Who doesn’t love a delicious peach, a juicy pluot, or a tangy apricot – especially when picked right off the tree. New varieties appear in the nursery every year, each more delicious than the last. In this episode of A Growing Passion, we taste our way through the experimental orchard of internationally renowned Zaiger Genetics, Modesto, California fruit tree breeders who revolutionized the world of stone fruits, apples, Asian pears, and almonds. Breeding fruit trees starts with pollinating a flower and ends with millions of trees grown by nearby Dave Wilson Nursery. Most of many fruits we taste won’t ever make it to market, while those that do, might take another ten or fifteen years to get there. Breeding is not a fast process!
From Zaiger Genetics, we head to Dave Wilson Nursery to see how the selected few are propagated, grafted, grown, trialed, and distributed to both commercial growers and retail nurseries. In Dave Wilson’s propagation green houses, we see young rootstocks and fruit stocks that are graft together to create fruit trees with the optimum combination of taste and vigor.
We also tour Dave Wilson Nursery’s demonstration orchard where we see how home growers can grow more trees to produce more fruit in less space than imagined. We end with a primer on how to select and plant the best fruit tree for viewers’ backyards.
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