Customer Reviews

The Fruit Expert

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How useful the "Fruit Expert" is depends on where you live. If you're English, this is probably a fine book for you; if you live in the States ... keep looking. I wish I had known this before I bought it; I wish Amazon would give the publisher's city for all their garden books.

This beautifully illustrated and photographed book is a very informative and easy to use reference for everyone who wants expert advice on how to plant and keep a fruit garden. This wonderfully organized book is divided into six sections:
* The Fruit in the Garden: gives advice on how to choose the right type of fruit for your garden.
* The Tree Fruit: a guide to buying, planting and keeping specific fruits that grow on trees, including apples, pears, plums, cherries, peaches and nectarines, apricots, figs, mulberries and quinces.
* The Soft Fruit: a guide to buying, selecting site and soil, planting and keeping, feeding and mulching, and protecting from birds and viruses fruits that don't grow on trees, including berries, currants, grapes, melons and kiwis.
* Shop-Bought Fruit: an illustrated reference on how to recognize fruits available in the market, including tips on how to buy, preserve, ripen and eat them.
* A Glossary.
* An Index.
As an added bonus, both the Tree Fruit and the Soft Fruit sections contain a visual reference to help you identify several different varieties of the same fruit, and a very thorough guide on solving common fruit troubles.
The information given in this book for the fruits listed is very complete; however, since it was written for a British public, it only lists temperate climate fruits. Other fruits like banana, orange, papaya, avocado, pineapple, mango, grapefruit, lemon, etc. are not included in the book, except for their brief entries in the Shop-Bought Fruit section.
I recommend buying this book if you want to start your own temperate climate fruit garden, and complement it with other books when you are ready to add to it some tropical fruits.
--Reviewed by M. E. Volmar

I first checked this book out from the library when we moved to a new house that had established fruit trees and bushes. It was full of so much great information that I had to buy it for future reference. Loved the amount of photos and descriptions of trees, since I wasn't exactly sure which apple trees I had; but now I have a pretty good idea!