grow the fast ones in a container, too. Cold hardy palm tips for you. Debbie, thanks so much.
Debbie Flower 28:25
Oh, always a pleasure.
Farmer Fred 28:29
Garden Basics comes out every Tuesday and Friday and is brought to you by Smart Pots. It’s available just about anywhere podcasts are handed out. And that includes Apple podcasts, I Heart Radio, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Podcast Addict, CastBox and Google podcasts. And for Northern California gardeners, check out this podcast: the Green Acres Garden Podcast with Farmer Fred, also available wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening, subscribing and leaving comments. We appreciate it.
