632: Christy Wilhelmi on Growing Fruit in Small Spaces.
Don’t Let Yard Size Determine Your Harvests.
In This Podcast:
Are your fruit trees an experiment or an investment? Christy Wilhelmi talks about the steps needed to ensure that the fruit trees you plant in your yard are an investment that bears fruit. She covers every stage of the process, including planning your harvest, planting trees in suitable soil, and pruning to keep your trees a manageable size. Christy also explains why these steps are different from what you might hear in classes or read in agricultural textbooks.
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Our Guest:
Christy is founder of Gardenerd, the ultimate resource for garden nerds, where she publishes newsletters, her popular blog, top-ranked podcasts, and YouTube videos. She also specializes in small-space, organic vegetable garden design, consulting, and classes. She is author of Gardening for Geeks (Fox Chapel Publishing), 400+ Tips for Organic Gardening Success (Amazon Digital), Grow Your Own Mini Fruit Garden published by our friends at Cool Springs Press, and her upcoming novel Garden Variety (William Morrow/Harper Collins) will be sprouting in April 2022.
Listen in and learn about:
- Backyard Orchard Culture techniques
- A good height for backyard trees
- Why you might plant several trees in the same hole
- Extending your harvest season
- Natural pest control for citrus
- The wrong way to plant a fruit tree
- Soil preparation for planting a tree in the ground
- Square holes or round holes?
- Don’t be afraid to break up the root ball
- Two steps to keeping a tree small
- Chill hours – what they are, why they are important
- Matching rootstocks to your soil
- “Soil prep is everything!”
- Easiest way to prevent disease
- How to do a drainage (or ‘perc’) test
- Add worm castings to the soil to keep sucking bugs away from the leaves
- Chitinase is an enzyme, but what is it good for?
- COVID’s effects on our gardens
- Tree kale
- Backyard Orchard Culture techniques
As well as:
Her failure – Forgetting that you are supposed to stop watering potatoes when the foliage starts to die back and ending up with a putrid, rotting mess in a raised bed.
Her success – Getting her novel published by a top publisher after receiving at least 89 rejections.
Her drive – To entertain and give information, and to help people learn and be curious.
Her advice – “Grow something purple.”
Books written by Christy:
400+ Tips for Organic Gardening Success
Grow Your Own Mini Fruit Garden
Garden Variety published April 2022
Christy’s Book recommendation:
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
How to reach Christy:
Website: gardenerd.com
Facebook: gardenerd.com
Twitter: gardenerd1
Instagram: gardenerd1
UrbanFarm.org/gardenerd
*Disclosure:
Some of the links in our podcast show notes and blog posts are affiliate links and if you go through them to make a purchase, we will earn a nominal commission at no cost to you. We offer links to items recommended by our podcast guests and guest writers as a service to our audience and these items are not selected because of the commission we receive from your purchases. We know the decision is yours, and whether you decide to buy something is completely up to you.
