Orchard People Fruit Tree Care Education

There are definitely a lot of differences between caring for ornamental trees and caring for fruit trees. Because of what I learned in this course, my fruit trees - both established and new - are thriving this year. Taking this course was definitely time well-spent. Thanks for sharing your knowledge!

Susan, your course is really great! It's informative, well-structured and fun. I loved the way the Mini Quizzes helped me review the main points all along the way, as did the final quiz at the end. I'm really glad I'll have access to review it over the years since there's so much information to absorb. But I also appreciated your final word, to just go out there and do it! Having a hearing impairment, the captions were great and made it possible for me to follow along. They were perfectly timed and flawless--which is rare and was very much appreciated!

Coming from an industrial forestry background and then into the urban forestry side, I believed there was only really one way to prune a tree - for height and structure, usually the taller and straighter the better. I thoroughly enjoyed both the winter and summer pruning modules because they explained that pruning fruit trees is not done for aesthetics or timber - it's done so to maximise fruit quality and yield, and facilitate harvesting. The organic approach was also ideal, as developing orchards and home fruit tree care ought to be done using integrated pest management, of which a lite version has been introduced here with the use of birds, physical barriers, and good tree care. Overall I am excited by the knowledge this course has given me and I hope to revitalise an urban orchard, as well as potentially try my luck with some (very) hardy apples on the North Shore of Lake Superior. Thank you!

I have an apple tree I planted about ten years ago in my garden -- a semi-dwarf espalier. I am an academic and so I thought "what the heck I can just go online and download a bunch of stuff to learn how to care for it!" Which I did. But over years I found it almost impossible to sort through different strategies, account for regional differences in when and how to prune and feed, or discussions about timing and keep in my head the big picture about how to best care for my tree. My tree was healthy enough as trees go (lots of great foliage) but in terms of my original plans it was a hot mess, responded to my sporadic interventions in ways I did not fully understand and I have never had anything approaching a decent yield. My interventions were often based on something I had just pulled off the internet with little understanding of the big picture or a multi-year strategy to help my tree reach its full potential. Susan's course is a really worthwhile investment - it lays out the whole process from start to finish - how to pick a site, the need for soil testing (big surprise there when I got my soil test back and discovered some significant deficiencies) the timing and different strategies for pruning, for protection against diseases -- this is the whole package and then some. The videos are short and informative - they anticipate questions as they arise, the diagrams are very clear and on top of that Susan is a wonderful teacher -- ready to answer particular questions you have as they arise, coach you through anxieties (eg about pruning, over pruning). And this is a resource I can turn to again and again over the years as I help my tree reach its potential. I can't recommend this course highly enough - my only wish is I had started it ten years ago!

Sue, I loved your IPM course. I savored every module. During the course I would take pages & pages of notes, the next day off I would go into my orchard and scout problems and, boy, do I have them. My orchard is on the northeast side of a steep hill. I have three tiers about 150' long x 15' (+ -) wide. The first tier has 4 rows of grapes, second has about 30 different apple trees and the third has peaches, plums, and pears. The orchard is about 10 years old. Things were pretty good up until a few years ago. Some of the apple trees were too tall and a few fell over. Most of the fruit trees have disease & pest problems. That is when I turned to the internet. I thought the "bigger the better." So first I trimmed all the trees 50% - I know that is a lot of pruning but they really needed it. Then I found Orchard People. It took me a while to start the class but when I did I loved it and hated it. Now I know my orchard has every pest, direct and indirect, fungal and bacterial. But now I have a game plan starting this winter with copper and dormant oil & in early spring from silver tip to fruit set. I made traps for peach tree borers, bought sticky traps , apple maggot balls, glue, and have my scouting kit ready for pest war. Thank you MIchael Giamo Cedar Grove, NJ

This course has provided me with a confident knowledge to look at the pests that have and will come each season and make an intelligent decision on whether to use an organic or chemical solution to combat it and best of all I have several new online resources thanks to Susan to get help in photos and text to identify those darn pests. If you want to win the battle I highly suggest you take this IPM course.

I really enjoyed learning how to use all of the different resources for my area to research pests and diseases. Even though a bunch of the resources are online, I'm not sure that I would have found them without a bit of guidance and direction. This course had so much information and I am looking forward to returning to it through the summer as issues with my fruit trees start to pop up.