Customer Reviews

Growing Fruit (RHS Encyclopedia of Practical Gardening)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have an extensive home orchard with 162 trees (27 varietals) of fruit and nut trees. This little volume covered everything I needed in a short, erudite and amazingly well-detailed volume. I live in the Southeastern US and this book was spot on everything from blueberries to stone fruits and pears and apples, (not to mention Walnuts and Filberts). It covers everything from soil preparation, pruning, fertilization, pests and diseases, propagation, healing-in, ad infinitum. I have nearly every book available on fruit and nut production for the home orchard. This is the best one I own by leaps and bounds.

I am very glad I purchased this book before I started planting my fruit trees. I did not realize what needed to be done, for best results, before the trees were planted. I also got a better idea of the size fruit trees I needed for our use. The book is very informative. I look forward to studying it during the summer and, hopefully, starting the planting of trees in late fall when everything is prepared. It is a little complicated to follow and I found I needed real quiet to get the details lined out. I had to take many notes in order get everything into a easy format to follow.

This is an informative book without being boring. Lots of diagrams. The book is laid out well and it's easy to find the information.

It does not cover diseases of the apples and pears very well (for example), which specific fruit varieties are suseptible, resistant, or moderately resistant. Further, many of the rootstocks being used today (2011) and their specific weaknesses (also disease susepptibility and strength) are not mentioned. This is problematic if you are in an area that is prone to say fireblight, and you pick the wrong rootstock and wrong fruiting tree (it will die quickly). So this should not be your ONLY source of information for backyard growing.....

I never tire of looking through my Growing Fruit book, and find endless new things about fruit everytime I do read it. The subject is fascinating and the drawings well executed. I work in a garden nursery, am a horticulture student, and have a small garden of my own; helping customers with their fruit tree problems and small garden fruit needs is one of my tasks. Some people are looking at fruit trees for their smaller gardens, having never been able to consider them before due to size issues and the like. This is a small career investment I am glad I made.

Great book and was very pleased with my purchase. Book covers all the basics of every type fruit tree I can think of. I've already used it in the planting of my apple and fig trees as well as my grape vines. Soil preperation, early care, and yearly pruning and maintanance are all covered in clear detail. Lots of basic pruning sketches and I think a good balance of text info and helpful diagrams.

Book arrived exactly as discribed and in great shape. Excellent book from excellent seller.

Page after page on different ways to prune your fruit tree. To me this book is so detailed it's confusing. It tells you how to prune... not according to branches, but according to leaves. You have to count leaves to follow the advice in this book. Did you know you can get your apple tree to grow like a grape vine against a wall? And you can trim it into specific shapes. This book will tell you all the exact shapes you can train your apple tree into. There are 30 pages on apple and pear trees. Each page has drawings that show which branches to trim... with leaves drawn in of course, since you will need to count them. With at least 10 paragraphs per page, here's a sample instruction: "From July to August, throughout summer cut back laterals to three leaves or 3-4 in and sub-laterals to one leaf beyond the basal cluster. Prune the leaders of the side branches to six leaves." What I would like to know is WHY do I have to cut it so specifically? Is this for aesthetics? Or for fruit production? Or what? I don't see much explanation of WHY.

The other problem with this book, for me, is that I live in California, and this book is written for the British Isles. Little to no info in here about pomegranates, persimmons, citrus, and other warm-weather fruits.

The section on pests has no pictures of damage nor pictures of insects to help the novice identify the problem. And the solutions all involve insecticide or fungicide.

I have found more useful information online.

This book is very thorough and covers most material needed to successfully grow most types of fruit or berries. The book is well organized and very easy for the beginner fruit grower to understand and follow. The author generally covers the different ways to grow each type of fruit trees. There are quite a few pictures in each section that help illustrate the text and concepts a little better. For a gardener in the US, some of the terms, especially fertilizer and insecticides/herbicides names are slightly different than I am used to. Overall I would recommend this book for anyone looking to grow fruit or berries.

I bought this book as a gift. My son says that it is easy reading and has lots of info for growing fruit - which is exactly what he wanted.

I got this book for my dad who grows his own fruit trees and I thought it would help because it tells you how to do it organically. I'm disappointed because there's not much in it about fruit trees when it looked like there was. However, for a beginner gardener, this would be an awesome book because it looks like it has a lot of valuable information. It pretty much tells you about everything including pest control. Unfortunately, this book wasn't what I was looking for.