- Loquats are the best
fruit you've never tasted and I'm gonna show you exactly how to grow them in this video. Loquats are a tree from China that have a ton of Chinese mythology. In fact, they used to be apparently lining the banks of rivers where
these delicious fruit would fall into the river, carp would eat the fruit, and the carp would gain the strength to swim upstream and become dragons. So in ancient history, it was the fruit of Chinese royalty. But of course, today I
am not Chinese royalty and I have a beautiful loquat tree. So why not grow this plant? I think it's highly underrated to grow, a sort of semi-tropical
that is somewhat adapted to cool climates where both the fruit and the leaves are edible. Loquats were introduced
to Europe in the 1600s, made their way to America in the 1870s, and they grow as an evergreen tree. Mine's pretty tall, they
can get up to 30 feet tall. But if you're growing them in production or in a home backyard, kind of wanna keep them at
that 10 to 15 foot range like I have here. If they're grown that way, you sort of treat them
as a dense, bushy shrub. But if you're in a climate where you can't grow it in the ground, they actually make
fantastic container plants. You might think for a tree like this there's only a few varieties, but in fact, around the world there are 800 plus different
types of loquat cultivars. Just in California alone, we grow about 100 different varieties. I don't even know the variety that I have because it was here when
I bought the property, just like my old house. So loquats sort of have
this special meaning to me as a gardener. They were at both of the properties where I really developed my green thumb. Now what you need to know is when you put a loquat in the ground, it's gonna be two to three years before you start to get some fruit and that fruit can be peach colored, can be white colored flesh. On large trees like the one behind me, you'll get about 100
pounds of fruit per season in these tiny little plump, sort of plummish-looking shaped fruits that can be a little bit
unwieldy to deal with, but I'll show you how to
do that later in the video. The real key with loquat is understanding the flower and fruiting cycle. This is a plant that if you
were to prune it in fall, much like you would a deciduous tree like let's say your apples, you would be in a really bad situation and that's because the flowers form after a warm summer in the fall, and all the fruit comes
off of that new growth. So the new growth that's
less than six months old will throw out a cluster of flowers, these panicles that then get pollinated roughly in November, December, October, somewhere in that range, that then form fruit right about nowish in the Feb to March to April range. Let's talk varieties, here are the ones to go try to find at a nursery. These are the ones
commonly grown in the USA. So Vista White, sort of
white to peachish color, small to medium fruit. The only thing about this one is you do need a second
tree to cross pollinate. The one that I suspect this
one might be is Gold Nugget which is a large fruit,
orange flesh, orange skin, nice and sweet, sometimes tart depending on how the season goes but it's self fertile. Next up, Early Red. I haven't seen this one personally. This one is an orange flesh, orange-reddish skin that has
these little white dots on it. Again, it's a self-fertile variety. Next up is Champagne with a
white to yellowish sort of flesh and then a pale yellow-orangish skin. It's a medium size and it's also self-fertile. Now if you're in a cold climate and want to grow it in a container, there's a variety called Strawberry which is really interesting. It'll top out at about
eight to 10 feet tall and it has this sort of tart, alpine strawberry type of flavor. So they're still a great recommendation for those of you in containers. So grabbing your loquat
trees is pretty easy. Go to the nursery, grab
your favorite variety. But a couple creative ways
that we've made more loquats, you can actually take cuttings and they root pretty easily, but growing from seed is actually viable. So take a look at this big loquat. What I like to do is I
kind of rub the fuzz away. There's a little bit of fuzz if you're eating it fresh in the field and then I'll take a bite. Tart, but still really good. Actually getting almost
right to that ripeness point. Usually loquat will have at
least two or three seeds. I've seen some monsters
that have five or six. Just rinse off the sort of loquat residue. You do not wanna dry the seed out and then plop it in some soil, and in fact that's what we did last year. So I've got the son of
Epic loquat right here and if you're watching this video, at the end of this video I'm
actually gonna give this away to one of you watching
just as a way to say thanks for connecting with our content. But honestly growing from seed, it's a little bit intense. Most of these commercially-grown loquats are grafted onto a root stock which gives them a little
more vigorous growth. It's a fun experiment though and honestly there are so many
seeds on this tree right now that you might as well
have some fun with it. If you're growing loquat in a container, simple rules of thumb. All you need to do is grab a pot that's at least 20 to 24 inches across. So this is even just a tiny bit smaller. Probably go to one about this big or so. Fertile loamy soil, good
potting mix would work. Something like maybe Happy Frog or Ocean Forest from FoxFarm. Pop it in and you can
throw some fertilizer in the hole the same time that you plant, and there you go. You've got a container loquat. It isn't that picky as
far as soil conditions. Now if you're growing it in ground, what you can do is dig
a four-foot-wide hole, pop it in, throw some fertilizer in, and off you go. Now what you'll notice here on this one is I have two trees in the same hole. So whoever planted this decided they wanted two different varieties because these are actually
different fruits on this side and this side of the tree. But when it comes to fertilizing, a good rule of thumb is about a pound for every inch of trunk diameter. So what I would do here is I would actually move my mulch away. I have quite a bit of mulch here. At least, I don't know,
four or five, six inches and then I would come in
and give this a sprinkle, and I'd actually fertilize
out to about four feet or so around the entire ring of the tree, cover my mulch back up, and then I'd come in and
give it a healthy water, and that's really all you
need to do for fertilizing. For light and watering
conditions for loquats, they want full sun. They want a healthy amount of water. So in my case in my yard, east is roughly there,
west is roughly there. So throughout the whole day, they're actually getting
exposed mostly on this side until later in the day. So I have a sort of partish shade mostly because the loquats
just huge at this point 'cause they will in the heat of the summer want a little bit of afternoon shade if you can give it to them. The thing you're gonna run
into as far as problems go is if temps get above 95 Fahrenheit, what'll happen is these
delicious leaves here and yes, they are edible, will start to scorch and burn. So the only real way you can combat that if you don't have shade is to give it a healthy amount of water. So you can get leaf tip
burn like I mentioned. It's really not that big a deal. I personally don't stress about it much. There are some other
problems you can run into. Fire blight is one. It's a member of the rose family. It's sort of susceptible to
similar things that roses are and then you've got your sort of standard
garden varieties of pests, aphids, white flies, et cetera. But to be honest with you guys, I don't do a lot of pest control on this. I don't spray the tree at all, why? I mean, look at it. There's hundreds, maybe
even thousands of fruit. If some bugs are getting some of them, welcome, welcome to the garden. Enjoy the all-you-can-eat buffet. I'll have the rest of
the loquats for myself. The only real care thing that
you need to make sure you do are two different types of pruning and to show you the first one, let's go under the tree. So we're underneath the tree and you need to do a
little bit of a look-see and see what's going on. For example, what I notice is I've got all these
young offshoots here. Now what's really gonna happen with these? They're in the middle of the
tree, they're in full shade, and they're honestly at
a very awkward low angle. You wanna remove all of these. You can do this at any time of the year. April, May is a good time to do i and honestly it's a little satisfying. You're just preventing
the tree from throwing out what would've been a ton of wasted energy. Now that's obvious, then you've
got stuff like this up here. If you take a look at this branch and you'll get a better sense for it when I actually cut it off, there's nothing going on here anymore. So what I wanna do is come in with my pruning saw and remove it because all it's doing is
blocking light from this tree. Now look at this. Most of this is completely wasted. Yes, there were a few leaves. Yes, there were sort of very poorly, misshapen clusters of fruit here, but it was buried in there and all it was doing was blocking airflow and blocking light flow. And so you can come in as
the fruit's starting to set and do a bit of a prune-up, tuneup and then honestly, just chop that up. Leave it on the ground for mulch. After you fruit though is a really interesting
opportunity to prune. So after all these delicious fruit have been harvested and used which I'll show you how to do in a second, you really wanna come through and give this a shape. Like I said, 30 feet tall. If you let them get outta control, they really respond to
a pruning for shape. So early on when I started living here, I gave this one a pretty serious prune on our Epic Homesteading channel which kind of chronicles my journey through living in this particular space. More of a vlog style fun channel that I encourage you to check out, but what I did is I hopped on a ladder, I grabbed the pruning saw,
all sorts of different tools, and really cut it all down. I cut out any crossing
branches in the middle. I shaped it, I topped it. I actually removed a
significant amount of branches, so much so that I actually
filled an entire compost pile full of just loquat which
composted extremely quickly. I think it's maybe the high
nitrogen content in here just really heated up, but that's your best opportunity. After all the fruit have set, so somewhere in that late spring, early summerish time is
a good time to do it. But I can't stare at these anymore without showing you how
to use and enjoy them and they're actually quite
versatile and highly worth it. So let's check out a few methods. What's so cool about the loquat fruit is that it is high, high, high in pectin. So pectin being the
sort of thickening agent when you make a jam or a jelly, makes it a really good candidate for a loquat jam or a loquat jelly. In fact I've used it as
a loquat crumble before. Of course, you can eat it fresh. I've dehydrated these,
I've actually blended them and then thrown them on a dehydrated sheet and made loquat fruit leather. But I wanna also call your
attention to the leaves. This is a very interesting plant, especially when you look into
traditional Chinese medicine. Now I'm no expert there at all, but you can make a
pretty simple loquat tea. What you'll notice when
a loquat leaf forms, it sort of has this
sort of fuzz on the top and you can even rub that off, right? That sort of flies away and you also have this fuzz on the bottom. I'm actually not looking
for a leaf like this. I'm looking for one a little bit older but not super mature. So if you take a look at
let's say this one right here, this one has a glossy top. But if I flip it over, there still is that kind of fuzzy bottom and I wanna grab two leaves like this, and then we'll take them
into the back prep station and I'll show you exactly
how to prepare them. Also grab a couple more fruit too. With fruit, you wanna
look for the big size, you want a little bit of give on it and honestly there's always so many fruits that you can just give
it a quick taste test. If it's a little bit too tough and it's extremely tart, it's not ready. If it's lightly tart but there's sort of a juicy
sweetness that comes through, it's good to go and you can also tell by
how easily those seeds wanna fall out that it's nice and ripe. Got my loquats and I'm gonna show you how I like to use them. Now there really are a
lot of different ways. You can be as simple
or complex as you want. Of course, if you're
just gonna eat them fresh which we love to do here, I like to rub this sort of
fuzz off just on my hands. If you really were paranoid, you could rinse it. But at that point, come in and give it a bite. You'll know it's good
when that juice starts to sort of squeeze out, and there you go. The skin's completely edible. Whether you're making a jam, a jelly, a loquat crumble is something
that we did last year, it's a little labor-intensive. Maybe you're even dehydrating them, but it's worth it. So what I like to do is I take a knife, I come through and I split it in half, and then what I'll do is really reveals the seeds quite simply. The seeds go in water to me 'cause if I'm gonna save them, I wanna keep them moist but I also want to remove some
of that residue off of them. And like I said, you can have some really honking loquats with five or six seeds in there. Now what I like to do
is I actually trim off this little sort of flowering end because it's got a little
bit of debris in there I kind of don't want and that also allows you to grab the interior sort of casing of that seed and remove that which is
a little bit more tough. Now this is not mandatory, but now you have a really clean loquat that is ready to process. So it's so fruitful of a tree that we might even have a
loquat day here at the homestead with friends and family
coming over to help process. But this is the fruit and I'll show you now how to make the tea. (bright music) I got my tea. Let's see how it tastes. Sweetened with loquats themselves. Oh, that's really nice. The sweetness sort of drops out. You get a sort of medicinal,
herbal, tangy flavor. Really nice, first time I've ever made it. Guys, if you want to grow loquat, I can't recommend it more. If you want to win the Epic
loquat, the son of Epic loquat, you just need to be one
of the first 100 people to comment on this video. We'll reach out to you. Way to say thank you for
watching our content. Of course, you can always support us by grabbing some garden gear
at shop.epicgardening.com or at our seed company,
Botanical Interests. I'm gonna chill by the
pond, enjoy my loquat tea. Good luck in the garden
and keep on growing.
