by Greg Alder | Apr 5, 2024 | Avocados |
Last October, I had the chance to visit the oldest Carmen avocado tree in the USA, and I thought I would come away with a better understanding of the variety. The tree had a metal USDA tag still attached to it, from when it was held in quarantine after the budwood had...
by Greg Alder | Mar 19, 2024 | Fruit |
I was watching bees work the flowers on my Red Baron peach tree when this hummer pulled up and stole the show. ShareClick to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new...
by Greg Alder | Mar 15, 2024 | Avocados |
I’m going to start harvesting from my Hass tree soon so I thought I’d show yield results from the girdles I did on it in the fall of 2022 and the flowers that are emerging from the girdles I did in the fall of 2023. On those recent girdles, I used narrower...
by Greg Alder | Mar 4, 2024 | Avocados |
Now that it’s March and it’s very unlikely there will be any temperatures cold enough to be damaging to avocados through the rest of this winter, I took a walk around my yard to make some observations about how different avocado trees fared during the...
by Greg Alder | Feb 23, 2024 | Fruit |
Yes, you can move a fruit tree that you planted in the wrong spot last year. (I’ve done it.) Yes, you can move a fruit tree that you planted in your current yard to the yard at your new house. (I’ve done it.) I feel like I can give you tips on doing this successfully...
by Greg Alder | Feb 16, 2024 | Citrus |
My neighbor had a citrus tree that she called a grapefruit, but it made curious fruit: it was the size and shape of a grapefruit but the rind was golden yellow, unlike any grapefruit I’d seen, and the flavor was so sweet that it tasted artificial. How could this be a...
by Greg Alder | Feb 9, 2024 | Avocados |
The spring of 2023 in California was abnormally cool, making avocado thrips abnormally populous. Thrips are tiny insects that chew on avocado fruit as the fruit is small, and this chewing becomes brown scarring. The thrips damage can result in large patches that some...
by Greg Alder | Jan 19, 2024 | Avocados |
You and I, we go to the nursery and buy our avocado trees. Not Brad. He is so well-rounded in avocado growing skills and knowledge that he has developed a new grove of hundreds of avocado trees from scratch. Starting from seed Brad planted over 200 avocado seeds,...
by Greg Alder | Jan 12, 2024 | Berries and Vines |
Do you ever get bug bites in your strawberries? That’s my main challenge to harvesting perfect, plump, red ones. So the last couple years I’ve grown fewer strawberries in the ground and more in containers, which has vanquished the bug threat. I start the...
by Greg Alder | Jan 5, 2024 | Avocados |
Most avocado trees make plenty of fruit without other types of avocado trees nearby — when the weather is good. But the spring of 2023 was cool, and that is not good for pollination. (The photo above shows GEM avocado trees flowering during yet another foggy day...
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