My Clever Trick to Harvest Fresh Fruit for 8 Months Straight!

What's going on growers? It's James Frigioni coming to you live from Jersey. Today I'm going to share with you the clever way I harvest fruit out of my garden from May all the way till December. Let's go! With fall around the corner a lot of gardeners are starting to call it quits. The big summer harvest came and they were happy with that. But some of us are just not happy with a normal harvest or a standard harvest. We like to be a little bit extreme and to take things like as far as we can take them. When it comes to food we don't just like extending our season when it comes to cold hardy veggies. We like to take things to the next level and extend our season when it comes to fresh homegrown organic fruits. That leads me over to one of my favorite pear trees we have the chojuro pear. This thing is incredible. The flavor you won't believe it. It's called the butterscotch pear because it has a butterscotch flavor to it. When it's truly ripe it gets this bright orange color and the flavor it's it's unbelievable. This one's a little closer to ripe it just fell off on its own. It's tiny though but I'm telling you these things it's the best pear I've ever had. It doesn't look like a pear because it's a it's an Asian pear so it's rounded but this thing is so dang good. And since I planted it all I've done was just continually come out and grab harvests from it. Perennials, fruit trees, they're amazing. They give you so much food with so little work during the main season. Yeah we got to do a little pruning with it maybe spray it with some kale and clay once or twice but overall endless food. And right behind that we have our earliest perennial of the whole season. We're grabbing harvests from this massive thicket of asparagus starting in April. We'll allow these to continue to grow. Look I mean look at look how many there are back there. It's so crazy. But we'll allow these to continue to grow until they get so so dead that they're all brown. If they're still green in here it's still photosynthesizing. We want this to grow as long as possible so that it can take all this energy stored in the root and then come spring spear after spear popping up. Swing to my right but just take a step back for a second. Take a step back. Look at all the food in this one little area. I got the Chajuro pear right here. I can grab that. Sure. I've got the asparagus right to my left and then next to us to my right this is my latest producing fruit tree. The persimmon. This is a hybrid. It's one of those ones that you have to wait for it to get soft before you eat it. It's the Nikita's gift. It's it's an incredible tree. This thing I'll grab harvests from this tree up till December because the fruit truly doesn't ripen until it gets soft and we get a nice hard freeze. The tree has gotten massive over the years. It's endless production. One of the easiest fruit trees I've ever grown and with these thick waxy leaves there's barely any bugs that want to go after it. When it comes down to it this is my greatest season extender but there's plenty of other fruits that we're still grabbing harvest from now and into October, November. This baby's for December. Let me swing over here though. Check this out. Within underneath all that stuff we still have another fruit tree. This one right here the hazelnut. This is an incredible tree. It had a bunch of nuts on it earlier in the year but when it comes down to it it's tough to get those nuts because the squirrels, the chipmunks, everyone wants to come in here because this thing is a paradise for all living things. So that's kind of how it is. You guys take a look at this and you'll notice wow that's a lot of fruit trees. That must have taken forever to start. The reality is it's only one little step at a time. You start with one fruit tree and that's the start of a food forest. Emerson had a quote that I really love and he said the creation of a thousand forests is within one acorn. So that's all it's about. You don't have to start huge. Start with one seed, one fruit tree and that will be the start of your whole food forest. We just checked out our latest producing fruit in the whole food forest. Let's move over now to the earliest producing fruit and it's the one right at my feet here. Strawberries. This year was a great year for strawberries. We grabbed a huge harvest from this section and strawberries are one of my all-time favorite fruits. All of them rarely make it inside but when you get a nice thick patch of it and you grab a big harvest from it, it's truly a special treat and it is such a good feeling for me because that really kicks up, kicks off the fruit harvesting season. I mean I love my veggies, I love my greens, but the fruits as you know so dang good. Let's move over to my latest producing pear over here. So right through where the where the strawberries are and notice they've spread themselves out over years. We'll have to replant the new area here and I'm growing the shucks and strawberries. Those are my favorite variety of all time simply because the flavors. I mean it's hard to compare to any other one. I just love it so much. Right here is a late producing pear for me. It's loaded with fruit. Look at this beautiful fruit on it. Looks like there's a bite or two right there but overall loaded with fruit. Look at the size of this one up here. Look at the size of that pear. Huge. It's a late pear though and last year this thing kicked out an incredible amount of fruit. I was grabbing it late in the season. It looked absolutely gorgeous and there's nothing like grabbing fresh fruit and I mean late in the season, early in the season. It's it's non-stop if you set things up right. Here's another apple hidden in the back. I mean this area gets very little light because there's so many things blocking it but it's just enough for this apple to produce some beautiful looking apples as you can see here. Like look how nice this one is. This is a good looking apple. Check this. Really cool stuff and just like we like planting a diverse number of fruits to extend our season as far as possible from strawberries to currants to raspberries and everything in between persimmons you know apples everything we also like to plant a diverse a diversity within each fruit. So for instance when it comes to apples we always make sure we have the Williams Pride apple planted because that's our earliest producing apple. That makes so we can get apples late in July. Then we also have late producing apples like the Liberty. That one gives us apples way late in the season and we have some of these other apples which are mid-season ones. So not only are we planting a diverse number of crops to extend the season when it comes to all fruit but we're also planting a diverse number of each fruit that can extend the season of each of each one of those fruits. When you do it like this you truly can take advantage of the only thing we can work with. Space and time. In spring and early summer the grapes above me were looking perfect. They looked so healthy happy it looked like a massive harvest was on the way but take a look at the grapes now and I mean there are no grapes. They've all been stolen by the birds. I mean it's hard to blame them but the grapes look perfect and then right as they start to ripen the birds come and scoop every single one of them. I was thinking maybe they wouldn't grab all these because they're kind of hidden but in reality I think they knew exactly where they were and there was even a bird's nest up here with a morning dove or maybe it was a robin. Regardless it's hard to get some of these fruits sometimes because I mean again it's a paradise for all living things so it's hard to stop the birds. Ultimately we have some other sections where we have grapes because we cover them with insect netting but it's I mean it's not easy to get grapes when when you've got so many dang birds, chipmunks, everything wants the food. Right below me here is a currant. I mentioned currant earlier but this currant is one of my favorite varieties because it produces very early and it's consistent this white currant and or maybe it's called the champagne currant. They look beautiful, they taste great and it's such a easy fruit to grow. So we stick this underneath the apple tree as you look up. This is the prigioni apple. It's got absolutely massive. It's always got a lot of fruit on it. We snack on the fruit. It's got a nice spritey flavor to it. Overall it's just a really really good tree and then check out this apple over here. This is the one I talked about earlier too. This is the liberty apple. Well to my right here is the honeycrisp. This one doesn't have many fruit but my other honeycrisp does. Here is a liberty apple. A late producing one and if you want to try to grow apples and you're thinking you might have a little bit of an issue with it, grow the liberty. You got to start with this one. It is known as the most disease resistant apple on the planet. I always say that but it's important because if you guys want to try to grow some things like apples which is my favorite fruit of all time. I can always eat apples. I never get sick of them. This is the place to start. Look at this. Look at the color on it. Look how nice this thing looks. It's got a twist and a taste. Oh my gosh that came off nice and easy. The liberty apple, the flavor, the ease of growth. There's nothing like homegrown organic food. Truly living. This cherry right over here is our yellow cherry and last year was the first year it fruited. It was loaded with fruit this year as well. The cherries look gorgeous. That nice yellow color. One of the great things about the yellow cherry is that the birds don't go for the yellow cherries like they do the red ones. So just like they decimated our grapes this year they didn't go after our yellow cherries because we've got the rainier cherry too. That one had so much fruit on it this year and it's probably my favorite flavored cherry that I have and the look is absolutely gorgeous. If you pan over to the tree right now you'll notice it doesn't have any leaves on it. This thing suffers from what I believe is a bacterial issue with the leaves or maybe it's I think it's cherry leaf spot but it still performs really well for us. This time of the year it has a few little issues so what I might do in the off season is hit it with something like a copper fungicide. I never like doing that in the in the in the growing season but in the off season it works good as a dormant spray. So I'll probably hit that to try to keep that bacteria and leaf spot issue kind of at bay. Regardless it's a massive producer for us and when it comes down to it there ain't nothing like grabbing fresh fruit right from the backyard. That's today's video growers. Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got something out of it. This was a fun video for me just running around like an idiot showing you all my fruit trees. There's a lot that I haven't got to but some of them are just like repetitive. It's like the same fruit trees that I have in other locations but when I get a tree that I love I don't just get one. I usually get a couple of them because I mean I can never have too many apples. I love Liberty. I love the Honeycrisp. It's one of my all-time favorites and the asparagus too. I mean I literally have asparagus growing everywhere. If you have never grown asparagus come on what are you thinking? It's it's one of the best crops. There's nothing like grabbing a spear early in spring and it's it just gives back so much. The third year you get you get like a good amount and then every year after that it's it's such a fun fun thing to do. Perennials are truly so much fun because you put in all the work like a year before the year before then you come in the spring and things just produce for you and then you combine that with annuals it's like I don't know it's it's such a fun garden to be a part of a food forest because it's so it's not static. It's it's always in motion. It's always moving. Things are always changing. It's it's a living ecosystem. It's like a moving machine of living parts. It's it becomes its own entity and it's just such a fun thing to be a part of. That's why we always encourage you to get some perennials in, get some fruit trees in, get your food forest started. One strawberry plant at a time, one fruit tree at a time, but that's all it takes. Those little ripples come on you know they make big waves. I had a blast out here though. I wanted to send a thank you to one of our new child members Sharon Gilchrist. Thanks for being a part of Team Grow. Thanks for having your hand in everything we're doing out here. There's it's been a year where there haven't been that many tours. Some of you have noticed and there haven't been that many harvest videos. It's because there's a lot going on you know behind the scenes at the new place where we're going to be setting that thing up for a whole new adventure. A whole new adventure of videos and and learning things and growing things and and building new gardens and we're really really excited for that. So make sure you guys hit the subscribe button so you can follow along for all these updates and all the upcoming interesting videos that we have coming down the pike like the McDonald's tomato. Don't think I forgot about that. I'm holding on to that one to make it as good for you guys as I possibly can. To give you the whole story so you really get a good idea of what the heck happens when you plant a seed from a tomato from a McDonald's burger and we'll see. It blew me away. The McDonald's you're going to see it. It's a big surprise. Overall though the season has been incredible. We feel very grateful for you guys continued support and nothing motivates us more than the love in the comments. So get get active down in the comments and also get over to the community over at teamgrow.us. That thing has taken off. There's so much activity. There's so many people engaging with one another. There's so much knowledge information and just experience being passed around for free. It's become an incredible resource so you gotta check it out. Also check out some of the merch because that's some of our favorite things. The classic food forest. You gotta rep it. This is my favorite shirt I've ever designed and some of the other ones we did this year. We're really really happy with how they came out. When it comes down to it though don't quit. Don't stop. Get out there. Get sowing. Get going. I heard a quote someone said. You've got that classic one. If you don't sow you don't reap. What about the other side of it though someone said. If you don't, if you, if you, if you, you won't reap if you don't sow. So I mean it's the same thing reversed but when it comes down to it if you're not reaping much you got to get some sowing going. We'll catch you on another one real soon. We out.