30 Perennial Crops to Plant Once & Eat Forever: Herbs, Vegetables, Brambles, Berries, Nuts, & Fruits

Welcome to the Rusted Garden Homestead. Today I'm going to show you 25 maybe 30 crops that are perennials. You can plant them once and then you can harvest them pretty much every year. Some of them can be harvested for 20 years like asparagus. Other ones maybe you'll get five or ten years you have to divide or replant. So let's start with herbs. I'm going to cover herbs, vegetables, fruit canes and bushes, and fruit trees and nut trees. So it's going to be a lot. I'll put in a time stamp to help you kind of navigate through the parts you want to see. But let's start at the front of my garden. Herbs are wonderful. I'm in Maryland zone 7. So everything that you're going to see here has been growing in a place that gets 20 degree Fahrenheit winters. Meaning I get a winter, I get a freeze. Typically the cold temperatures get into the 20s. It can get below the 20s. That's below minus 7 Celsius. So the freezing temperatures here generally speaking minus 7 to minus 9 Celsius. 20 you know to 32 degrees. Why is that important? Some crops can't take a deep freeze. Some crops need a cold period. So I just want to be clear that you guys are modeling the Maryland area. Let's start with the herbs first. Mixed right in here I have oregano. Oregano is a wonderful easy growing perennial. That's all going to be harvested before it flowers. It's going to be left to dry and I'm going to use it as oregano flakes. Right next to it I have sage. Sage is a beautiful perennial bush with purple flowers. And you can see that the sage has reseeded pretty freely. I could dig those up. I can move them other places. But it doesn't get out of control. It doesn't spread like mint or anything like that. But these are two wonderful perennial herbs, sage and oregano. Inside the main garden I'm growing mint. Mint should be grown in containers. It will get out of control. You can grow regular mint, spearmint, peppermint. And these are two I think five gallon containers. These are fabric pots. I sell them at my seed shop. Contain the mint. It's a beautiful crop that comes back year after year. This is thyme. It's just starting to come up. I use it as a ground cover. You can grow oregano as a ground cover too. But thyme can be grown in containers. It can be grown in your garden. Or you can just put it in a perennial bed and harvest it as you wish. Lavender is a great perennial herb. I'm growing it outside my garden next to my nectarine tree. Really used for the fragrance. But it makes a delicious herb to use with chicken dishes. Next to it I have garlic. Garlic is actually a perennial. We tend to harvest the bulb and use it. But you can harvest the greenery. It's going to come back year after year. Deer, leave it alone. You can also harvest some of the bulb drop in another clove and it's just going to you know come back again year after year. If you leave the bulb in you're always going to get the greenery. A lot of people use that in their sautés, in their different cooking dishes. Garlic's a great addition. I am going to go through the herbs first and then I'm going to get to vegetables. But use the time stamps to jump to the section of the video you want to watch. These are garlic chives. So you have regular chives. Tastes more like onion. Garlic chives, flat leaf. Tastes very similar to garlic. They both will come back year after year and you can just put them pretty much wherever you want. This is my spearmint. It's in a framed raised bed and you can see the mint is still breaking out under the birdhouse and in the back right there. I'm going to actually dig that up, stick it into some containers, use it to give away. Maybe I'll sell it at a plant sale. I wanted to show you the chives real quick. They were all divided up from a place I wanted to move them from and these are going to get dropped back into my garden in different places. This is my nursery area. I have sage ready to go out into different places. Thyme. I wanted to show you the lemon balm. It should be contained like mint. It's a free seeder. It does come back year after year. It's managed much more easily than mints but you do want to keep an eye on it. But it's a beautiful lemon fragrance. Use it for teas. I can cook with it. I do cook with it. It's just a beautiful plant. Very hardy and it comes back year after year. I love rosemary. I grow it in containers. I grow it in the ground. It's all over my property. Love making this with potatoes. Rosemary potatoes, rosemary chicken. Absolutely delicious and it just smells and tastes wonderful. This is my horseradish plant. Grows pretty much without care. Horseradish typically you harvest out parts of the root. Leave the root in there. It's going to come back year after year. Harvest out parts. You can make horseradish but you can also eat the leaves. You can use them. Saute them down. They're not as strong. The leaves do not taste like the root. The root is what is you know got that classic spicy horseradish taste. But I love growing it. I have it actually in two places in my garden. On the inside where we are now. Fenced in and outside. Rabbits leave it alone. It does flower. You can remove the flowers if you want. But the root just continues to grow. It's a really hardy plant. Makes great divisions. These are my fruit towers. I'm growing strawberries. They are perennial. We'll get to those shortly. Wanted to show you the parsley. I grow parsley in different pockets of my towers. Butterflies love them. They lay eggs on there. Caterpillars will eat the leaves. And of course you can use them in your own kitchen. But I have parsley tucked around all over the place in my gardens. We went through the herbs pretty quickly. We're going to go through the perennial vegetables more slowly. I'm going to talk a little bit about the conditions they like. In which they like to live. So this is an asparagus plant. It is a mass of roots. I just wanted to show you that. Asparagus starts out as the spears that we like to eat. And then you let it continue to grow. It will get four or five feet tall. And it will fern out. You have to do that so it recharges the root system through the summer. And then every year you're going to get asparagus. Now this was dug up from my other garden. It's going to be moved inside. I'll show you that place in a second. But I just wanted to show you the root system. The root system gets massive. And you can dig it out just like this. Replant it somewhere else. But it gets really large. And it's going to give you asparagus for a good 15 or 20 years. Let's go over to the main bed. Here's my main asparagus bed. It is now I think on its sixth year. I have two varieties in there. Purple Passion and Mary Washington. I've been harvesting for a good 30 days. At this point I'll take a few more of the spears. But you have to make sure you leave a good amount of them to grow. Like I was just saying. So that they fern out and then they recharge over the summer. So you want to be in an area that drains pretty well. You don't want this to sit in water. I have a nice long row. I don't know. It's probably 12 to 18 feet. Planted these from roots. Every, I don't know, maybe a foot or something like that. They're going to creep in, fill out. And you're going to have a nice hedge of asparagus. The plant that you just saw is going to be divided. And I'm going to put it right into there. And then there's another open space. So let's see if I can just show you how it grows. All right. Here's a good example. So it comes up as the spears that we know. And I'm going to just reach in and just snap one off. I will harvest six or eight of these when I want them for dinner during the harvest period. Let them grow. They continue to get more loose like that. Then they open up. And then some of the other ones are right over there. I have two posts at each end. Some metal wire. I like this because it doesn't decay. And then I weave the growing stalks through there just so that they don't flop over and shade out some of my plants over there. But asparagus is a wonderful perennial plant. It's going to keep giving for a good 15 to 20 years. You can see more of the spears coming up. Purple passion tends to come up first, followed by the Mary Washington. Pretty well draining soil. Just FYI, my soil is mostly clay. So I do prep the area, feed them at the end of the season, feed them at the beginning of the season, compost down the, you know, right down the line that you see there. Keep the weeds out. That helps them stay intact, do their thing. You can put down an organic granular if you want, if you don't have a lot of compost, and maybe feed them with a water soluble in the spring just to get them growing. But if you haven't started an asparagus patch, I highly recommend it. It's really, you know, work to get it set up. But then you just step back, keep it weeded, keep them fed, and you get asparagus every year. This is where I'm growing artichokes. And in case you missed it, I'm in Maryland zone 7. I get freezing winters, typically 20 degrees Fahrenheit, sometimes into the teens. Low temperatures for Celsius about minus 7, a little bit lower, generally minus 7 to minus 9, minus 10 Celsius. Globe artichokes. So here in Maryland, I need a hardier artichoke, so I grow the globe artichokes. These were planted last spring. I got artichokes from them. They came back in the fall. This is what they look like. I mean, they kind of look prehistoric. They do need a cold period. Perennials are going to vary based on your winters, how cold it gets. If you don't get freezing winters, you have other crops that are, you know, perennials that just don't get killed off by the freezes and frost. The globe artichokes are pretty hardy. You could mulch them. They're going to die back to the ground. Put down four to six inches of leaf mulch or something over them. That will protect them from the cold. They're going to come back, look something like this. Prep the beds very similarly to the asparagus. Compost at the end of the year. Compost at the beginning of the year. Water them in with a water-soluble fertilizer. They're spaced out, I don't know, two and a half feet, something like that. I tend to plant things more closely together, but I have four plants. One, two, three, four. They're absolutely beautiful foliage-wise. I think they're cool looking, but the flowers are these purple sea anemone looking things, where the bees actually look like they're swimming through them. But you are going to get plenty of artichokes to harvest, or you can just let them bloom and they really do attract bees, other pollinators. But artichokes, hope I didn't say asparagus, artichokes are pretty easy to grow. Once they're established, they're going to come back year after year. This is my rhubarb plant. There's actually two in there, one I planted this year. The main one that you see, this is its second year. If I didn't say it, the asparagus and artichokes need full sun. Rhubarb took me three or four years to find a good place for it. It likes sun, but it doesn't want baking 10 hours sun heating it up. It's going to kill it off. So this is in a little bit of a shadier area. It will get full sun from like 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., that's six hours, and then it gets more sun from 4 p.m. on, but it's a little bit lower in the sky. So it definitely wants a good six hours of sunlight, but it doesn't have to be in full sun, you know, for the whole day. It does much better with a little bit of shade. So asparagus usually buy as root crowns, as a root, and you drop it in, it establishes. It can be pretty easily. The plant right there, that is a second year plant from a small root that I bought at I think a big box store. Talk about that in a second. Also in here I have a dwarf apple tree, we'll be talking about fruit trees, and a grapevine. So this is my perennial food area where these plants took some work to get them started, but now year after year I'm going to get food without having to replant. So let's lift up this, these leaves here actually. And just so you know, the leaves themselves are poisonous. You cut them off and you actually eat the stalks. You make pies and different things out of them. So this is the second year plant. Well, let me just restate that. This is my second plant that I just planted this year, and it will establish and it's going to look just like this. I'll be removing these leaves so some sunlight gets in there. This plant is two years old, started just like that. Two years later, I mean look how massive it is. When it starts to flower, you want to remove those. So I've already done a round of removing the flowers, but I'm going to remove them again. And you just want the energy going into the leaves. Set up was pretty easy. Again, I have clay soil here in Maryland. I just made a nice mix. I will link in my container soil mixes that I make. But basically peat moss and compost, loosened up that area, dropped in the root, watered it in well with the water-soluble fertilizer. And again, at the end of the season, beginning of the season, I drop down compost. Usually just water my plants in with the water-soluble. You can just see how lovely the rhubarb plant is doing. Massive leaves, don't eat those. Delicious stalks. Please subscribe. If you're interested in more about how to grow the different plants I'm showing you, you can just search my YouTube channel. I have over 1500 videos on vegetable gardening. And if you're interested in a book, I have a new book called Growing an Edible Landscape. Helps you design the space like I'm showing you today, where you're just growing edibles throughout a standard garden and throughout your property. All right, next we're going to talk about berries, fruit canes, fruit bushes. These are my strawberry towers. I'm affiliated with Greenstalk Garden. They're actually having a big sale through May 12th. If you want to check out the video description, these are just wonderful ways to grow vertically. Strawberries. This is again my strawberry section. Look how beautiful these strawberries are. They're just starting to get ripe. I decided I wanted to concentrate strawberries throughout my garden. I have them in towers. I mean just massive amounts of strawberries. I also grow them in containers lower to the ground, which you can see right over here. These are 22 gallon containers. Always in your containers make sure you have holes in them. Strawberries, strawberries, strawberries back there. Strawberries over there. You're going to look at the blueberries too. I also grow them in the ground in different parts as a ground cover under blueberry bushes. Blueberry bushes in front of my yard. They're really versatile. Love strawberries, so I really upped the amount that I'm growing. Next, we might as well talk about blueberries. These are so easy to grow. We can overcomplicate blueberries. You know, we're told that they want more acidic soil, which is true. However, blueberries just have shallow roots. They don't get more than a foot deep, something like that. Maybe spread out to the width of the canopy. So you can just get a water-soluble acidic fertilizer. Water in the base. That adds some of the acidity. That helps them pull in nutrients. But you can see how beautiful my blueberries are. I have them on two sides. They're in fact, in their fifth or sixth year, you know, they're starting to come together. I'm going to have to start doing some pruning. I get thousands and thousands of blueberries off of these plants. You want to grow blueberries so that you're getting a harvest at different times. You have earlier varieties, mid-season varieties, late season varieties. So you want to mix it up. You also want to have multiple varieties. It helps with the size and pollination of the blueberries. So I probably have six, eight different varieties. I have early season, mid-season, late season. And if we step right into here, you can just see the blueberries go all the way down. Really easy to grow for feeding. You know, these are in, again, more clay soil. I just planted them. I will throw in some compost, some peat moss, loosen up the soil, but they want to take off. Water-soluble fertilizer that's more acidic. Just look up acidic water-soluble fertilizer. Once or twice a year, that gives them the acidity they need. I will scatter down some organic granular. But they're doing extremely, extremely well. And I don't over prune. I kind of just let them do their thing. And, you know, I'm rewarded, you know, beautifully for it. Stepping over here, you can see blackberries. These are clumping varieties. I think birds took some of the blackberries, dropped seeds over here, but they don't typically move. Why is that important? Because raspberries, which we'll be talking about, can get invasive. You want to put them in a place where, you know, they can kind of spread out and kind of take over. These are blackberries. Blackberries, clumping variety, which means they stay right in their basic footprint. I think these are arapahoe variety. They don't spread out. You know, these have been in here for five years and they're just wonderful growers. Thornless variety. So if you can, you want to get clumping variety, thornless blackberries, and they're going to just be super prolific, strong year after year. As they sometimes might creep out, you know, I have a cane growing in here. I just leave it. You know, some of them work their way over here. I don't really think it was underground because there's some wood in there. So it's really difficult for them to move over. I think the easy to just kind of pull up, transplant to other places, don't take up a big footprint, and you're going to really have endless blackberries. And you need maybe three or four plants to get started. Put them in a place that you can enjoy and watch them grow. I really like the foliage. I really like the flowers. Coming into this section, I had a black mission fig. It can't handle our winters. The upper wood dies off. The roots stay intact. New wood comes up, new leaves, etc. But I'm not getting any figs. So after five years, that fig tree's not working. When we go to the figs, we're going to go to the Chicago hardy fig. Just FYI, those are eggplant. If you get your eggplant devastated with flea beetles, seven dust, not organic, will kill them off in the night and then in the morning rinse it off. I've tried using Captain Jack's dead bug dust. That's organic. Doesn't work as well with the flea beetles. My point, flea beetles devastate my eggplant. If I don't treat them, I can't eat them. And a lot of people have trouble with the flea beetles eating their eggplant leaves. These are muscadines. These are five-year-old vines. Plant them like a grape, very similar to the grape. Grow on second year wood. So I hack these back pretty harshly in the spring. Feed them with the water soluble. But once established, the roots go down really deep. They take in what they need. Leaves, decay, feed them. They're really low maintenance, but absolutely delicious grape-like berries on there. I highly recommend muscadines. Grapes, wonderful perennial crops, can take really cold winters, come back year after year. This is a plant that I just put in about a month ago. You can see the grape bunches starting to form. I'll be pruning this back a little bit, but the idea is for me to grow it up this cattle panel, and it's going to cover this whole arch. So I'm growing some of the perennial fruits inside my garden. I'm going to show you a couple more grapes that are growing outside the garden. But they're really easy to grow. Low maintenance. You really just drop it into wherever the planting hole is. Set up like I've been saying. Maybe a little bit of compost. Loosen it up. Wants to be in an area that drains decently. Just can't be sitting in water. But they're extremely hardy. They actually grow 10 to 15 foot roots that are going to go really deep into the ground, and they're going to pull in all the nutrients they need. But I'll give them a big drink of water-soluble fertilizer in the spring. Help them kind of take off. Give them some nitrogen for the leaves. But they do extremely well here in Maryland. Here's another grape vine. This one was the same size as the one you just saw, and I put a little, you know, trellis for it. It's mixed in here with the rhubarb, dwarf apple tree, as I was saying earlier. And, you know, it's doing exactly what I want. You can prune these back pretty harshly. They're going to stay contained, the vines that I'm keeping on there, to what you see there. I think it's going to look beautiful. Just starting, I think, I don't know if they flout. Well, there's one. So there's a cluster of grapes in there. They're, again, I just want to stress, they're pretty hardy. Much more hardier than you think. You can buy any kind of variety. You can get seedless grapes, red grapes, yellow grapes, purple grapes. I mean, you can find just about whatever you want. Grapes to make wine, if you want to do that. I highly recommend them. Let me show you another vine, and then we'll move on to raspberries. This is another part of my garden. You can see I have a lot of fruit trees. This is a Concord grape growing along the fence. It's growing in a 35-gallon whiskey barrel. There's my dog, Willow. You can grow grape vines and dwarf fruit trees in containers. You need something about 30 to 40 gallons. There is a hole in the bottom of this, so the root probably escaped into the ground. The plant here is five years old. You can see how thick the vine is, just loaded with grapes. I don't do any kind of fancy pruning. You don't have to be afraid of the pruning. You know, you just cut it back. You know, watch a video or two and just keep the general shape. This will, well, would have gone all the way down the fence that way if I didn't keep cutting it back. Highly recommend grapes. One or two in the garden, growing up some sort of trellis is perfect, and they're going to again come back year after year. This is one of my perennial flowerbeds. I have mixed in here edible plants. If you want to check out my book, Growing an Edible Landscape, it talks about this kind of design. Apple trees in the back. I wanted to show you a bigger thyme plant. It's starting to flower. After it flowers, I'll cut it back. I'll get tender growth, be able to use it for herbs. This is a currant plant. I'm going to show you three of these growing throughout my property. I think this is a yellow currant, but they produce berries, resistant to deer, grow with little maintenance, and it's just a great way to add other fruits into your garden. This is one variety of a currant. Let's go over to the other two. I want to show you another area too real quick. This is horseradish. This is actually the horseradish you saw in the garden was in a clay pot. It was sitting here for a year. The root grew into the ground. When I lifted the clay pot, it broke off. Horseradish here, horseradish in the other part of my garden. It's really, really easy to propagate. Coming back to this corner, I have another currant plant in here. This is a black variety. This is on its second year. You'll get a small plant. It might be a foot tall. After it establishes for the year, over winters once, it just comes back, you know, with some ferocity really. Look at, you know, all the berries that are going to be on there. And I like having different types of berries, fruit canes, bushes, etc. that provide fruit over really May into late July. One more place. Let's walk over here. Coming into this corner, I have trees that I have to remove that grew into the ground. These are tulip poplars. They're going to get moved. This is my original four-year-old red currant plant. It's going to take over this whole space, which I'm thrilled about. And you can see the currants are all starting to form. They'll be ready in about four weeks. Well draining soil doesn't mean it can't stay wet. It just, you can't have pooling soil, you know. So it drains out within a couple of hours after a rain. The currants are going to do fine. Most plants do fine with that. They just don't want to be in sitting water. Sitting water fills the air pockets around the roots, causes root rot, the plants suffocate. So the water just has to drain away in some capacity. This one I don't even feed or do anything to. It's just living off the decaying mulch, different kinds of stuff that fall to the ground. I mean they're really, really hardy. This is getting to a good size. I could prune it back, but I would definitely add the different currant types into your garden. I'm walking up towards the main road. I'm using the hardy kiwi and figs to create a screen. So you're going to hear some cars and see some cars. So the thing about the hardy kiwi, and again I want to stress hardy kiwi, you need a male and female plant. So I have them planted right here. Nice and dense, makes a great screen for the road. They have support in there. Female on the right, male on the left. This is a five-year-old plant from when I put it into the ground. Again, drop it in the ground, water it in, water soluble fertilizer. To start, after I had this established, I leave it alone. I prune it back because it does get out of control. The key with the hardy kiwis, and you can see all these blooms. It took four years for blooms to come onto these plants. I got some last year. So you're going to have to let them grow for a good four years and establish, but just look at all the blooms. That means I'm going to finally get a whole lot of hardy kiwis. It was about five years waiting, but you definitely have to let the plants grow and do their thing. You can see that they do get out of control. I apologize for the car noise, but that's just the way it is. I'm going to let these grow. At some point, I will just cut the tips back and I maintain it to this general space here. But I'm really thrilled. Five years later, I'm finally getting all these blooms, which means kiwis. You can see the kiwi in the back creating a screen. These are Chicago hardy figs, which means the wood, unlike the Brown Mission fig, survives the winters here in Maryland. Some of it dies off, like this is dead. I'll be pruning all the dead wood back, but you can see that figs are already starting to form. It's only May. These will continue to grow and get massive. The longer that they're here, the stronger they become to the winter. I will get hundreds of figs off of these plants. I'm using one plant. I'll walk over here. Two plants, three plants. You can see from the road, which again I apologize because it's noisy, but it's creating a screen so that you can't even see into my property where the main garden is. You can use them as a screen, decoration, but what's more important is figs will continue to produce year after year. The hardy figs will continue to produce. The hardy kiwis will continue to produce. And again, I recommend the Chicago hardy fig for areas that get colder winters with freezes in the 20s Fahrenheit. Next is the goji berry plant. Not grown for super sweet berries, but they're very nutritious, have a lot of minerals, vitamins, etc. in there. Great for smoothies. Now you can see the base of the plant, a whole lot of woods coming out of there. These were grown from a single stem, bought at Home Depot with roots, about 12 inches tall for $9.95. The plants now are four years old. They get massive. This has been hacked back greatly. This will get 8-12 feet tall. It will bush out completely. So don't be surprised that a little goji berry plant goes crazy. But you can hack it back. This is going to be loaded with orange berries come August. I like them. Very nutritious. Highly recommend them. Now out of all the plants that I talked about, the gojis really don't like to have wet roots. So I don't know if you can see it, but the line, the earth line is higher over here. And my water pools this way after rain. So this plant's doing the best where it's drier. The water doesn't settle. It drains out pretty quickly, but they don't like to have wet roots. The plant here, goji, I made a mistake when I planted. I thought, you know, they're going to be little. They're going to be bushes. They're not. They'll basically turn into trees. They're just crazy growers. Not as big, not as prolific, because the soil starts getting more wet there. And then as you come down to where everything settles, the grapes do fine. The grapes are over there. It is in a raised container, but the main root is going into the ground. They do okay with the water. The apple tree too, side note, doesn't like how wet it stays there, but it's doing okay. I think it'll be fine. My point here is the third goji plant was not pruned. I removed the dead wood on there, but it keeps dying back. And that's just because it's staying too wet. So you definitely want to have your gojis planted somewhere where water doesn't settle after a rainstorm. They don't like to have wet roots. Feeding-wise, once they've been established, I just let them go. They may get a drink of water-soluble fertilizer if I think about it, but they're a really great addition to the garden. Goji berries, if you know what they are, you like using them in your food, they're really expensive. So grow your own. They're going to come back year after year, their plants are going to get really big, and you're going to get more berries than you can use. And finally, let's talk about raspberries. We're going to walk over there. This is my front yard. This is a fenced-in area. Fig tree does well in a 30-gallon container. It is not growing into the ground. The only issue with growing fruit trees in containers is you have to stay up on the watering because they're going to suck the water out of there, especially when mature, and you're going to have to feed these every two weeks with a water-soluble fertilizer because there's no other place for the roots to go, and there's no other nutrition in there from like decaying wood, etc. etc. You have to supply the water and the nutrients, but the Chicago Hardy Fig will do fine in a container. Apple trees, fruit trees, nut trees we'll be getting to in a second. I have them on the inside of the fence. Deer will chew down the leaves of apple trees and stuff. You do have to protect them, but I'll talk about that. Strawberry plants, go into the base of this peach tree. So I have the raspberries in here. These are black raspberries. I have to get in here, remove the dead wood. Typically, raspberries grow on second-year canes, so new canes will be coming up this year that aren't going to have flowers or fruit, but next year they are, and they're going to look, you know, something like this. Flowers are starting. I'll have fruit soon. The canes that produced fruit last year just die off, so I'm going to have to remove all those. These can be aggressive, so I found that black raspberries tend to stay within their space pretty well. I had some more aggressive raspberries down here that I removed, and you can see they're still coming up in different places, and they were going under the decking and stuff. They were just a mess, so I'm going to try and dig those up, move those to my wood area. Here's another grape that I just planted, too, by the way. There's Will. Hey, say hi, Willow. Hello. In here, I have blackberries that were kind of a planting mistake in a raised bed. I got to get in here. I always neglect this area. I've got to weed this area out, but beautiful blackberries, clumping variety, so they are staying within that space, and then I have more raspberries in there that kind of spread over. So, bottom line is plant raspberries, put them in a place where they can get out of control. This was not the right area, but they're absolutely delicious. The black raspberries are just spectacular. All right, so let's get to fruit trees and nut trees. So, let's go through the fruit trees and the nut trees. Again, I'm in Maryland Zone 7, so I can't grow citrus here because the freezing temperatures would kill them off. I'm basically growing stone fruits like peaches, nectarines, and palms, apples, peaches. They have seeds. They do really well in Maryland. They need a cold period of at least 32 degrees Fahrenheit, 40 degrees Fahrenheit, cold temperatures, so that the trees get the signal that they're kind of going through dormancy. They do their thing and come next spring, they're going to flower and produce fruit again. But most of these fruit trees can take temperatures down to minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit, so they really do like freezing winters. Let's start with the apple tree. This is a basic dwarf apple tree. That was a nectarine tree I was showing you. It was supposed to be dwarf too. You can get trees in dwarf size, semi-dwarf, and then standard size, and it all just depends on what you want to grow. All the trees have pretty much flowered. They're starting to set fruit. There's some fruit right here. You can see a couple of apples. I find the apple trees to be more challenging. I'm having trouble getting them to really flower, but I'm working on it. So apple trees are great additions to gardens. You do have to learn some basic pruning, like opening up the inside of the canopy. Different diseases are going to show up, but that's going to vary garden to garden. And please subscribe. I have over, again, 1,500 videos, and you can find details on most of what I'm talking about if you want to learn more about planting the fruit tree, etc. You can see all the nectarines right on there. Let's get a close-up. I mean, this tree is loaded. Nectarines are pretty easy to grow. One mistake I made was I let this just get too much fruit on it, and some of the branches actually broke. So you'd have to prune this back. Make sure you get stocky branches. Remove some of the fruit. But this is just loaded with nectarines. This is going to need to be sprayed with an antifungal. I'm going to start that as soon as the rain goes away. But the nectarine tree is just loaded with fruit. I probably have three or four nectarine trees. I don't know, maybe eight apple trees. Nectarine trees, great additions, fruit really well. Really recommend them for the garden. Let's formally hit the apple trees. Dwarf apple tree. A dwarf apple tree right in there. I just added these last year and two years ago. That one's struggling a little bit, as I said, because of the water in that area. This is a granny smith semi-dwarf. Not flowering like I like it, or like I would like it to. So I haven't really gotten a granny smith apple off of here in four years. So I'm not too crazy about that tree. More apple trees through here. These are producing flowers and fruit. You can see some of the flowers right in there. That's going to be fruit. More up here. Apple trees tend to produce flowers later in the season while the other ones have fruit on it, the other fruit trees. There'll be a lot of apples on there. And then I have more trees coming around this way. You do want to protect them. I'm leaving these lower branches in because it dissuades, I guess if that's a word, the deer from coming in and the bucks rubbing their horns on there. But you should really have that removed. I have a cage that I use to protect this tree because some of the deer, again, the bucks are getting in here and scraping the tree down. Here is, I think this is a Fuji apple. This one's already done. It's flowering. It's setting fruit. I can see four there. This is a better tree. Some up there. And I'm sure there's more if I look around. Here's more right in here. So apple trees are going to vary on when they bloom and set fruit. Another larger apple tree in there. But overall, I struggle most with the apple trees, just getting them to, you know, flower and do their thing. Pruning-wise, I'm a chaos pruner, but I do know to open up the inside of the canopy, keep the air flow going. All right, let's go over to some peaches. Peach trees are my favorite. Very prolific. I get hundreds of peaches, more peaches than I can eat and give away. This is one variety. I just want to show you all the peaches on here. I'm going to have to remove like every third peach because it's going to weigh down these branches, but it is just loaded with peaches. Now, some fruit trees, you need different varieties and stuff like that. I have multiple trees throughout my garden of peaches, plums, pears, apple trees. Just check with the variety that you're buying if it needs another variety to help with pollination. This one does not. Loaded with the peaches. Now, I have the cage, the deterrent from the deer, but I want to talk about the strategy. So over here is the south, behind me is the west. This is supposed to be a semi-dwarf tree. I'm keeping it contained. It's not going to cast a shadow onto my garden. It's outside the main garden. And I wanted it there for a little bit of shade for right along this area where I grow peppers because come July it gets really hot here. A little bit of shade is going to help them out. They still get light as the sun tracks around, but you can strategically place your trees so they don't create shade or they do create a little bit of shade in your main growing area. I have fruit trees inside my garden. This is another nectarine tree. You can see some of the nectarines, some sort of weird leaf disease, which is great. I'll figure out what that is. Again, nectarines do really well. I mean, just look at all the nectarines in there. Now this tree, all of my trees are actually bought at Home Depot, Lowe's, or Sun Nursery. They were all about five feet tall, six feet tall, at least three years old. The trees here have been in the ground. This is the third year. This is supposed to be dwarf. I have to cut it back a whole lot. Again, another nectarine tree. A plum tree. We'll be focusing more on those when I go outside of this main garden, but I just wanted to show you that you can grow them sort of in raised beds. This again was supposed to be semi-dwarf. I'm going to have to go and cut it back. Grow them in all kinds of different ways. Add them to the fruit garden. Basically, the southern sun's over there, the western sun's over here. The shadows to the trees are going to be cast outside the garden, so you can plant with the strategy and put some of them inside your fence line if you need to protect them from deer and other animals. I only have one nut tree on my property. This is a Hall's Hardy Almond, which I really do recommend. It doesn't come in any kind of dwarf size, so it is going to get really tall. That's, you know, over 20 feet tall. I think the almonds are on there. I get so many almonds. The squirrels tend to eat some of them, but it's really prolific. So you can see the almonds all through there. It has beautiful flowers too. Here's maybe a better example of the almonds, but the Hall's Hardy Almond is a wonderful tree. It's over here more to the edge of my property. The sunlight comes through. You can see that, but it's not going to really cast any shadow into my garden because I knew that it was going to get really tall. Just here's some more of the almonds. Hall's Hardy Almond. I highly recommend that. So when you're growing trees that are going to be 18, 20, 30 feet tall, make sure you place them in a place where they're not going to drop shade onto your main garden. Here's a quick look of a dwarf peach tree. It's on the inside of my other garden, planted right in the center of a raised bed. That's the bed that I'm going to be putting strawberry plants into. Lots of peaches staying about, it'll be somewhere between 8 and maybe 12 feet tall, but it's going to stay nice and small. Some mild pruning and this will be loaded with peaches without, you know, having a massive tree. This is pretty much my orchard. These are some pear trees, which we'll get to in a second. And then I have five trees out here. I And plenty of space. Dwarf trees, semi-dwarf trees, you don't have to worry so much about having a great distance between them. These trees are all pruned. They're supposed to be semi-dwarf. They're pretty tall, but they're not going to get 25, 40 feet tall. Well, one of the plums is on its way, but sometimes buying more at a quality nursery, you can make sure you get the type of plant. I think some of these semi-dwarfs aren't semi-dwarfs. They're full-sized trees. Anyway, this is kind of the spacing I have. They get at least eight hours of sun. Realistically, they're probably getting a good 10 hours worth of sun. You want a lot of sun for your fruit trees. And my biggest tip is to really prune the inside of the canopy. Here's one of my plum trees. It's doing really well. Heavily pruned on the inside again of the canopy. There's some of the plums starting to come out already. Last year, they were infested with aphids. So far, so good. There's no insect damage. I'm inspecting these very closely. Here's another plum tree. And you can see just all the plums on there. Fruit trees are really rewarding. There's a little bit of a learning curve to learn how to manage them. You know, I'm not an expert pruner, like the branch right there should probably come out. But I pruned the inside out a whole lot. You see new branches come in. This tree is doing pretty well. Loaded with fruit. You know, I'm very happy about that. Plum trees, another great addition to your garden. Cherry trees are wonderful to add to the garden. The crows do like the cherries. My other fruit tends to be left alone. I just have to pick them when they're actually ripe. They're pretty good. When they get overripe and they're really sweet, that's when the crows like to roll in. This is a cherry tree that produced really well last year, but it's even producing more now. I mean, look at all these cherries. They're just all over the place. I'm really excited to see that. That means there'll be room to share with the crows, and I'm going to get a lot of them. I mean, I can see all the cherries going all the way up the branches. Now, this is a good, probably 18 feet tall. Pruned a lot to remove a lot of the inner branches, keep that airflow going. You really want to manage disease issues. All my trees will be getting sprayed with an antifungal this week, but they're looking pretty good. As far as feeding, once established that year, I don't do much. I just let them, you know, take from the soil. I will put mulch, grass clippings, and stuff around the base. That helps provide some food, but I don't do much else. All right, let's go into the picket fence, and I'll show you the peach trees. I'm sorry, the pear trees. We're looking at the southern sky, so the trees all in this line just get a ton of sunlight, and actually probably don't have to go in there. Just going to show you. So last year, struggling a little bit getting the pears, pruned them back. This tree is loaded with pears now. I mean, that is just wonderful to see. Sometimes when you're pruning and cutting back, you'll learn what to remove. It helps bring out more flowers the following year. Just look at all the pears on here. This is actually, this is pretty impressive. I didn't look at this tree yet really this year, and it is just loaded with pears. It's wonderful. This might be a Bartlett. I have a couple different varieties. Like I was saying, different tree types, tree varieties, like mixes of different types of trees. So I have like 12 different variety apple trees, three different kinds of pears. This one's loaded too. So the pruning actually really did help bring out some more flowers. And then let's just go down to the last pear tree and see if that's doing the same thing. Also the age probably impacts how the flowers grow. So these are all on really, I think their fifth year being put into the ground. I mean, yeah, loaded. Just beautiful. Do recommend adding fruit trees to your garden, nut trees if you have space. They do like full sun. Once established, the only maintenance really is pruning, managing for pests and disease, and hopefully you don't have a lot of animal pressure that's going to steal your fruit. I get lots of squirrels. I have to trap and release them. All right, let's go back to the main garden for the conclusion. You can see I have the fruit trees really spaced out all over the place. These are the clumping of the apple trees. Coming over here, I have the dwarf trees on the outside inside of the white fence. Grapevines, the nectarines are over there. Another peach tree. Thanks so much for watching. Please check out my seed shop at therustedgarden.com and please subscribe and follow me. You can really look up through my 1500 videos just about everything you've seen here if you want more detail. And I will teach you how to grow food, have some fun, save some money, and I wish you luck in growing your own edible landscape. Thanks for watching.