Ed. Laivo: Hi I am Ed Laivo with Dave Wilson Nursery and today we are at the Greenery nursery Turlock, California, and we’re going to be selecting fruit trees, we’re going to show you some ideas on what should you look for and what should you be doing when you are buying your fruit trees for the season.
Our bear root season is when you will always find the greatest selection of fruit trees; also, you will find them at the best price, so let us go out and select the fruit tree. When selecting bear root fruit trees, what we want to do is we want to look for couple of things. Basically, we want to look for a nice healthy tissue, we don’t want to see any kind of damage, any kind of oozing, we want to see nice healthy tissue, that’s one of the things we’re looking for when selecting bear root.
Next thing we want to do is we want to see there’s a nice developed root system. Now, in some roots of course, they’re a little shyer, and we’re not going to see as much branching, may be we will not see as much root. However, we want to see is that there is a good root zone that exists from where the tree was planted down.
The next thing is this; it does not matter if it is pruned or not because in many cases you are going to decide where you want that canopy to be. So of course, we recommend that after the tree has planted that if I’d be cut off neatly so you got a nice low canopy. This would be now a low canopy as well. But, it doesn’t really matter if it has large branch that had been pruned back much at all.
Other good things to look for, a rootstock label, now, those rootstock is milo29c and there’s a good description as what the attributes of these particular rootstocks are. So, what you’re doing is you are matching these trees rooting system, where they have ability to be able to grow in your particular situation. For drainage and particular disease problems, dryness, sandy soils, the roots, dark label should give you a good idea of whether or not that root system is going to be adapted to those situations.
In the case of this particular variety right here we have one of the new saucy king nectarines which is a flat nectarine. Here is the rootstock label. Now this is a citation rootstock. Citation does not always have the prettiest root, but it is a very dependable root in terms of anchoring and in terms of getting down and producing a wonderful root system and a quick efficient manner.
Here we go with my favorite apple rootstock; we find it at a bear root bin, it’s on a Fuji apple. What is it, B9 miniscule root, very suspicious but also very dependable. So if you find a root like this and it got a label that says b9 rootstock, it is a very dependable rootstock.
You know, bear root season is a limited season, so you know there is a very, very small window opportunity to plant, and you know, we are looking at different plants right here that you can plant during that opportunity over that window and here we go. Look at what we have, we have grapes. Grapes can be planted during the bear root season. You can find wonderful plants at your local retail nursery. These varieties right here are all manucas, black manucas, and wonderful variety of grape. We got another one over here, of course the Thompson seedless very, very popular variety of grape, and some flame seedless, which are also popular. Grapes are a wonderful, wonderful product to plant during the bear root season.
All right we’re looking around to see what else we got to for this bear root season and here we go we’ve got some multiple budded fruit trees, real popular item during bear root season, these are four in one peaches I see. This is real, real nice product right here. You have four nice balance varieties on here, so this would be an ideal bear root, multiple butted, but it is definitely not typical. What’s typical is having something like this Asian pear where you have a little smaller variety that actually grown a little weaker than the other two or three, and it is always important when you are selecting this, if this is what you choose, this looks healthy you want to make sure that it is not broken. You want to make sure that it originates with a color code on it, so that you know that it actually is a variety and not just a rouge branch and always when you are planting this plant the smaller variety to south to southwest.
Hey jay, so what if people looking for when they come in for bear root, you know at this time of the year.
Jay: Well, typically, they have a specific thing in mind that they want; they’re looking either for a peach or for cherry something like that and when they tell us that, then we ask him, when do you want to ripen, and they say, we don’t care. We say, well you know, we have several different varieties that can ripen successively throughout the summer. So what is your window of opportunity that you want this fruit to come of? At that point then we will lead them to a particular variety that will ripen at that time. If they do not care and they only have room for one tree, then we will take them over to a multiple budded tree, where they can have four to five different ripening periods and ripen off summer long.
Ed Laivo: What about high density planting, is that a popular technique in home gardening these days?
Jay: It is getting more popular with people smaller with yards that they have now. People do not quite understand that you can plant four trees within four square feet with each other and still have an amazing amount of fruit that you can possibly eat in one time. But it is becoming more popular, we are talking about backyard horticulture in that fashion and so we are trying to educate the public more about planting more trees closer together and controlling the growth so that it’s a shrub not a tree.
Ed Laivo: So, are there any other options aside from just doing bear root, you know do we have other choices here at the greenery?
Jay: Sure, you bet we do. If they don’t find something in the bear root section that they want. We also have container ice trees, and those are trees that have been grown for a year longer in a container and there are varieties out there that we may not have chosen to offer in a bear root form this year. So we’ll have them in a five-gallon container.
Ed Laivo: Good deal, want to go to look at them?
Jay: Sure.
Ed. Laivo: Let’s do it.
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