Charlie,

Glad to know that your plants and fruit trees are surviving. BTW, I am also in No VA area. I live in Potomac Falls.

Anyhow, I do mostly vegetable gardening. I usually grow tomatoes, peppers and green chilies. Last summer, I also tried okra and it turned out to be pretty good crop. On the whole, I have a brown thumb. If anything flourishes in my garden, it is like winning a Nobel prize:-).

I have always wanted to grow fruit trees, but I feel so intimidated by fruit trees. I have heard from so many people that fruit trees are very hard to grow and you have to do manual pollination and take for ever to produce the trees. So what is your experience with fruit trees. I have tried strawberries a few times, but no luck. Either they died or they did not bear the fruit at all.

I am only interested in peach, apricot and plum fruits? Do they survive No VA area winters?

Any help will be appreciated.

Thank you,

Mindy

Mindy,

I have a moorpark apricot, a burgundy plum and a elberta peach that have had fruit for the past 2 years. The problem I have is keeping the squirrels away from the fruit when it is ripening. The survive the winters fine. This year I believe my figs have also survived. My paw paws look like they are ready to bloom. I will have to hand pollinate the paw paws since they require flies to pollinate and it has to be with a different variety. If I get fruit, it will be my first paw paw fruit. I also have hardy kiwi that I got about a gallon of fruit off of last year. I have fuzzy kiwis that should also have a few fruit this year. My fuyu persimmon produced about 225 fruit last year. I plant tomatoes, peppers and egg plant among my landscape plants in this picture.

Here is my raised garden bed with a gojiberry bush in each end.

Alas, my artichokes did not make it through the winter.

Hi Charlie,

Sorry to hear that your artichokes did not survive.

I really love your garden. What are you growing in a planter in the 2nd picture? Are they salad greens? You really seem to be a very experienced gardener. I think you should give gardening classes at local nurseries:-).

How did you get into growing fruits? I do not why I feel so intimidated by fruits. How do you pollinate fruit trees by hand?

Thank you,

Mindy

Sahai6 - The second picture show my raised garden in which I was growing radishes, artichokes and green beans. The artichokes covered the beans too much so they did not do well, but the artichokes made about 30 chokes and the radishes did well. This year I have planted bright-light chards, beets, brocolli raab, spring onions and mustard greens in the raised garden. This year I lost most of my paw paw blooms to the last freeze, but I am hopeful that a few blooms will show up and if so, I will hand pollinate them. In this case, you collect the pollen from one tree's blooms and with a small artist brush insert it into the blooms of the second tree and vice versus.

For the second winter in a row, I've lost a pomegranate - and the one I put there this last time was supposed to be more hardy. The other one appears to have made it through its second winter, but with quite a bit of damage. But it is not dead. I'm a little worried about a persimmon and two mulberry trees that were already leafing out nicely when we had that late freeze. All that new growth was frozen, and they haven't yet put out any new growth. These are things that should be fairly hardy, but they are just not doing anything new yet. I guess we'll see.