Welcome to Hodge's Nursery!

This Saturday, May19th at 10am, Hodge's Nursery will have their "How to Clinic on growing Fruit, Citrus, Avocados & Grapes". We always have a good time & a lively group at this clinic. We'll start with initial layout & design of a small backyard orchard, the planting & initial pruning of fruit trees and then go into the cultural practices, including dealing with Peach Leaf Curl & insect pests using the safest & most environmentally friendly methods available. And of course the best part, enjoying the sweet tree ripened fruit. We'll talk about selecting the best fruit varieties, but also spacing out the ripening dates of your fruit trees, so that you can enjoy tree ripened fruit almost year-round when you include winter ripening citrus in your orchard. The clinics are always free & we'll have refreshments afterwards.

 

Next Saturday, May 26th at 10am We'll have a similar clinic on Fruit Trees & Grapes, for people that can't make it to the first clinic, but we'll include some different things, like actually planting a "four in one" grouping of fruit trees. This won't be four fruit trees grafted onto one trunk, but four different fruit trees planted in the same hole approximately 18" apart. Many of our trees are planted two in the same hole, to save space & get more varieties of fruit in our demonstration orchard. This type of planting is useful when you have a small space or room for only one tree. By planting four in one, you can have four different types of fruit ripening at different times, but taking up the space of only one fruit tree. We'll talk about this more later. But you should see our dwarf grape vineyard. The vines are beautiful & loaded with bunches of grapes, even the grapevines we just planted last year. If you haven't seen it, you should come for one of these two clinics. We have 18 table & wine grape varieties, all grown without a trellis system. They are staked up like fruit trees & kept to a 6' dwarf size, so no ladder is required. There are pictures of the orchard & vineyard on our Facebook page. 

 

Saturday, July 7th, We'll have a "Burchell Fruit Tasting" at our nursery. Burchell has many new & interesting varieties of fruit including the "Freckle Face Nectarine" widely regarded as the best tasting nectarine there is. We planted one of these at our last fruit clinic in January. And we still have some of these Freckle Face Nectarinesavailable in 5 gallon containers if you would like to try one. Suzanne from Burchell Nursery will be providing the "Fruit Tasting" & she'll be giving me more information on what varieties of peaches, nectarines, plums & what else is sweet & ripe at that time.

 

Right now at the nursery, we still have loads of Tomatoes, Peppers & other Vegetables as well as the best selection of Fruit Trees. And some unusual plants like:Italian Purple Artichokes & Cardoon which is a 6' artichoke that you can eat the stalks like celery & many interesting Garlic Varieties & the Walking Onions which I remember growing as a kid. Steve Goto says they are better than shallots