Growing Fruit forum

i love the aesthetics of this. reminds me of an old rv

So just a question- are you all very tall? 4’ high and deep for a raised bed side seems like it would every challenging to both plant the back half and harvest?

First year getting fruit off this 3rd leaf Housi Asian Pear. Great mild flavor, very juicy. Slight butterscotch notes.

Welcome! I like your set up. Thanks for starting this thread. Your experience and the responses are very interesting to me as I like the idea of container growing blueberries because of their soil requirements and space issues but have never tested unprotected pots or grow bags. Its really helpful to hear ppls zone and what they are growing without babying the containers in winter.

HVmike: Phytophthora That was what I was warning of. I lost one lot of grafts this year not noticing bags on a plastic table were not draining properly.

clayne: They’ve grown a bit since replanting and drainage could always be better but I don’t think they’re in any kind of root rot situation, they’re just taking forever to grow. Most all that i have grown are at least a 3 year investment of time to see quality fruit. Year one is root and crown growth.. then removal of all top growth. Mulch with woodchips and leaves and compost at the end of the season. Year 2 is emergence of primocanes with addition of fert in early spring.. then thinning of only the strongest canes. Year 3 is crop reward from the best canes. Same as alot of other fruits like strawbs and other fruiting trees where removal of early fruits and buds and flowers net a better result later. There was maybe / still are some good videos on Backyard Blackberry growers of a gentleman in Arkansas that did different tests on U of Arks as he was close to the school and visited John Clark often. The mulch, pruning, fertilizing regimen etc was from Dr. Clark passed down via this poster.. but that was a long time ago from memory.. but it does give better results which is better and more fruit. Very nice project you have going there..

Trav: I usually grafted two and prune the variety I don’t want or the weaker one to be a low growing branch, even if it’s a less preferred variety. And here’s an example of just that, and just a couple months in, it’s almost healed over. Also I needed my purchased Clara Frijs graft to make it but my free Asian pear graft I cut down as far as possible to make it into a low south facing branch. This is a pretty normal cleft graft, but the large side is angled for the straps to not bend and break, it worked great! These are not tucked in, just Parafilmed down to contact the cut end, and trimmed to not overlap after the Scion was in place. Update: here it is now. It’s 3½ seasons later and of course it’s fully healed over, even though I was gone my plan to make that one bud into a South facing branch worked, but the goldenrod seems to have a way of crowding and rotting things out, or maybe the fireblight got it, but anyway, here it is Clara Frijs took over just as I had planned, and yes that little side branch is from that little Asian pear graft. Unpruned, but I’ll fix that soon enough.

I’m in Zone 5-ish, but on a hill with brutally-cold winter winds that, in a bad winter, can place me closer to Zone 4. The past few winters haven’t been that brutally cold, though. I planted a bunch of Northern high-bush blueberries including, I believe, all that you’ve listed in large, custom-built Ipe-wood planters along my driveway. (I also have a bunch of half-heights in smaller Ipe-wood planters on a more shaded part of my driveway.) No extra insulation added, but I did upside the high-bush planters to allow for root mass and some degree of soil insulation. They’ve been planted about five years now. I’ve had zero deaths on the blueberries to date. I see some tip die off – as I do nothing to protect the branches – on a handful of the blueberries, but the basic plants are fine and have been producing reasonably well. I had been drip irrigating in the summer months, but stopped that for the past two seasons and have been mostly neglecting the blueberries as I’m no longer really living there (hence lots of weeds). The biggest problem I have is with people hitting the planters with cars and trucks… I think we’ve had six accidents over the years, mostly when there’s snow cover on the blueberries. Ipe is a tough wood, though, and, while the vehicles have suffered some serious damage, the planters have proven to be immortal. I’m attaching a photo with five of them showing… but I have a total of about 20 of these. I miss my garden and orchard!

Do the leaves of Illinois Everbearing change a lot when it grows? The minute rooted cutting or whatever I bought in June 2025 has very different leaves. I know that for many plants the leaves change when the plant grows, but the sort of maple leaf-shaped light green leaves of my plant and the rounded dark green leaves of yours leave me a bit concerned if I have the correct cultivar. Especially since I can find online both big and small plants with either the ‘three-tipped’ or ‘single-tipped’ leaves. So, do the leaves also vary based on other growth conditions? Or is there a real one and an imposter being sold as Illinois Everbearing?

Zone6: Remove skin and seeds: Always discard the skin and seeds, which contain higher concentrations of neurotoxins than the edible flesh. Well obviously. You’re not supposed to eat the skin or seeds! That goes for lots of fruits! Mango has toxic skin. Many fruits have toxic seeds, like cherries. And many things that cure cancer are supposedly poison, like apricot seeds. The Truth About Cancer – 4 Jan 21 Apricot Kernels for Cancer: The Real Story of Laetrile You may have heard about 'laetrile' and how it can potentially help heal cancer, including breast cancer. Laetrile is the commercial label for apricot kernels (it also goes by name amygdalin or vitamin B17). You may have also heard about some...

My father was on the review board of the NIH. He has lots of research compiled about statins and the statistics say that 10,000 people need to take them to save one life, and at that rate, I can’t remember how many, let’s say 15 will for from the side effects, so no, they are not useful in the real world. midwesterndoctor.com Why Are Statins So Dangerous? Unpacking one of the largest scams in medicine “Bad" cholesterol may be an indicator of a high level of fat soluable free radicals, but cholesterol itself is not a problem; that’s why Sweden entirely have up testing cholesterol and olny tests for cortisol in their standard screenings. “… 29% of all statin users were likely to experience side effects (which they then removed once health activists publicized this hypocrisy). Nonetheless, when independent researchers looked at the published trials (which almost certainly inflated the benefit of statin therapy) they found 22 that taking a statin daily for approximately 5 years resulted in you living, on average, 3-4 days longer …”

Could be! I was having trouble with seedlings and I think what I had was Fusarium. This was going on a couple years. After advice from Darrell about how he steam treats soil, I switched to a seed starting mix that had been heat-treated to kill pathogens. I didn’t have any problems this year after doing that. I discovered that there’s plenty of fun pathogens that can cause “root rot” and they’re not just one thing and not just one cause. =/