Q. I am a new gardener.  I am growing everything in pots including my fruit trees: figs, cherries, peaches all on dwarf root stocks.  The trees are in 30 inch pots holding 6 cubic feet of soil.  My tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, squash and others I grow in 5 gallon buckets.  I am growing 12 different varieties of raspberries and blackberries in 20 gallon containers with a trellis on each pot other than my trees. I started my garden a bit late so it is mostly in the shade.  I am thinking about taking it out into the sunlight after the summer to hope to stimulate more fruiting on the plants. A. You have to be a good gardener to pull that off. Container gardening can be quite a challenge but if you have no other alternative then it is what it is. Containers are not very forgiving. Even with six cubic feet there is not much room for error so they require more monitoring than plants grown in the ground. Womak blackberry, a blackberry that does produce in the hot desert of the Mojave but fruits ripen unevenly and quickly when it is hot.             Irrigation, soil temperatures due to the overheating of the container, soil nutrients because the soil can be exhausted fairly quickly are going to require careful monitoring. In smaller containers you can dump the soil and start fresh again. Small containers overheat in the summer very easily and the soil temperatures which can damage the roots of plants can be a problem.             Putting them in the shade helps but finding the right balance of sunlight and shade can be trickey. Flowering and fruiting plants require more sunlight than plants grown for just their leaves. The fertilizer requirement for leafy plants is different than flowering plants. Dorman Red red raspberry. A low chill raspberry for the south that did not perform well for us and we finally pulled out the plants.             Leafy plants require more nitrogen while the flowering and fruiting plants require a more favorable balance between nitrogen and phosphorus. And don’t forget to rotate plants that are annuals so you don’t build up disease and insect problems. If growing in containers does not work out for you, try growing them in the ground. I can help you get started with that. Just let me know but don’t give up! By the way, I dont know of any variety of raspberry that does well in the hot parts of the Mojave Desert. If you have one that has lasted at least four years and produced a decent crop, I would love to hear about it!

These pomegranates aren’t quite ready to harvest but you can see their size. If they were thinned, the remaining one would have been even larger. Q. I hope things are going well for you in Afghanistan. I have a question regarding our pomegranate trees. Two years ago, we had an abundance of good sized pomegranates from two trees. These trees are about 25 feet apart. However, last year we only got about six in total from both trees.             This year there are an abundance of blooms and many already have a fruit set. It looks like there will be at least 25 to 30 pomegranates on each tree. Should I thin some of the fruits after they have set? Is there a reason why one year we get an abundance of fruit and the next virtually none? Try to thin pomegranates while the fruits are still small. In this case (next picture) we will leave only the largest one by twisting off the other two smaller ones. A. You didn’t tell me if last year you had an abundance of blooms as well as no fruit or if you have few flowers and also few fruit. Of course if you didn’t have many flowers then you would not have many fruit either.             In this case it sounds like the growth went into shoot and leaf growth rather than flower production. If plants are in a very juvenile stage they tend to put their energy into gaining size. As they get older and they mature they will begin to produce more fruit.             If you prune pomegranates so that you remove excessive new growth but keep the older, larger wood, you will produce fewer fruit but they will be larger. I only remove pomegranate fruit when they are small if they are directly opposite each other. If they are at least an inch or two between the fruit, I leave them both on. Here is the remaining pomegranate after thinning.             I will post some pictures on my blog at Xtremehorticulture of the desert to show you what I am talking about.

Readers Thompson seedless grape cupped leaf Q. My property is in the shape of a pizza slice so I have tons of room in my back yard. I have a dwarf peach tree, Utah Sweet pomegranate, Valencia orange, Thompson seedless grape, and Flame seedless grape. The past couple of years I have been using drip system along with all my other backyard foliage. I used to water once per week for an hour during the winter, three times per week during the spring and fall for an hour each, and an hour per day during the summer. My fruit production was okay, nothing special. I have now switched from drip to watering with a hose.             Do you have any suggestions for watering my fruit trees?  I have also found that my Thompson seedless grapes have been turning up in brown and some of the leaves have also been curling in. I attached pictures of both issues. What do you think could be my problem? A. This seems to be the year for grape problems. Grapes do wonderfully well in our climate as long as the soil is prepared well at the time of planting, they get adequate amounts of water frequently enough and you cover the surface of our soil with organic mulch. Red Flame grape at the Orchard             Some people believe grapes should struggle to produce a quality crop of grapes. Believe me, in our climate and in our soils they struggle enough without imposing additional struggles. To get good grapes, keep them healthy and don’t let them struggle under our circumstances.             We did have some strong winds earlier that can cause the kind of damage you mentioned and that appear in the picture you sent to me. Watch the new foliage as it emerges. If it looks healthy, don’t worry about the older foliage. That is old damage that was just temporary.             You talk about watering over a certain length of time. This is like me asking you how many minutes of coffee or tea you drink. Or, if you don’t drink coffee or tea, whatever beverage is your favorite. We don’t talk about minutes or hours when we talk about drinking something. Likewise, when we give plants a “drink of water” we should not be talking about time but instead the volume of water we apply.             I don’t know how many drip emitters you have and I don’t know how much water each one delivers in an hour. So I am going to guess you have four emitters for each tree and they deliver 4 gallons of water in an hour. This would mean that in one hour these trees would receive 16 gallons. For a medium-size tree, this is far too little. Drip irrigation on grapes on the ground with mulch             When watering with the drip system it should run for a long period of time, in some cases two or three hours. You will double the amount of water to these trees if you increase your watering from one hour to two hours. I would try this first.             Drip irrigation is extremely accurate in applying the water. Much more accurate, efficient and consistent than using a hose.

Q. I am having a serious problem with my grape vine.  It seems to have stopped growing and is losing leaves. I used a lot of bone meal on the plants and I am wondering if I have over fertilized it? The ground is never dry, the flower bed it’s planted in is on the same drippers as prior years. Readers grape plant. Notice the leaf discoloration in the top center of the picture that might be a disease problem. A. Thanks for sending a good detailed picture. I looked at the picture closely upon magnification which I could do on my computer. Here is what I could determine from the picture and your comments.             I saw some good strong growth from some of the vines, but there appeared to be a fair amount of unproductive wood in the canopy. I am wondering if there is quite a bit of dead wood in that vine.             You reported leaf drop and I could see some scorching in the leaves. This type of leaf damage is common to some grape diseases. The grape bunches looked very healthy so I am guessing that something happened rather quickly to the vine. This could be a problem to have grape clusters this exposed in our high light intensity desert climate. However, this exposure faces east so it is not quite so bad.             I rather doubt that applying bone meal, even in fairly large amounts, would cause this leaf drop and leaf scorching unless it was applied directly to the base of the vine and in large amounts. If this problem you are reporting happened over the entire vine, then something happened to the root system or the trunk of the vine.              It is possible it could be diseased if there is a lack of air movement in that location. If that microclimate is higher in humidity it might also cause some leaf problems (disease) that could cause defoliation. This is not the climate for disease problems to florish so I would not be treating for diseases unless humidity and cool temperature persisted or if I saw the chance for diseases to persist from year to year due to the microclimate. In our climate, this type of weather condition does not usually persist and there is enough stored energy in the plant for it to refoliate.             One problem might occur and that is defoliation of the vine and sunburn of the already semi mature bunches of grapes. If grape clusters are exposed to sunlight early when they are small they can accomodate higher light intensities but their is an increased chance of sunburn on the berries when the plant defoliates when the grape berries are this far along.