what's going on growers it's James Prigioni coming to you live from jersey today me and tuck are going to show you how to grow apple trees in your own backyard and we'll share some of the tips and tricks we've learned over the last nine years we'll also grab a huge apple harvest along the way let's go for today's video.
me and tuck are going to be doing things a little different in regards to the how-to videos i'm going to be involving more of my own personal experience for this video because like i said i've been growing apple trees for like almost 10 years now i've grown them every way from seed like we have right here the prisionee apple i planted this thing from seed maybe seven eight years ago and it's done well.
i have transplanted pots apple trees that i got in pots you know varieties just from places like home depot or lowe's i've grown them that way and i've also got bare root ones so i've essentially grown apple trees almost every way that you can do it first off let's get the basics out of the way apple trees grow best in zones four to nine and one thing you really need to think about when it comes to apple trees is they do need another pollinator so when you're ordering trees you want to make sure you're at least getting two trees or you're going to need to get a tree that's a multi-grafted .
one different varieties that will pollinate one another another thing about apple trees like almost all other fruit trees is they like good well-drained soil because they do not like sitting in standing water no fruit trees really like that with the basics aside let's get into the meat of things so when it comes to growing apple trees in my opinion the first most important thing you need to take into recognition and to make sure you do is to get a good variety and plant that the first time so you need a variety that's going to do good in your particular circumstance every circumstance is a little different but a good place to start is a good disease resistant variety something like this right here here's the williams pride apple you can see how beautiful these apples are and we've got large production from this tree .
and just on just a four year old tree this is a great variety because it has good disease resistance and it's also an early uh ripening one so we have some apples right here on the ground this fell on its own it's nice and ready and ripe as you can see a beautiful apple right here so this thing is ready in august when some apples are ready in september some in october so because it ripens earlier the apples seem to you know have to be only on the tree for a shorter period of time which i think makes.
it so it's easier to kind of get the harvest especially when it's disease resistant too another variety that's excellent you can get into the ground is the liberty apple that's said to be the most disease resistant apple on the planet so starting off with the right variety the first time will make a world of difference a huge difference i made this mistake when i first started let me bring you to a tree a tree that i got in like seven or eight years ago that's not even doing well i got the wrong tree in and i paid for it now let's go back to a tree that i planted like seven or eight maybe nine years ago this is a golden delicious apple this is one that i got from lowe's and it was a potted tree so not a good variety that i really researched or anything not a good healthy tree.
it was like a potted tree it was root bound so this is a perfect example of how you don't want to do it the way i did things in the new food forest where i'm getting way better production how i'm getting huge apple harvest on just four year old apples this is how i did it so what i did was i ordered bare root dwarf trees from good reputable companies that's super important you need to make sure you get it from a good company and that you research what variety you're getting because this is the tree that's going to be in there for such a long time .
and you're going to put into it that monetary investment so you want to make sure you're getting the most out of it what you don't want to do is like what i have over here is order trees from a company that isn't that reputable because i ordered this tree from a you know a company again that that i didn't know much about and they this was supposed to be a katy apricot tree they sent me a santa rosa plum and this tree is.
it's not what i wanted if i wanted to sand there was a plum i could have just gotten one from lowe's so i wasted my time and my money because i didn't even realize that it was a plum until a few years after so this was a complete waste one company that i like to use a lot is rain tree nursery that's one that i have found to be you know pretty consistent so i've gotten a good amount of trees from that place after you've decided what varieties you want you've chosen your trees you've ordered them and they've come in the spring that's when i suggest most new gardeners plant their trees in the spring .
i suggest you prep that fall before and then plant the tree in the early spring what you want to do is get that bare root tree in as early as you possibly can as soon as the ground can be worked so once the ground can be worked we want to dig that section out we want to space our dwarf fruit juice about 10 to 15 feet apart when it comes to the apples we want to dig into the soil and we want to make sure that we're not burying the graft union because this is uh you know a regular tree grafted onto a dwarf rootstock.
so when you come down here you'll notice the rootstock down here you want to make sure that you're not burying that graft union if you do then the tree can root from the top part and then it won't be a dwarf tree anymore that's not what you want so that's important when planting after you have that tree planted you want to make sure you come around and put a thick mulch around it i suggest wood chips they seem to work the best in my opinion because young fruit trees one of the biggest things that can hold them back is if they have to compete with weeds and grass grass growing under a young fruit tree will greatly hinder its growth and overall production .
because it just takes so much from that tree so make sure you get that mulch down then you want to make sure you water that tree in and for the next three months or so come by and just give that tree some water it's the first year that it's setting in so just baby it along a little bit apple trees and pear trees like growing with a central leader when it comes to pruning while trees like plums and peaches like growing to an open center i'll show you an example of an open center tree after this.
here is a williams pride this is growing to one central leader as you'll notice this main stem starts from the bottom and goes all the way to the top as just one central stem this is growing like this because when we first put the tree in we pruned it to grow like this and then staked it and kind of encouraged that tree to grow up the one stem because this is the shape the tree kind of naturally wants to grow in and this is the shape where it'll you know provide the highest level of production so that's why we wanted to encourage it to grow like that as opposed to a peach tree which i'll take you to right over here this tree likes naturally growing to more of an open center so when we planted this street we encouraged it to do to grow to that you know shape .
when you do this you're really uh you know guiding the trees along and saving some time and getting yourself quicker to production not wasting growth on branches that are going to be taken out later so you'll notice right here when i first planted this tree we cut that this was the center leader we cut it out and encouraged it to grow into this open center so making sure that you're pruning the trees correctly will help you to get uh earlier and better fruit when it comes to fertilizing your apple trees what i like to do is i like to come out in the spring .
and i'll pull back some of these wood chips like right here i'll pull back the wood chips and then i'll just put compost all around the base of the tree then after i do that i'll put wood chips back around you know around the base of the tree i like to do this in the spring i don't want to do this in the late fall because if we fertilize too late in the fall then we could try to like encourage that tree to grow a lot and then some of that growth could die off in the in the um in the winter so that's not what we want we want the tree to blow up and explosive growth in the spring that's really what we want now it's time to get into some first-hand issues that i've had with apples and i want to talk about some of the things that i did to resolve the issues.
so one of the first main problems that i had with apples and a bunch of my fruit trees was that i wasn't getting good pollination and the re i thought that the reason i wasn't getting good pollination was because i didn't have enough good pollinators at first then when i added some more trees i thought well this can't be the issue because i have enough pollinators but i still wasn't getting good pollination after that i thought maybe that some of these uh you know blossoms were getting killed off by a late frost so that's what i chalked it up to because some days i would come out and the flowers would all be like crumbled up .
and dead and i couldn't really find out what the issue was after a few years it took longer than it should have but i finally realized that my issue was that my flowers were getting brown rot on them so essentially my flowers were getting brown rot and then they were dying off because of that rot before the bees could come and pollinate them so that's basically what was happening to deal with this issue what i did was you know not something that i wanted to do but something i had to do to make sure that i could ensure a harvest.
i used a sulfur spray a micronized sulfur spray just in the spring i came out and sprayed some of the flowers before they were uh you know infected by that brown rot and what this did was you know it kept the brown rod from coming to those uh to those flowers and allow the time for the bees to come in and pollinate them when i sprayed the sulfur dust it's right here i'll grab it when i spray this i made sure to spray it only at night when there were no bees around because this is not good for the beneficial insects it's something i felt like i had to do though in order to get fruit and i want to share this with you .
because i want to equip you with some of the tools that you know in order to get apples it's not 100 you know completely natural like it would be in nature but it's still definitely organic and this has helped me immensely the next big issue that i had when growing apples had to do with the pests in particular the plum curculio which has devastated my garden and my fruit trees are had for years but i feel like i really have a hang on it now and a lot of the other pests too so that's why i want to share this with you.
hey tuck you want a cucumber boy no one boy let's see uh if he wants a fresh cuke grab one here for him and i'll talk about it more as he's snacking on one because i saw him run around looking for something because we just have so many cucumbers here one boy so we'll let him go do his own thing but my issue was with the plum perculo mainly the reason they were so devastating is because what they do is they come in they cut into the fruit and they lay their eggs in the inside they can do it with hundreds of fruit just one cuculio too so the way that i actually resolved .
this was i used something called surround kaolin clay and this is important they actually get the surround one because it's a super super fine particle of kaolin clay and they make this with a magnetic centrifuge to make it super super fine and this is the stuff you need you don't want to use just regular kaolin clay because it won't work this acts as a protectant on the fruit so you basically spray it on the fruit when it's young and then the bugs don't want to come for it it kind of like you know it protects it basically it doesn't um you know hurt the bugs .
but it deters them from going for it what's super super important with apples is that you start this spray the kale and clay right after petal fall when the fruit is very small because when the fruit's tiny you have to make sure you have a good covering on them because one plum curculio insect could hit so many apples when they're small like that so if you stay on top of one small and consistently spray that's going to form an incredible you know protecting layer this kale and clay also helps with things like sunburn too.
so it's got multiple functions and uses another thing that's great about it too is if you're going to use the sulfur spray you could mix the sulfur with the kaolin clay and it actually helps the sulfur spray work better because it i think it helps it like contact and stay on the tree better so that kaolin clay works incredible it's helped me with so many insects it even helps with things like cucumber beetles too another thing that i started doing which made a huge difference regarding the health of the fruit trees keeping away the pest and disease was i went around and i raked up all the pits in the fallen fruit from previous years.
and now anything that falls to the ground any fruit or anything diseased i pick that up and i either throw it in the garbage or i burn it i get it off the property one of my big problems was in the past the plum peculiar were laying their eggs in the fruit a fruit like this or even smaller would fall to the ground then the plum peculiar that was inside it would hatch and the next generation would grow and then infect my other fruit so i was essentially reseeding the plum per kilo in my own garden creating the perfect environment for them to thrive so i was creating my own problems .
after i learned this or removed a lot of the fruit the you know the second generation of plum curcuto hasn't shown up as much and it's made a huge difference so you want your garden to be tidy not super neat because it has to be a little natural but you want it to be tidy picking up any fallen or diseased fruit removing any diseased branches or leaves and getting them off the property after i dealt with the issues of bad pollination bugs and disease and insects i cleared a lot of that stuff up i was still having one issue my issue was that i was getting a lot of fruit on my trees i mean these things were absolutely loaded but the fruit wasn't really ripening and there was so much of it it wasn't very good high quality .
my issue was that i was being way too greedy the thing that opened my eyes was when i had a chijiro pear tree a young pear tree and it probably had about a month or two before it was ripe and i left so many pairs on it that the branch just snapped in half it cracked i lost all the fruit that was on it because i tried to get so much after that i said i'm going to start thinning this year in the last year i've been thinning more than ever and look at the result look at the size of some of this fruit as opposed to getting tiny little apples i'm getting these big monstrous apples like this here's the williams pride.
we're just going to twist it let this thing come right off and look how ripe and ready it is look at the size of it so when you fin you can allow the fruit you know the tree instead of focusing on 500 fruit it can focus on 25 30 50 fruit and make those big and healthy and just incredible it just makes sense it's like if you're a parent or something imagine trying to raise like five kids as opposed to trying to raise 150 kids at once it just won't happen you can't put your focus on what's best so when you thin these trees you kind of um refocus the tree to put everything into those few fruit to focus on those and to make those as high quality and delicious as possible let's crack into one of these though and see how it actually tastes and you'll notice it's a little whiter than some of the stuff.
you'll see in the stores that's just like the natural uh you know uh bacteria and stuff that come on the on a fruit you don't see this in the stores because you can't get in this fresh you can't get them this ripe the there's an apple on the ground right here this thing fell on its own to the ground so there's no way you could get it and store this ripe it's just when a chip is good so when you grow the stuff yourself you can actually eat them ripe you can grow the varieties you want they can be organic you can know that and you can get all the benefits that come from it .
so i mean in my opinion it's beautiful let's shine this one up though this thing might look even better let's shine this apple up and see what it looks like so we're going to take this rub it in our shirt a little bit and then see how much it shines man that's absolutely beautiful so apples are ready to harvest the really the thing that i'll tell you when the harvest is the taste when you order the tree though the company should give you an idea of about when their harvest ready to harvest so like the williams pride it says it's ready in about august time and when it comes to early ripening apples like this one you'll know they're starting to get ripe when the first ones start to fall from the tree because the early ripening apples they ripen over a lot longer period of time than the late ones so the early ones will ripen over like a three week period of time.
some already earlier some a little later while some of your late apples they could all ripen on the same day so having the early apples is really fun because it extends that harvest and it kind of lets you let the apples trickle in a little bit instead of coming all at once let's finally bite into this baby though incredible flavor no starchiness that's one way you know it's ripe when it doesn't have any starchiness in it the thing again that will identify when an apple is ready is the taste nothing better than fresh apples from your own backyard now i want to harvest the apples from this tree and here's some apples that have just fallen from the ground the last couple days.
i want to show you all this because this is what you can have from one tree in just four years it's it's possible i think everyone should be getting these into the ground i want to harvest all these apples and show you them but look at this one over here look how incredibly ripe and perfect this thing isi'm going to cut this baby right out man look at that beautiful not every apple is perfect a lot of them have little marks on them and stuff like you know this has a mark on it in here some of these have some marks they're not 100 perfect but they're great for eating they're delicious and it's also another little indication that they're actually organic because they have some bug bites so we're going to harvest all these apples.
i'm going to show you how much we have in the bucket and then we're going to bring them inside start eating them because we've been eating some already as many as we can kind of as they fall and stuff but now we're gonna have a a bunch of them here look at that apple that thing is massive too the size beautiful i feel so blessed and thankful let me just get the ladder right here because some of these are up a little higher grab this one here grab this one here and then i'll come back to you uh when we have everything all harvested that's today's video guys thanks for watching i hope you enjoyed it.
i hope you got something out of it i hope me and tuck encourage you to get out there and to get some apple trees into the ground and i hope we equip you with some maybe some tools and some skills and a little bit of knowledge to be able to successfully grow apples and eat them right from your own backyard like right here look at this harvest from a four-year-old tree that's just one tree right there we have a lot more apple trees coming so this is an incredible amount of high quality super nutrient dense organic can't beat it food in my opinion this stuff is absolutely priceless the reason .
it is because you can't buy this in the store you can't get this ripe this organic this local there's just no way to do it unless you do it yourself so that's why me and tuck make these videos we want you guys to be growing yourself too before i let you go i wanted to thank one of the new channel members tobias malo i hope i said your last name right but thanks for contributing to the channel it means a lot to me and talk to know that you know that you're putting out for it and we want to thank you for that .
i also want to thank everyone who's giving the new super super thanks and contributing to the channel that means a lot to us too and you know anything that we get from you guys we're just going to reinvest it back into the garden and into growing more delicious apples so we just wanted to thank you for everything we also want to let you know to hit the like button hit the subscribe button share with your friends don't forget to check out the merch down low and remember whenever you're on amazon start your shopping with our amazon affiliate link talking james we'll be back again real soon we out.
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