MSU Extension MI Ag Ideas to Grow With

Great. Well, welcome everyone. I know some of you have been with us for the afternoon and some are just joining. So we appreciate you taking the time out of your day to learn about lots of different topics related to beginning farming. So this is, as a reminder, part of our MI Ag Ideas to Grow With virtual conference. My name is Mariel Borgman. I'm a community food systems educator with MSU Extension and I'm super excited to welcome Cheyenne Sloan here this afternoon to talk about beginning fruit. Hi everyone, My name is Cheyenne Sloan and I am the blueberry and small fruit educator for Southwest Michigan. For Michigan State University. Today we're going to talk a little bit about some fruit myths and a little bit about intro to fruit production. And mostly focusing a lot on some myths or some questions you might have had during your des if you want to grow fruit or have thought about growing fruit or have been on social media in the past like five or so years. Things you might have heard about in regards to fruit production. First things for, oops. First things first, I want to talk a little about what I like to call fruit crimes. If any of you guys have been on social media in the past, like, I don't know how long, I feel like these people have been around for a really long time. You've probably heard of or seen a video from Five Minute Crafts and they really like to show silly things on the Internet about how fruit is grown and what to do with fruit, and they don't know what they're talking about. A lot of times I'll see them shared videos like this where it's like how to grow a grape in a banana. That's not how grapes grow. That's a seedless grape or like how to grow lemon from your lemon seeds or how. I don't even know what they're doing in this one with a toothpaste and a pear and an orange. A lot of times videos like this are more click baby or looking to get people like me upset. So people will watch them so they can get add revenue and things like that. But generally, if you see something like this shared on Facebook or Instagram or on Tiktok or whatever, and it comes from five minute crafts like take it with at least seven heaping tablespoons of salt, because a lot of times they're not really doing anything and it's just something silly for you to watch. Yeah, an orange pair mint hybrid would be really gross and weird. But I've had, I've had like my mom send me videos before, like this isn't how that works. And so if you've ever seen a video like this on the Internet, we're going to talk a little bit about why things like this may or may not work. Or why it may work in some cases, and why it may not work in other cases. The most important thing that I want you guys to take away from this is how plants reproduce. It's not really something that you learn about unless you are specifically learning about plants. So there are two different ways that you can make more plants. And so there's asexually where offspring is produced by a single parent. So here's a little diagram of it. Oh, here, let me turn on my laser pointer. Over here is asexual reproduction. One parent produces offspring and they're going to be genetically the same, whereas sexually, offspring is produced by two parents, like humans are produced sexually. We all have an ex mother and a father. And then we are here and we are some combination of our mother and father's genes. So we don't look just like our mom or dad. We don't we're not just as tall or look, or act just like our mom or dad. We're a little bit of a combination of our mom and dad. So you might feel like, oh, you have your mother's eyes, you have your father's nose. Or maybe you do look just like your parents. Because sometimes genetics is weird and hard to explain the process of sexual reproduction in plants, the first thing is the formation of game. Gamet. Plants have specialized structures called gametophytes, which produce gametes. In most plants, the male gametes are produced in structures like pollen grains, with female gametes are produced in structures like ovules, like spores. This is what's happening before we get to pollination, and then we get to pollination. Pollination is a transfer of pollen, the boy, the male gametes, from another flower to the stigma of the same or another flower. And this can occur in a bunch of different ways. You're probably most familiar with pollination. Bees are like poster child for pollinating, but they're not people. Only people es aren't people. Bees are bees. But they're not the only organism that is involved in pollination. A bunch of other different kinds of insects. Also, pollinate birds help in pollination. Wind can be really important in pollination, especially in crops like grapes or even bats. Bats are important pollinators too, for a lot of different plants. Once pollination occurs, which is when the pollen lands on the stigma, a pollen tube grows down the style, to the ovary, where it delivers the male gametes to the ovule. This is fertilization. Once this happens, the plant starts forming seeds. Seeds are the a result of the fertilization. Then once we have seeds, we start thinking about seed dispersal. All of the fruit, not all of the fruit. There's a bunch of fruit. Now that also is seedless. That's a little bit more complicated, like how they get it to be seedless. What it means to be seedless. And all of that fruit are just a way for plants to disperse their seeds. Most fruit is designed with the idea of being munched on by an animal. And then the plant, the animal eats it. And then they go somewhere else. And then they poop. And then there's built in fertilizer right there. So it's either an animal will eat it or the fleshy fruit part that we eat and think is so delicious will help fertilize and take care of the seed while it's growing, so in germination. So here's a couple of different kinds of seed, like here's a cherry seed. So you see here's the cherry seed and then here's the fleshy part. So we tend to eat the fleshy parts of it when we're thinking about fruits. The seed is right there. And then here's apples. I think apples are especially cool because you can, you can tell whether or not there's complete or incomplete fertilization by looking at the shape. You know how sometimes you get an apple and it's like funky shaped. So like one size might be slightly smaller than the other. If you were to cut an apple in half the side, that will be funky looking, that's slightly smaller than the big side. We'll have misshapen and incompletely fertilized fruit because the fruit knows not to put a lot of the plant knows not to put a lot of effort into building these nutritional reserves for things that aren't going to do anything. Because plants ultimately just want to pass on their genes. Then there's things like blueberries. Blueberries were evolved with the idea of being eaten by birds and then dispersed by birds. So that's why they're really small and they have the little tiny seeds. And then things like avocados evolved to be eaten by things like mammoths. That's why they have this giant seed. Because then they would go through like the mammoths digestive system and then when the mammoth excretes it, at the end, it's like kind of gotten through the seed. So this is what people, in my experience, usually think of when they're thinking about, oh, I want to plant a blueberry or I want to plant a cherry, or I want to plant an apple. Like one time I was working with a group of students that wanted to send blueberries into space. And they were like, oh, it'll be super easy to send blueberries into space because we can just send the seeds and the seeds are super small. And it was, it was a bit of a hard time for me to explain to them that blueberries aren't really grown from seeds. So that wouldn't really work. And that will not actually be the most practical way for you to grow blueberries in space as an example, but we're going to talk about that a little bit more later on. So one question, is it safe then to swallow apple and cherry seeds? As long as we do not chew them? Yeah, you can totally swallow them. It's not that big of a deal. You don't want to eat too many apple seeds. Well, okay, I'm not trying to fear Monger here. You can't eat apple seeds, but apple seeds contain a lot of arsenic, so you just probably shouldn't eat apple seeds. I would not recommend eating apple seeds. There's not significant enough arsenic for you to like for it to actually hurt you. But better safe than sorry. And also, apple seeds taste kind of gross anyways, I promise sexual reproduction plants. So here's an example of a couple of different types. A couple of different flowers. Over here are some strawberry flowers. They're really cute. Here's where the pollen will grow, and then you'll see that I don't have a picture of the strawberries, but then they'll grow into little strawberries. Over here's some blueberry flowers, there's the pollen tube, there's the flower, here's some fertilized. I mean, not strawberries, these are blueberries. And you can kind of see down here, the blueberries starting to get bigger and develop. And then over here are some raspberries. And you can see all of the one thing that's cool about raspberries. Raspberries are a compound fruit. So each of these little spot, each of the little balloons of little raspberry balloons in the fruit are actually individual little fruits. So each of these have a seed that was, and all of them were individually fertilized. And then over here is a cherry tree. I think cherries are beautiful. They're one of my favorite things to walk around when they're in bloom. Then this one's an apple, and they're all pink and cute. And this is before they've opened up. These are the sexual reproductive parts of the plant. Then there's also asexual reproduction in plants. Asexual reproduction in plants more often is the main way that people grow perennial crops. A perennial crop would be like a blueberry or an apple. A crop that is going to be in place for more than one year. Things like vegetables or herbs, stuff like that, are generally going to be grown from seed. Not always, but you more often than not, those kinds of plants are grown from seed. Asexual reproduction and plant can be things like runners or sister plants. You might have, you might have heard about runners and strawberries. They're my favorite example of asexual reproduction in fruit. The best example, one of the best examples of asexual reproduction and fruit, because this is what we call the mother plant, this strawberry right here. And then all of these cute little ladies are daughter plants. And so what happens is the strawberry grows its daughter plant, and it's just like this little arm. And then it gets heavy and then it plops over and falls on the soil. And where it falls on the soil, it starts to develop roots. And so all of these plants are going to be clones of the mom. Because they're not getting genetic material from any other plant. They're only getting the genetic material from their mother plant. Then you might have also heard of mother of millions, Mother of thousands. This is another really great example of asexual reproduction because it's not a fruit. But all of these little guys on the edges are just going to be clones of their mom. And they're super easy to just stick in the soil and propagate. And then there's also grafting, which is kind of like asexual reproduction. U, which is a part of asexual reproduction because most of the time when people are grafting, they're doing something called tissue culture to take to either get the sion or the root stock. But we're going to talk about this a little bit more. How are most plants commercially grown? Pretty much all commercially grown plants that you and I consume are clones, which is super cool. Like all honey crisp plants are the same. The second plant over here, it's some grass. I don't remember exactly what kind of grass it is. It looks to be some grass. These are apples. And then I believe this one is also some kind of, this one might also be an apple tree. I don't remember which one this one is, but these are apples. All commercially grown plants are clones. So if you are eating a honey crisp tree, if you're eating a honey crisp, those are going to be theoretical, genetically identical to honey. Well, the fruit isn't, the plant will be genetically identical to all other honey crisp trees. So if you bought a honey crisp tree somewhere way back when they got that genetic material from the mother plant, which was developed in Minnesota. Commercially grown fruit crops generally aren't grown from seeds. They're either grown from tissue culture, they're usually grown from tissue culture, or by grafting. There's a lot of reasons why, one of them is consistency. You know exactly what you're getting when you clone a plant. Another one you're getting consistency then also it's easier and it's a lot faster. A lot of times when, if you buy like an apple tree or a blueberry bush or whatever from the store, those plants are 234 years old most of the time. They're not even growing them from seed. If you're growing something from seed, it takes a lot longer just for the plant to reach sexual maturity and all that kind of stuff. Tissue culture is one of the most common ways that people do grow plants. Now, plant tissue culture is a technique where small parts of a plant known as X. Plants are placed in a sterile nutrient culture medium to grow and develop into new plants. This method allows for the propagation of plants in a controlled environment outside of their natural surroundings. This process involves the manipulation of plant cells, tissues, or organs under aseptic conditions and usually in a laboratory setting. Tissue culture is, it feels mad scientist sometimes because you have to be super careful about being clean because the baby plants are really, really susceptible to diseases and other pathogens and things like that. You're doing it like in super aseptic conditions, so you have to be like all geared up and really careful about touching things. And it's a really cool process. If you ever have the chance to see it in person, highly recommend it. But of plants are grown from tissue culture, a lot of blueberries are grown from tissue culture. It's a big part of the industry now. Chem components of plant tissue culture include X plants, so the tissue samples, nutrient media that has the central nutrients and growth regulators like hormones that help control the growth and differentiation of cells. There's different types of hormones you can put in the different auger solutions so that it can do different things. Sometimes you want roots, sometimes you want callous, sometimes you want all kinds of different things depending on the type of tissue that you want to create will indicate what type of food and hormones you put in the plant. Yeah, it's a lot faster because the plant that when you're doing plant tissue culture, if it's already at maturity, that plant that you tissue cultured, all the little plant lets will also be at maturity. So we had a question about strawberry seeds. I've seen strawberry seeds in catalogs. I've only grown them for runners. Is there any advantage to seeds, suppose, compared to a tree? A growth time from seed to fruit less so. Yeah, it would depend on what kind of strawberry seed you want to grow. The reason why you might not want seeds, we're going to be talking about this a little bit is just because why you wouldn't want to plant seeds from a strawberry that you have is because you don't know what boy who pollinated or what pollinated that fruit. So you don't really know what the fruit is going to be like. It could be sweeper, tasty, it could be amazing. It could also not be fertile. But usually if you're buying seeds, they're selling you seeds for a reason. The seeds are going to be sold, are going to grow, they're going to be what they say they are, it'll just take a little bit longer and seeds are just a bit harder to maintain to grow. I have a hard time starting from seeds and yes, you will get access to the slides. Grafting is almost all. I only say almost because I don't want to say every single one and be raw and like maybe some strange small growers in some other part of the country that I don't know about does this. But pretty much every single apple and grape and tree fruit that you eat, that we eat or that we grow commercially, was grafted. Grafting is really, really important because it allows you to pick the root stock and then also the pion, or what you're ultimately going to be eating. So if you want a honey crisp, you do like a honey crisp pion. And then you just pick whatever kind of root stock, the root stock. There's a lot of research in rootstock. Roots stocks are able to help control vigor, and they're able to control the height of your plant. A lot of times in modern orchards, people pick dwarfing roots stocks because otherwise the apple trees could be up to 25 feet tall. People don't want to pick apples out of 20 foot tall trees. They're a lot harder to manage. They spend more time doing vegetative growth than, than reproductive growth or fruit growth, which is what we ultimately want the plants for. Grafting is really hard. There are people who that is, their whole job is grafting. Grafting is as much of a science as it is an art, but it's one of the real re, cool. It's one of the really cool parts about plants is that you're able to just cut off one plant and stick it onto another plant. And it just, it doesn't just grow. It does grow, obviously, there are limitations. They have to be in the same species. You can't put like a blueberry onto an apple roots stalk and expect that to go well. But malice apples are in the malice family, so Malis to Mali species are good. You may have heard of of the French fry plant, which is a joke or like the Tomacco that was in the Simpsons. So tobacco, potatoes, and tomatoes are all in the same family. So theoretically, I mean, you can, it just would not be a very efficient plant. You could put like potato root stock and then a tomato con, and then a tobacco pion on top and have a tobacco tomato potato plant. Not very practical, mostly because your plant won't be really good at anything, but it's still something like people do also do grafting for annual crops or vegetables and things like that. There's people have been doing grafting in like watermelons. It's just not as common as in apples or grapes or other tree fruit. Okay, grafting in grapes is especially important because of this cute little bug. Well, I think it's cute because it lives in the soil and I love soil called Philox. Philoxa is an aphid species that is native to North America. Loves grapes in North America, There are a couple of different varieties of grapes that are native to North America, like Concord and Niagara are examples of native grapes. So those are usually what we call juice grapes. And then there's the grapes that most people think of when they think about grapes, which is wine grapes. And so wine grapes aren't actually native to North America. Most varieties of wine grapes are native to Europe. So places like Italy and France, like where the wine regions are, and so in those places they do not have pylox sera. So all of the wine varieties were evolved in area, in an area that didn't have philoxtera and don't have natural resistance to philoxtera. If you were to take a esling as an example and plant it on its own rootstock here in North America, it will get philoxtera, it'll munch, it won't die immediately, but it will die a slow and painful death. Pretty much every single wine grape in North America is on some kind of native North American rootstock, and even in some parts of Europe, because they accidentally brought Philoxa over to some parts of Europe, they have issues with it now. And they've had to go away from having it on their own native root stock to using American root, North American roots stock. Additionally, that's the main reason why, those are why you would find why you would have rootstocks in your grapes. But also it can impart disease resistance. So if you have a disease resistant rootstock, it can impart disease resistance into the pion or the part that you'll be eating. Also can make it easier for different types of soil. Different types of soil require different kinds of plants. Figure control. Grapes are weeds that we decided that we want to grow everywhere because they're delicious and tasty and awesome. But sometimes you want to control the vigor so that your grape doesn't take over or it isn't growing just all leaves and not any fruit. It can also make earlier productions, so depending on when you need your fruit and then also just can help control your yield. Here's a little grafting. Grapes are super easy to graft and super easy to propagate. If you've ever thought, if you ever wanted to graft or propagate a plant, I would recommend starting with grapes. They're ridiculously easy to graft. Why are apples grafted? I don't know how many of you guys have been in a modern orchard lately. But orchards are smaller. They're getting bigger. But plants are getting closer together and tall and skinny. Because the ultimate goal in tree fruit production like this, high density, is to create a fruiting wall. Or you guys, maybe you've heard of the term espali, which means wall. Fruit is a French technique and it's what inspired how a lot of our modern fruit trees are grown. So here's just an apple tree and then here's some conduit in the middle, and then a cute little fruit right in the middle. And then down here where we see this white protection stuff. There'll be the graft union. These are all on dwarfing rootstocks. I mentioned earlier that apple trees can get hu, they can get up to 25 feet, which is insane. By having these dwarfing roots stocks, we're preventing them from getting up to 25 feet because we don't want them to be 25 feet, we want them to be smaller because people don't want to go up and down on ladders. That's the safety issue. Then it can also help with disease resistance like in grapes. Also helps with uniformity and consistency. If you have all the same rootstock, even with different pions, it can help keep your apples the same uniform. You also have a bit more control over fruit characteristics. And you're able to pick like the best roots stock for your type of soil and oops, yeah, that's why apples are grafted. All of that to say is why wouldn't I want to plant my insert here? Seeds. Ultimately, you don't know what the fruit will be like or if the fruit will even be able brut stock incompatibility. We talked a little bit about the grapes. If you have a wine, grape and you try to plant a wine, grape seed in North America is not going to do super because of the philostra and the soil. I mentioned that they might not even be viable. Not all seeds are viable. Just because there is a seed in the fruit doesn't mean that it can actually. Become a fruit or grow into a plant. Additionally, they take forever to plant in an apple seed. We're looking at at least 34 years until you, if you get an apple from it, if you're in it for the long haul. Super fun, super cool. But otherwise, it's not the most practical way if you want a fruit within your lifetime. I guess I also wanted to talk a little bit about a couple different types of plant breeding. The first one, what most people think about when they're thinking about plant breeding, in my experience, is selective breeding or classical breeding. It's the most romantic version of breeding. If you ask me, you go around and you and you take the little things. You just have a bunch of plants and it takes a bunch of time. So all plants that we eat have experienced some kind of selective classical breeding. You might have heard of like corn or Toccinte used to be like super duper, tiny little seed pods and now they have these giant corn. Corn is huge, or even apples. If you look at crab apples, apples used to be super small and we've been selecting for bigger fruit year, year and for thousands of years. Now, strawberries are a hybrid. And the, we've had them for the last couple hundreds of years and they're all pretty cool. So selective breeding is what most people think of when they think of plant breeding. It's random. You don't really know what you're going to get. Just like you don't know what your kids are going to look like when you have kids. You don't really know what the plate is going to look like. If they're going to have fruit, how big they are. You have a good idea based on what the parents are like, but you never really know because genetics is kind of random. It also only works within species. So you can't do like a tomato and a blueberry or you can't put a blueberry gene in a tomato gene. And it's also slow because you're working at the rate of the plant reproductive cycle. The next thing that isn't super common, but it's mutation breeding. And that's just where you blast a bunch of radiation at some seeds which causes mutations and then see what happens. It's unpredictable and it's fast. It's not quite as common as it was when it first came out. I can't think of anything with mutation breeding right now off the top of my head, but that's one of the ways that people do plant breeding. Then there's transgenic breeding which started in the 1980s. That's random insertion and fast, that's what you might be, one of the things you might be thinking of when you hear like GMO. Technically all plants are genetically modified at some point. Because whether it's through selective breeding or transgenics or genome editing, genome editing is more like copy paste. You copy a gene and then you paste it into another place. You know where it is and you know what it's going to be doing. Whereas with transgenic, it just gets stuck in there. Some basics about home propagation, if you are thinking about propagating whether you found like a loose piece of plant that you want or a seed. Some of the important things to think about is the selecting healthy plant material. You always want to start with healthy parents. You want to make sure that you, it's free of diseases, pests and other abnormalities. To ensure that the propagated plants that you are propagating inherit the desirable traits. Timing is also crucial in plant propagation. You have to choose the right season for the specific propagation method you're using. Many plants are propagated during their dormant or active growth periods. Depending on the method, you want to make sure that you use high quality propagation material. Like selecting healthy plants, you make sure that you're doing healthy plants. You want to make sure that the media or the environment that you're using is nice and kushi for the plant. Usually they like it pretty warm and humid. There's a lot of different environments that you can use rooting hormones. I highly recommend using rooting hormones, especially when you're doing cuttings. It makes your life a lot easier. A lot of plants don't require rooting hormones, but it's just that extra credit that makes it a little bit helpful. And some plants do need rooting hormones. Moisture management is also really important. You don't want it to be too hot, you don't want to be too wet, but you also don't want it to be too dry because either is bad. You also want to make sure to protect your seedlings from environmental stress. You don't want to get too hot, too cold. They're little babies. They need to be princess. They need to be princesses. I also recommend labeling your things. I'm really good at forgetting what I'm growing, and like a lot of things look very similar when they're little. Especially if like the cutting that you have falls off or whatever, then you also want to make sure that you leave time for hardening off. So making sure that like once you've propagated it that it's like actually like prepared to be in the outside or in a bigger pot or wherever. Now I'm going to go through a couple of different questions that I've gotten. A few times I've gotten over time in my job working in fruit. Would you use reading hormones if you're putting the common in water? I no. Just because usually you would like you dip the planting in rooting hormone and then you put it in soil. I don't know many people who use rooting hormones when they're doing it in water. Because usually if you're doing the water method, it's a plant that on like a rock and they're really prone to self propagation and stuff like that. One common question I get when we're talking about fruit and fruit production is, what is a pesticide? Pesticide is actually an umbrella term that is used to describe a substance or mixture of substances designed to prevent, destroy, repel, or mitigate different kinds of pests. Pests can be anything from an insect to another plant. A fungus or maybe a rodent or like a bacteria are also plants, and the nematodes are pests of plants. Usually, you use pesticides in like a larger commercial setting because you don't have, the manpower is really expensive and you don't have the manpower to go through and like pull off all the bugs or squish all the bugs, or pull all the weeds and things like that. A pesticide is just something that is used as a substance. Mission of substance is designed to control a pest. My computer. Why isn't more fertilizer always better? I get this question. A lot more fertilizer can actually be quite detrimental to your plant. One of my favorite examples, because I'm a blueberry person. I'm a blue biologist. I'm not a blue biologist, that's a fake made up word. But I work with blueberries. If you fertilize after harvest, you can cause your blueberries and a lot of other plants. This is true of most fruit crops. If you fertilize after, like you take fruit off the plant, it's like giving your five year old a red bull right before they're supposed to go to bed. They're not going to do it. And it's just a bad idea for everyone involved because if you give them fertilizer right before when they're supposed to be winding down for the season, instead of using energy to wind down and prepare for dormancy, They're like, oh sweet, I have all this extra nutrients. Let's keep making, let's keep growing vegetatively, which can then lead to frost damage, loss of cold hardiness. Here's some frost damage and a blueberry bush loss of cold hardiness, which is really important, especially with the weird springs we've been having. Then also you have way more vegetative growth than you need, because instead of putting energy into growing fruit, it's growing leaves while we do love leaves, and we appreciate the plant doing its thing, we're here for the fruit more than the leaves. It can also cause water sprouts. This is one of the best pictures I could find, which is just like excessive vegetative growth, which is just not what we're trying to do when we're growing a plant. We what? Yeah, When we're growing a fruit. When we want to grow fruit, would you need to harden off plants like watermelon started indoors prior to planting them out in an unheated greenhouse? Yes. I'm not as familiar with how you do that for perennial crops. But you would want to make sure to harden them off before you put them outside. Especially depending on like the difference between your inside and outside. Who what is an heirloom variety? People ask me a lot about heirloom varieties. They have all kinds of silly names. One of my favorite is nutting bumpus, which is silly. A silly name for an apple. But an heirloom fruit refers to a traditional or heritage variety of fruit that has been cultivated and passed down through multiple generations. These fruits are often open pollinated, which means they are pollinated by natural mechanisms like wind, insects or birds. And they're seeds produced. Plants that are generally true to the characteristics of the parent plant. Important is generally because, like we talked about earlier, they're sexually reproducing, so we're not really entirely sure exactly what's going to happen. So a reason you might pick an heirloom variety is history and heritage. Maybe there's like history attached to like your area or your location. Or maybe you have a family history with a different fruit, open pollination. People are really into that. Think that that's really important to them. A lot of heirloom varieties tend to have more distinctive characteristics than some of the more modern varieties. Modern breeding programs tend to focus on yield and color and uniformity. Whereas back in the day people were just like, oh, this is a weird, looking like a little bit less capitalism put into it, I guess. And then the biggest part of an air loom variety is its cultural significance is not necessarily better or worse than a new variety. But a lot of more heirloom varieties, like in blue, blueberries in apples tend to be used for like ciders or pies and things like that. Because we don't have as much of a breeding focus anymore on cider and pie apples. Because most of the breeding focus has been on like bigger, better, tastier apples instead of things. For pies and stuff like that. What shall I look for when I'm buying a fruit plant? You want to make sure that you're not buying a sad plant. You want to pick a plant that is nice and healthy, and vigorous. If you're able to look at the root system at the plant, take a look at it. It's not a good look if when you pull it out or you can see that it's already root bound in the pot, which probably means that it's been in there for too long and will probably have a hard time transitioning from the pot to your soil. You also want to look for signs of disease or pest. A disease in a pest is pretty easy to spot even if you aren't trained for specifically pests or diseases. If the leaves look gross, there's probably something wrong, Or if you see some bugs on it, that's probably a bug. You also want to look at the graft. We talked about how a lot of tree fruits are grafted. Now, blueberries are pretty much the only fruit that I can think of off the top of my head. Blueberries, Strawberries, Raspberries. Those aren't grafted, so don't worry about checking the graft union on those. But check the graft union. That is where we can see there can be a lot of potential for disease because you're causing a wound in one plant and then sticking it to a wound in another plant. And diseases love wounds. You also want to make sure that it has the variety and think about what kind of variety you want. The age of the tree, it'll usually tell you either the nursery we'll be able to tell you or it'll say on the pot. Local adaptability. I really wish that I could tell you guys that you could buy a lemon tree and plant it outside here in Michigan, but I don't recommend that it's not going to work. Apple trees will do pretty good. Pretty much any temperate fruit crop, which is most fruit crops, when we think of fruit, can do pretty well here in Michigan. Especially if you're along, sorry, if you're along the fruit belt which is along the western shore of Michigan. I also really recommend looking into a reputable producer. Please don't buy your plants at Kroger. They're going to be like, they could be fine. If you're really about a project or you like the challenge, then, yeah, you might be able to save a tree that you buy at Kroger, but if you're able to get it from like the local nursery or even online, I highly recommend trying to find a reputable producer. If you're having a hard time or aren't sure where to look, reach out to your local extension office. They'll be, you can e mail me. I'll be happy to help you try and find a provider somewhere for you to purchase the plants. And additionally, if you're particularly interested in like native plants or more native fruits, I recommend looking into your NRCS, your local conservation district. They pretty much, from what I understand, every county does a tree sale every year. We're able to buy trees and help not only support your local conservation district, but also buy trees. So if you want like a Paw paw or some apples and a couple other native trees, they are a good place to go for getting your tree fruit or your fruits or your bushes or whatever. So another thing I want to talk about is the dirty dozen. So every year, the environmental working group uses pesticide monitoring data from the US Department of Agriculture and the Food and, and the Food and Drug Administration. The USDA's Pesticide Data program includes data on pesticide residues for conventional and organic produce in they're ready to eat forms. And their most recent annual report found more than 99% of food sampled at pesticide residues below the tolerable levels established by the US Environmental Protection Agency. With 24% having no detectable residue. Tolerable levels are set well below the levels considered to pose health risks and take into account average exposure from all sources, not just a single food. So despite this, the dirty dozen conveys the false idea that conventional produce is unsafe to eat. And that uses a ranking system largely based on how many different pesticides residues are found on samples from each crop. Of the six criteria that the environmental working group that puts out the dirty dozen uses, only one considers the total amount of pesticides detected and none factor in the relative safety or toxicity of the pesticides detected. Their report states that the dirty dozen list does not incorporate risk assessment into their calculations. And all pesticides are weighed equally and they don't factor in the levels deemed acceptable by the EPA. The Environmental Working group also doesn't tell you how many pesticide residues were found on comparable organic crops, even though organic produce isn't free of pesticides. So I'm just mentioning this because every year it comes out and I see lots of posts on Facebook or I'll get messages from my friends or my mom's friends asking about it. And it's just it's not a fair list. They don't take everything into account. And I just want to remind everyone that the people who are growing your food are also growing food for their families. Farmers aren't out here dousing everything and pesticides trying to hurt people. There's a lot of really important education that goes into pesticide education and pesticide use, and lots of great research and science before pesticides can even be used. And they're expensive. Like people aren't using pesticides unless they have to. Next time you see the dirty dozen, or you hear people talk about the dirty dozen, I encourage you to think critically and do a little bit more research about it and take what they're saying with a bit of a grain of salt. Another question that I get a lot is, do I need multiple trees or bushes? I don't want to say it depends. But I will say app, you should have at least two apples. It isn't as big of a deal for most of them, whether it's the same one or not. But you should look like a pollination chart. If this is something that you're really worried about, look at pollination chart, like apple pollination chart, Blueberry pollination chart, and look for your variety. Because it'll tell you what different plants it'll be compatible with. Compatible. Let compatible with best practice is to have more than one. Just generally that's the best practice. But I would not like tear down extra trees or dig up extra holes or whatever. If you don't, unless you're growing an apple, I would recommend looking for fruit that's considered self fertile. If you're super concerned, examples would be like cherries and blueberries are self fertile or like raspberries. Another question to get a lot. What fruits are the easiest to grow in pots? Strawberries. Strawberries are so easy to grow in pots. My mom has this awesome little, like, this awesome raised bed on her porch that she's had strawberries in for like five or six years now. She puts a little hay on them and then sticks them in the garage in the winter, and it's awesome. The squirrels love it. She doesn't love that. The squirrels love it. But the squirrels love it. And she loves it. And we get not a lot of strawberries, but a couple of strawberries. I think if we had less squirrels, she would probably eat more. But strawberries are ridiculously easy to grow in a pot. I even have a like a large commercial grower here in Michigan that grows all of his in pots. One thing, blueberries. Some people say that they're easy to grow in pots. Some people say that they're the worst plant ever to grow in pots. It's kind of a 50, 50. The important thing with both blueberries and strawberries and well all plants when you're growing them in pots is you just have to keep an eye on the soil ph. Because depending on what kind of water you're using and what kind of soil you're using and what kind of amendments you're using, the ph, you can alter the ph of your soil, like blueberries, like a super acidic soil, strawberries prefer a more acidic soil as well. More acidic to neutral Like for example, these strawberries, they were having a hard time because the ph of our water was too alkaline, so it was more basic. And it was bringing the ph up so high that the plant wasn't able to take up iron. So they had an iron deficiency. So just something to keep in mind is even if your plants in a pot, doesn't mean that you don't have to think about the soil. And the easiest things to grow in pots are probably strawberries and you can also grow grapes. Grapes, like I said, are just weeds that we chose to cultivate. They'll grow pretty much anywhere I would say. Grapes is also a pretty easy, I'm not great at things in pots, and I've grown a grape in a pot pretty well. And they're pretty, and they're viney and you can like stick them on something cute and make it look all cute. Now the question I'll get is when is the best time to plant? So usually late fall to early spring when the plants dorman's a good time. Late winter to early spring before bud break. Whenever you're planting, you want to make sure you're not planting in extreme weather, so don't plant in a blizzard and don't like a tornado, or if it's like a bazillion degrees outside because the plants not going to do super great. You'll also want to consider local climate. So if it's been really, really warm and then it's going to be cold for a week or vice versa, you might want to wait until the weather is a bit more stable, especially if you're getting when spring is really kind of in full spring. And spring gets all weird, container grown trees, trees that are grown or like bushes that are grown in pots. You just want to make sure that what is that, breaking up the root ball bar, Root trees are probably are pretty easy because you don't have to worry about the root ball and they're grown with being able to be planted in mind. You also want to avoid planting during flowering or fruiting just because the plant is stressed and it can confuse the plant. If it's flowering or fruiting, try not to plant it. Next one is what is the best time to fertilize? When there are leaves. Your plant is just a straw with roots on the bottom and a leaf on the top. Unless the, unless the plant has leaves on it, it's not going to be taking up nutrients. Don't worry about putting in fertilizer unless there are leaves on your plant. You also want to make sure, I mentioned ph earlier. If you take anything away, just please get your soil tested. And for the ph, you want to alter the ph of your soil before you plant, before you're putting your plant in the soil, whether it's your pot or the ground, you want to make sure that the ph is the correct for your fruit. Also, don't fertilize after harvest. We talked earlier about how it's like giving a five year old a red bull before bed. You're just going to ruin the cold hardiness of your plant and confuse it. The final question that I get pretty often is what does organic mean? Because organic is a certification that you can get through the USDA. That's what most people, when they think of organic and all organic means is that is that they only use organic pesticides. So there's a list of pesticides that they're able to use and they only use ones of those. They don't use synthetic fertilizers, and so that means they don't use nitrogen. Fertilizer is the big one because it's done through the Haber Bosch process and a lot of synthetic nitrogen. And they also don't have any transgenic plants or GMO, No plants that use genetic editing for their growth. So that's just what organic means. In order to become USDA organic, you have to go through a whole bunch of, a whole bunch of testing and like checkups and have all these really awesome. I have a lot of what's it called documentation. I actually took a way longer to talk than I thought, So I'm going and we have a bunch of questions. So I'm just going to do a quick plug. We have a couple spots left for our fruit school that's happening next week. If you haven't heard about it, it's going to be taking place in Okemos. It's going to be February 26 through 28. We'll be talking about the science behind fruit. We'll have a beginning fruit section on that Monday where I'll be talking about soil testing and stuff like that. And then we'll talk about IPM. And then the rest of the main part of it will be a deep dive into different scientific topics surrounding fruit, as well as a tour of fruit producers on campus. I have a couple of questions, so we'll start with the questions in the chat. And while I start with the question in the chat, we keep thinking about questions and we can work at them. Okay, how do I keep the birds out of blackberries and raspberries? Okay, so birds out of blackberries and raspberries depends on how I hate netting. It's a pain to put up, The birds can get stuck in it and it's really sad if you're able to look at your raspberries pretty regularly and you don't have a lot of the nets, probably the best I say you should, you should be able to look at them pretty often just because you can go and save any bird that are, that get stuck in your netting. And then someone also asked about Japanese beetles off their apple trees. Japanese beetles suck. I highly recommend getting a Japanese beetle trap and putting it as far away from your apple tree as possible. There is currently some research going on about a fungus that you're able to put in your soil that like is that pretty much kills the Japanese beetle larvae. If you find that you have a really big Japanese beetle problem, there's a bunch of, you can get a grub, like grub gone grub X, I don't know what the thing is, what it's called at like lows or Home Depot or whatever, and you can put some grub on your lawn or whatever around your plants to help get rid of them. Okay. What is a good method to seal of broken off branches? You don't need to seal broken off branches, especially if they're done like this over the winter, I wouldn't be super worried about it. Some people will put latex paint over them to seal it or there's a bunch of different you can find like wound seal. I haven't seen great, I haven't seen science behind whether or not it's good or bad. And most people that I know don't tend not to do wound seal. Fruit trees need full sun. Yeah, most fruit trees need full sun. Blueberries don't need as much sun as like apples or cherries because blueberries are understory plants. So they can get away with a little bit more shading, which is why they can do a little bit better in pots. Because pots tend to be closer to houses and then strawberries can have, most of the time they do need full sun. Yep, that's a beautiful thank you for sharing that article. Mariel to drown. It is totally possible to drown it. So one year in the ground tree and water, a slow drip, five gallon back three times a week, and it was dead by the end of the second summer. Hmm, yes, you can totally drown an apple tree. I'm not as familiar with apple tolerance to water logged roots, but generally a good rule of thumb is if there are leaves on the tree, it cannot be in standing water because it's not able to breathe. Like how we do 25 gallon three times a week, sounds like too much water for a baby apple tree to me, but I'm not sure how old the tree is. Yeah, if you have more questions about that, I would be happy to help you play plant detective and try to figure that out. Do some fruit trees, only fruit every three years. Depends on who you ask. You might have heard of the term biennial bearing, where you will have like a huge crop one year and then no crop the next year. That's due to the balance of energy in the plant. So the plant put all of its energy into fruit and it's like, oh my God, I'm beat. And then it starts doing more vegetation so that it's able to support a bigger crop because it's prepared for this bigger crop. Apricots are a little bit more complicated because apricots do not flower at a very good time. For Michigan, people will say that apricots, you only get an apricot harvest every three years because we only have a good spring every three years. This might be changing as our weather continues to change. But generally, when people say that about apricots, it's because all of the fruit, the flowers got toasted by the frost in the early spring. Or you might hear about biennial bearing, and that's just because you aren't managing your crop load correctly. So if you see that you're about to have like a ton of apples or a ton of pears or whatever on your tree and you're not going to eat them all. I would recommend going through and thinning them out so that you're able to avoid this biennial bearing, especially if you see this like boom, bust cycle with your trees. Make sure and go and take off some fruit. Latest of advice for fire blight control on pears, from what I understand is that plant fire blight resistant varieties, I'm not as familiar with pears. I've never really worked with pears. If you do have questions about pears, a really good person to reach out to would either be Lindsay Brown or Aaron Lowers. And they're both tree fruit educators on our team. Or Todd Einhorn because he's the pear guy, but he's harder to get ahold of. But yeah, sprays for beetles. There are sprays for beetles. I think most people for a home garden, they'll use seven is a pretty common one. That's the only one that I can think of off the top of my head. Companion planting pops with black walnuts. I don't remember what part of black walnut kills other trees, but I do know that you're not supposed to use black walnut like mulch on anything because it kills things. I'm not entirely sure about companion planting. I don't know if it's in the roots or just the bark, but I would I would make sure that yeah, maybe not, but that's okay. Thank you for all of that. You guys are awesome. I haven't heard of anyone trying this. I know that one important thing with Papas river plants and so they they grow along a river and they grow in the understory. So they tend to not need as much sunlight. And they like wetter soils. They like soil that they're pretty easily able to get water in. So I've been told that if it's a good site for blueberries, it might be a good site for a Paw. Paw too. Yeah, I'm not as familiar with pop paws though, so that's all I got for that. Yeah, that's all I have. Awesome. Thank you so much, Cheyenne. Lots of great questions. I think that this has definitely been a hit session that we may need to repeat in the future. It may be like next year's conference. So, I appreciate everyone for taking the time today and Cheyenne for sharing all this awesome knowledge with you.