This One Is For ALL Of The Naysayers!

what's growing on gardeners it's Saturday April 27th and it is a beautiful afternoon here on the Southeastern coast of North Carolina today's video is for all of the naysayers that told me all of the different things that I couldn't grow in my yard and garden because of where I live but I ignored them and I did it anyway and on today's video I'm going to take you around my yard and show you just how beautiful all these things that can't grow here look because it is spring and they are all waking up if you're new to the Channel Please Subscribe and hit the Bell to receive new video notifications and check out our Amazon store and spreadshop links in the video description for everything I use in my garden and awesome custom designed to power and another gear your support is greatly appreciated I live in zone 8B Southeastern North Carolina around the Wilmington North Carolina area and we live in a particularly challenging location to grow things because we have brutally hot humid wet subtropical Summers but freezing cold temperate Winters so our Winters are generally too cold to grow the sub Tropicals and our summers are too hot humid and wet to grow the temperate species so as a result when people move here a lot of people just give up and they think they can't grow things but we are human beings we can use our brains and we can adjust the micro climates of where we live to actually grow temperate and subtropical species it turns out with a little bit of Ingenuity this is a great place to grow food 6 years ago I told you I was going to grow an avocado tree INR in North Carolina and the naysayers came at me saying there is no way this is ever going to happen well I asked my avocado tree that's been planted in ground for 5 and 1/2 years and it seems to disagree it looks like it's doing pretty great to me wouldn't you say now this is a semi dwarf variety called Leela and I specifically picked it because I could keep it at a smaller size and I'd be able to protect it in fact you can still see the remnants of the protection I have my incandescent Christmas lights that you see inside the tree that's how I keep this tree warm I also have this water barrel it's a 60 gallon pickle Barrel in the back that I use for radiative heat and as a result I'm able to grow this tree all winter long with great success and just look at this baby right here look at all of the fruits on this avocado tree I have some nice avocados forming and they are all over the place this thing had an amazing Super Bloom this spring and you can see all of these beautiful fruits now avocado trees tend to drop their fruit greatly they lose probably 90% of the crop that they set but I still think that I'm going to have a really good season because these fruits are literally everywhere in fact such a tremendous success this has been I plan on adding another avocado tree to my yard this spring I'm just waiting for an online Nursery to get their stock up in the month of May now I'm up against my house right now and I want you to to see just how insanely thick the caliper of this trunk is I mean this thing is a monster that is how well this little dwarf avocado tree well semi- dwarf is thriving where I live it is an absolute Beast and the branches go all the way up and I simply prune it so it doesn't get any taller than about 7 ft it'll get a little bit taller in the summer but I just cut it back for the winter so I can protect it easy peasy about 6 years ago I said I wanted to grow lots of citrus trees in ground in North Carolina and again the naysayers told me that Citrus does not grow in ground in North Carolina the winters are too cold well once again I asked my aari Satsuma tree does it hate being in ground here and maybe 500 oranges later over the years it told me no it likes it just fine I have had absurd Harvest off of this tree over the past 2 years just absolutely monster fruit set and it just got done what may have been its biggest Bloom ever and it is covered in hundreds of little baby oranges now once again your Satsuma trees your citrus trees in general they pretty much always overproduce and then they will naturally thin their crop but again there are still hundreds of little baby Citrus on this tree so much so that I think that I'm going to have to again manually thin it because they won't drop enough this tree just loves setting fruit what I quickly learned after moving here that ah if it weren't for about half half a dozen nights a year we could grow some really cool stuff here you see we get about two nights every single year that fall into the teens and about half a dozen nights that are below 25° fah and those are really the six nights a year that mess everything up well again I'm a human being why can't I just protect my trees so they never drop below those cold temperatures if I could just defend against those handful of nights everything becomes possible so I simply developed methods that could accommodate a handful of cold nights every single year for example Citrus are natural understory trees and I have a little Forest canopy in the rear property of my yard so although it gets cold back here the forest canopy protects them from frost and I simply use these 60 gallon water barrels to keep them warm so right here I have a Cara Cara red naval orange a maywa kumquat and a brown select Satsuma and they have been growing in ground they're going on their third season and they've never been damaged by cold and then it's been going so well I decided I would put my marrow blood orange which I've been growing in containers for 5 years now uh that's about as Hardy as the carara so I figured why not put them in ground and all I do is I pull some agricultural fabric that lets light in and is breathable on those really cold nights and I can leave that on for a couple weeks at a time and keep them warm it's just that simple in fact so easy has it been to grow Citrus here that I'm up to nine varieties of citrus in ground all throughout my yard like my my Myer lemon right here that is on its fourth year this thing produces like absolute mad and in the front yard with full Northern Exposure I planted a sugarbell tree and that is thriving as well which brings me to my next Point people gave me such a headache when I planted my Citrus and avocado trees up against my house foundation they told me these trees get huge they're going to destroy my house but yet here I am 6 years later with no problems at all how could that be that's because I chose naturally small Tre trees I got my citrus trees grafted onto trifoliate root stock so they're never going to get taller than 5 to 6 fet with annual pruning and I specifically selected a semi dwarf avocado that only grows to be about 10 to 12 ft unpruned and of course I keep it maintained with annual pruning to about 7 ft throughout the year and it's been a piece of cake these are soft wooded fruit trees they don't have really invasive Roots they've been so easy to manage so despite the close proximity to my Foundation I picked small trees on purpose and I just keep them pruned you can keep your trees small you just have to stay on top of them prune them in the winter time and give them little summer haircuts here and there to make sure that they don't overgrow and get out of bounds now this will take a little bit of research you can't go to a big box store and grab a random fruit tree on a random unknown root stock and plant it it could get too big but if you do your homework and you select either naturally dwarfing varieties or or you get them grafted onto dwarf root stock the world becomes your oyster for example I'm growing an ungrafted Meer lemon because Myer lemons are a natural dwarf they only grow to be 6 to 8 ft tall and I chose to grow this like a shrub a little Bush and I just prune it every winter and then throughout the summer I give it periodic haircuts so it doesn't get a whole lot taller and it's never going to grow taller than 6 feet I will be able to maintain this as a little hedge indefinitely which brings me to my fourth point the naysayers went Bonkers when I planted my fig trees only 6 ft apart and near my fence only 30 in off the back of my fence they told me that they were way too close together hadn't I ever seen a fig tree orchard before they plant their trees 15 to 20 ft apart well that's because you need to get farm equipment around the trees I'm not going to drive a truck back here I'm just going to come out with my basket and handpick the fruit and again pruning shears and saws exist I can simply maintain the trees to the side that I want to keep them at it's really that simple now before you say anything and you wonder why they're all white that's because I sprayed them with surround WP kale and Clay because we have issues with the Ambrosia Beetle here in the spring so I sprayed all the trunks down so I won't get any boring infestations but does it look like to you that these fig trees are suffering in any way shape or form being planted so closely together they look absolutely beautiful to me and they produce off the charts just incredible yields that I've been showing you for years and again there is no issues with me fitting in between my fence and the trees you can see I'm easily walking behind no problems at all because again I prune the fig trees I make it so they don't touch the back of the fence and I pinch off any growth that is growing out in that direction and I can keep them nice and neat and orderly they told me I couldn't grow bananas in North Carolina bananas are not tolerant to frost and freeze if they get Frozen they will die down to the ground well admittedly bananas have been one of the most difficult things I've tried to grow here because our Winters are genuinely way too cold to grow them for fruit anything other than an ornamental that dies down to the ground and then grows back for the next season but the problem is bananas need about a year and a half in order to preserve a pseudo stem make a flow and ripen fruit so there's never going to be an 18-month period in North Carolina where we are Frost and freeze free it's never going to happen so I decided to take on the challenge anyway and what I do is I I place Steaks around my plants and then I put a metal cage and i stuff them full of straw and that is able to overwinter some of the pseudo stems a lot of them still do die back however I have been successful at getting fruit with this method now while I have been successful at getting fruit from my bananas the caveat is I've only been successful with one variety and that is the dwarf oronoko for for whatever reason this is an exceptionally cold hearty dwarf banana that's fairly easy to protect it can tolerate a light frost and I guess it has a really fast fruiting and ripening cycle this clump of bananas has produced fruit for me three out of the last four years it's been pretty reliable and as you can see my straw method has been successful at overwintering the pseudo stems these pseudo stems survived and they are producing New Growth all of them are they are all waking up they all survive so it is highly likely that I will probably get at least one rack of bananas from this plant right here the naysayers told me that traditional grapes will not grow here in the coastal Carolinas all you can grow are native muscadine varieties which I don't really like and that's because it's too hot humid and wet and all of the fungal diseases will destroy the fruits and if the fruits don't get destroyed Pierce's disease will kill the vines well I decided to do some research and I learned about the great grape expert TV mson that bred all of these different varieties of super disease resistant grapes back in the 1800s and I found this variety called Mrs mson this makes it possible to grow completely sprayless organic grapes in the coastal Carolinas all the way down to Florida and South Texas this is an absolutely incredible variety and it's also one of the best tasting grapes I've ever had the fruit is so complex and delicious and I need to take you in for a close closer look I think this Vine is going on its third year and last year I got an amazing Harvest on it and I'm so happy with the way it turned out but you need to see the fruit set on it this year look at all of these clusters of grapes and last year I didn't have to spray these Vines at all they did fantastic and they ripened their grapes I did not really get much rot the Clusters weren't 100% full but it is a young uh grape vine so I think it may just take a little more time it is just beautiful and it's been so easy to maintain you can see this plant is just totally pristine and so great has this Mrs mson variety been that I decided to get a little more confident and I also added a Mars seedless variety now this is not as disease resistant so I'm taking a chance on this one but I planted it last fall it's just starting to wake up now the Mrs mson variety over here is seated so you do have to avoid the seeds which is really no big deal and the flavor more than makes up for it I'm going to try this seedless variety just for fun I really wanted to plant an Asian pear tree in my yard but everybody told me that I need two trees because you need two unique varieties for cross-pollination for Asian paars to set fruit and hey this is technically true but I didn't want to dedicate the space for two trees I only wanted one so I decided to put on my thinking cap and find a way that I could grow multiple MP fruits in one so about a year and a half ago or so I showed you how to multi-graft an Asian pear tree so you could have numerous varieties on one single tree in order to have cross-pollination without the need for a second tree so what I did was I bought a chojuro Asian pair and I Bud grafted on Hos and Korean giant so all three tiers of my espalier setup right here are three different varieties on this first cable right here I have hos on the second cable right here I have Korean Giant and then on the top cable right here I have the actual variety of chojuro which is incredible and it worked like a charm they are setting fruit so on this lower tier right here is the hosui variety you can see all of the Asian pairs setting beautifully on this little tiny branch on the second tier right here is the Korean giant variety and again you can see successful cross pollination with lots of different fruits and then on the very top we have the chojuro now because this is such a young tree yet I'm going to have to remove most of these fruits however I can probably maintain about six of them total two on each tier so I'll just save the best looking fruits and I'll be able to have my first harvest this year if a multi-g grafted fruit tree like this sounds interesting to you I'll place a link down in the video description for a video where I showed you exactly how I grafted this tree when I moved here I had no idea what it would be like to try and grow tomatoes in this climate I grew up in New Jersey and I lived in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and tomatoes there are so easy to grow but when I moved down here the naysayers told me I would never be able to keep Tomatoes alive in the summer it's too hot it's too humid it's too stressful for the plants and there is just too much disease and aside from growing bananas which has been my biggest challenge here growing tomatoes may have been the second biggest challenge and admittedly in the beginning the naysayers were right all of my tomato plants were dead by Late July because of our horrible conditions but I got to thinking what is actually making the tomato plants give up the ghost so early in the season and what I found out was it was the heat the temperatures and the strong Sun the pollination would stop because of the high due points and the high temperatures at night and then the plants would get so stressed out from the Heat and the high UV that they would just get beaten down and they would get weak and then the diseases would take them over and then the plants would die so I thought to myself well if I can protect my Citrus and my avocados and other things from the cold why can't I protect my tomatoes from the heat thus the shade tunnel was born and I've experimented over the last 2 years growing tomatoes under shade in the summer and I can honestly say that I will never ever no matter where I live grow tomatoes without shade cloth in the summer ever again the results are are just incredible so last year I grew all of my indeterminate tomatoes in straw Bells underneath the shade tunnel and I had not only the best tomato season that I've ever had since I moved to North Carolina but the best tomato season of my life they thrived in the dappled light underneath the shade tunnel the only problem was because I planted them in straw bales and it's so hot humid and wet here the straw pales decomposed so they actually W wound up shrinking and then the roots became exposed to the air and the plants died off at the middle end of August had I not planted them in the straw bals I think they would have made it all throughout the summer all the way up until Frost maybe even or at least hurricane season until a storm destroyed them so this year I'm learning from my mistakes and I think I have the final solution to my problems I'm growing all of these in a sterile medium inside these 20-gallon fabricc grow bags because the medium won't break down like the straw Bells will however they will still be trellised up in this structure and they will be protected under shade cloth so I will get all of the benefits of shade without the issue of the the area that the roots are growing shrinking on me throughout the year so I think this is exactly what I'm looking for so why were the naysayers wrong well the naysayers were wrong because they made their judgments based on growing everything out in the open in the weather they got and you just can't control your weather however you can control your climate to a degree and I found that it's very easy to add 10° of heat protection in the summer and add 10° of cold protection during the winter so if you're okay with growing things in that 10° margin on either side of the year you can have incredible results in areas that otherwise wouldn't be able to grow these plants out in the open am I going to be able to grow a coconut palm or a mango tree here in North Carolina no because it's outside of that temperature buffer but things like citrus and things like apples can all grow here comfortably if you're willing to protect the Citrus in the winter and protect the apples in the summer and it really is that easy so next time somebody tells you that something can't be done ask yourself can it not be done because it actually is impossible or can it not be done because they just weren't willing to put in the work if the answer is the ladder and you're willing to put in the work it is stunning what you can do so everybody I sure hope you enjoyed this Garden Tour I'm really happy that spring is off to a beautiful start and hopefully we will get a mild summer this year I'm crossing my fingers but you never know here but the point I'm trying to make is no matter what your conditions are you can grow more than you think you can if you're willing to just do a little bit of leg work and protection in the winter and a little bit of leg work and protection in the summer the world is your oyster if you put your mind to it so everybody I sure hope you found this video helpful if you did please make sure to hit that like button subscribe to the channel and please ring that notification Bell so you're notified when I release more videos like these I will place several links down in the video description to things like my cold and heat protection playlist that will give you ideas on how I protect my trees from the cold and protect my plants from the heat when it gets really hot if you're curious about any of the things I use in real life in my garden I will link to all of the products that I use down in the video description in my Amazon storefront so if you expand the video description click on the Amazon storefront link you'll see everything I use in real life that makes me successful and while you're down there please check out my spread shop for custom merch if you want to support the channel thank you all so much for watching and I hope to see all of you again on the next video oh boy we have extra special dinner tonight we have tacos medium rare for Mom and Dad and then a side steak rare for a certain handsome boy that has no salt or any kind of other seeds seasonings on it just nice and seared for them M oh boy I wonder if somebody's excited Dale are you hungry oh he definitely wants his steak now wait we're going to see just how good of a boy Dale can be now Dale whoa whoa oh you're making me look bad wait wait wait wait Dale wait wait oh he's so good okay buddy go yes I made no what are you doing oh my goodness you didn't savor it Dale you didn't Savor did you even that my that that was like throwing a trash can into the back of a trash truck begging for ours oh my goodness that was absurd dale dale did you like that

Channel: The Millennial Gardener

Views: 39,460

Keywords: garden tour, spring garden tour, garden update, food forest, food forest tour, how to grow fruit trees, grow a vegetable garden, spring, garden, tour, update, fruit trees, fruit tree, gardening, vegetable garden, organic gardening, gardening tips, garden tips, gardening tips and tricks, gardening hacks, garden hacks, edible landscaping, growing, plants, vegetables, how to, diy, millennial gardener, the millennial gardener

Id: KRXeMRgIX3U

Length: 21min 22sec (1282 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2024