The main reasons for fruit trees “not being amazing” are incorrect watering, inadequate fertilizer, application of fertilizers at the wrong time of year, incorrect pruning for the variety, under-pruning or over-pruning, and most importantly not choosing the right varieties in the first place. My new organic book goes into depth on all these subjects so please consult it month-by-month for the tasks you need to do. It is too late now to do corrective pruning on deciduous fruit trees but not too late to fertilize them lightly which should be done here just as flower buds swell and not too late to fertilize citrus and avocado. Citrus should have been fertilized in January. If you failed to do this, follow January’s instructions and do it now. February is the month for feeding avocados. (Read pages 81 and 82 on that subject and feed avocados now.)
I agree that the vegetarian lifestyle is a good one, though I don’t adhere to it religiously and eat fish a couple of times a week. If you are planning to plant a vegetable garden, be sure to place it in full sun. You could grow vegetables either in the ground or in raised boxes filled with good top soil. Be sure to put wire on the bottom of boxes to keep out gophers. Perhaps you can attend one of my seminars or talks on this subject. Be sure to come up and say hi. Please check the list of upcoming events.
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We live in Del Mar Heights and would like to plant a peach tree. Since we have only seen citrus trees in the area, we are wondering if a peach tree would thrive. What would you suggest? Thank you. J Arnold
Peach trees grow well here as long as you choose a low-chill variety and prune properly in winter and dormant spray in winter after pruning. My experience however is that ‘Panamint’ nectarine will grow extremely well in a home garden and give you a big harvest of delicious fruit that personally I think is better and sweeter in coastal zones than peach.
That said, I recommend the following varieties of low-chill varieties of peach, all of which should bear where you live: Floridaprince (this one is early and pretty good), August Pride (said to have good aroma as well as flavor), ‘Bonita’, ‘Desertgold’, ‘Eva’s Pride’, or ‘Midpride’ (this is one of the best and has low chill as do all the others.) You should be able to order any one of these from a reputable nursery.
Pat:As always,enjoyed your talk at the San Diego Hort Society on Monday. I have a question that you may have touched on. I have an active veggie garden in Leucadia. For compost, instead of composting outside of the garden, I just dig a trough and put the old veggies under the new veggie garden. Is that an issue? Thank you
Digging or plowing the old vegetables into the ground and letting them rot in the ground is an old practice used more by some gardeners back east than here. These gardeners chop up the remains of the garden and plow it under and most of it rots over winter. Then they plant again in spring. Many French gardeners compost in a trench, covering the compost with soil and letting it sit a few years before planting on top of it. But the trench is next to the garden, not in the garden where they are currently growing their plants.
Another way is to chop up spent plants and bury them under your paths. They will eventually rot and improve the soil. The problem with turning the whole veggie garden over and then immediately planting again is that some plants such as members of the cabbage family and corn, to give two examples, have very woody stems. These take a long time to rot and will subtract nitrogen from the soil in order to rot. Also, things like lettuce when turned under in the ground may increase the incidence of disease. Beans, including fava beans, and peas on the other hand can be turned under the soil and you can then plant on top of them in two or three weeks. This is because they are legumes and have a high nitrogen content so they rot quickly and give nitrogen to the soil instead of subtracting it.
When you compost the remains of things like lettuce and cole crops and tomatoes that might have some fungi and diseases and if you are getting a good hot compost pile going you are getting rid of a lot of pathogens. It is great if one can purchase a chipper and cut up the stuff fine, but just chopping with a spade and piling it up works also. I also think the whole process of mixing all the plants up in the compost makes for a very complex structure of bio-organisms thus letting the healthy ones take over eliminating the bad guys in the natural process of rotting. You want it all to break down into something where you can’t see what it once was. When it reaches this stage it smells wonderfully sweet and earthy. You just know this stuff is good and you can use it in your garden to produce the most wonderful results.
I used to do trench composting in an open trench here in California. I dug a big trench next to a bank and it was in the shade and easy to keep moist. I just chopped up all the remains of the vegetable garden at the end of the season and threw it in that trench and stuff from the flower garden too, and after a year or two and I dug the most wonderful stuff out of the bottom of that trench. But eventually tree roots got into that trench and that was the end of one of the best compost piles I’d ever had, like something out of the past. It came to a sad end when tree roots ate all the goodness out of my compost. So I had to switch to the 3-bin method on top of stepping stones and visquine plastic to keep out the tree roots. I much preferred the slower trench method, more old-fashioned but in a shady spot against a bank I got simply great compost with little effort expended.
There is a whole chapter in my memoir, “All My Edens” called “Romancing the Compost Pile” and it’s fun to read. (Chapter 6.) This chapter has EVERY detail and more than you would ever need to know and it’s in story form to make it all the more memorable. I hope you will relax (with a glass of wine?) sometime and enjoy that chapter. You are a gardener so you will enjoy all the nitty-gritty bits I tell the non-gardeners to skip!
Additionally, my organic book has a complete but less detailed explanation on pages 97 to page 99. (Take a look. It covers the whole subject of compost in compact form, with boxes and sidebars to boot.)