Southern California Fruit Gardening

5.0 out of 5 stars A must have for any SoCal gardeners collection. Bar-none - this is absolutely the best Southern California Gardening Fruit book out there. The first half of the book is dedicated to providing accurate and actionable information to select, plant, and maintain your fruit trees, bushes, and plants. There are a lot of helpful (and beautiful) illustrations and pictures with the information being organized in a way that is easy to read and understand. The second half of the book is dedicated to individual fruit types - 38 to be exact - in alphabetical order from Almonds to White Sapotes which makes it easy to find what you need when you need it. Each fruit has two pages chock full of important information including the flowering and fruiting season, if the fruit can be grown in a container, where and how to plant it, what kind of soil, watering, fertilizing and pruning requirements each type of fruit plant has and how you prune, thin and prevent or treat major pests and diseases. A cool addition I haven't seen in other books is how to harvest the fruit, how to store it, secret growing tips, and nutritional nuggets. I love that many of the pictures are from the authors' gardens and one can see how the fruit is grown for real in Southern California. Honestly, this is the most concise and easiest to understand information for SoCal Fruit Gardening reference.

5.0 out of 5 stars Everything you need to grow fruit in Southern California! Reviewed in the United States on April 17, 2022 Verified Purchase If you want to be successful growing fruit in Southern California, get this book! I learned so much with this great resource, including what fruit varieties to grow in Southern California and how to plant them, as well as fertilizing, watering, and pruning. There’s even a section on grafting. Each of the individual fruit page spreads tell you exactly what you need to know to have success growing fruits like lychees, peaches, nectarines, loquats and avocados. There’s also nutritional information about each fruit, and recipes I can’t wait to try. This will be my go-to reference book on growing fruit in my Southern California garden for years to come. One person found this helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive and packed with insights I enjoy how easy to read this book is. It is filled with insights, beautiful pictures, and is super comprehensive. Just perfect for the SoCal gardener. The growing tips for each fruit covers location, soil, watering, fertilizing, pruning, thinning, harvesting, secret growing tips as well major pests and disease prevention. This book reminds me that it can take a few years for a tree to produce fruits (sometimes not at all), which means a gardener is really an “experimenter.” The very existence of this book means that authors have done a lot of the experimentation. Thanks to these growing tips, the success rate of our “experiments” can be much higher. That said, I can’t wait to start growing blueberries, cherimoyas and other yummy fruits!