HOW TO GROW POMEGRANATES

pomegranates a beautiful fruit trees that not only add a lot of Beauty to your garden but also produce delicious fruits that are a superfood due to the abundance of antioxidants they contain let's look at growing pomegranates and in today's episode I will show you how my pomegranate tree grew over a period of five years to give you an idea of what you can expect from your pomegranate tree so let's start in 2012 now if you look at my garden in 2012 it looks very different than what you might have seen in my monthly series of videos and here is the pomegranate tree pretty small it was about a year old when we bought the plant and just to give you an idea of how my garden looks like look at the tiny avocado tree on the side that's the same gem avocado tree that you've been seeing in my other episodes so one year later in 2013 you can see that the plant has grown pretty large and this pomegranate tree variety is called wonderful it's a very popular variety that's great for eating raw as well as juicing it's got a nice tangy taste and it really is one of the most popular pomegranate varieties to grow so if you're looking for a pomegranate that tastes very much like a pomegranate not too sweet but also tangi and sweet at the same time this is a great pomegranate variety to grow now this pomegranate variety requires up to 150 chill hours now I've spoken about chill hours before and the chill hours are countered whenever your temperatures go below a certain value during winters and this helps the plant produce fruit during the next growing season so about 150 hours is pretty common where I live I live in Irvine which is zone 10 and that is a very good zone to plant this pomegranate tree now you can see that in 20:13 once we approach the harvest season the pomegranates are looking very beautiful they produced a few pomegranates in the third year when we bought the plant it was a year old so in 2013 it would be about three years old and it produced a lot of good fruits now if you see this fruit right here the little crack on the fruit actually is an indicator that the fruit is ready for harvest so if you see this kind of a crack on your pomegranate tree that's when you harvest your fruit it's natural for pomegranates to produce these fruits and then the cracks on the fruit actually help the seed fall down from where the propagate talking about propagation pomegranates are almost always cultivated from cuttings so when you buy a plant at the store it has been propagated via cutting and that's the best way to grow a pomegranate tree I do not recommend that you try to grow this pomegranate tree from seed it's not only very difficult you never know what you might end up with when you actually get a tree so planting some cuttings that's the best way to grow your pomegranate tree that will ensure that you get the best quality fruits from your tree and here you can see some of the fruits we harvested now if you get some light pink colored fruit from your tree don't be surprised that's quite possible but mostly this pomegranate tree the wonderful pomegranate produces dark red seeds that are tangy in taste and they taste absolutely delicious and some of these pomegranates were eaten by birds or by squirrels chipmunks so you can just leave them alone you will still get an abundant harvest of pomegranates that you can use moving over to 2015 the tree has grown pretty large and if you look at the shape of the tree I have trained this as a shrub I have multiple branches that are coming out and in my zone this is the best way you can cultivate your tree prune your tree and you prune your tree during the winter season when the plant doesn't have any leaves and here you can see after pruning the plant has sent out a lot of new growth and it's the new growth that will bear the new pomegranates in the next season and here you can see the tree has grown pretty well after we did the pruning and in no time you will see that the tree has grown pretty large it would have grown all its branches by the time spring arrives so when you prune your trees just make sure that you prune it according to the size you need I train my tree as a shrub that goes to about seven feet not more than that and that way I can harvest my fruits easily pomegranates must be grown in full Sun the more Sun you provide to your pomegranate trees the better and here you can see some small fruits being developed and in 2015 the size of the fruit that we harvested was slightly larger as you can see here and we also got a lot more fruit in 2015 so as the plant grew larger you do get more pomegranate and the size of the pomegranates is also a lot larger here you can see clusters of fruits being formed and that's very common because the pomegranate tree has a lot of flowers there are sometimes two flowers there are four or even more so these flowers then eventually form the fruits which you can see here and cut open one of the fruits to show you how it looks like the pomegranate fruit is quite large in size the wonderful pomegranate it produces dark seeds as you can see here that are very juicy so they can be eaten raw and they can also be juiced so a great pomegranate variety as you can see here and the dark red color it indicates a lot of vitamins minerals antioxidants that are present in the fruit and I highly recommend that you eat super foods like pomegranates the antioxidants are known to have anti-aging properties they are good for your health and I highly recommend that you eat some kind of fruits like pomegranates for good overall health and here you can see this is our harvest from 2015 and we did get a lot of pomegranates in 2015 and now moving on to 2016 where we did not prune our tree and we let the tree grow from what it was last season and you can see here a lot of flowers being formed beautiful looking flowers the pomegranate is also an ornamental tree it is so beautiful that you can keep it in your patio your backyard and it looks very beautiful and in no time these flowers will produce small pomegranates as you see here beautiful looking pomegranate and this is springtime this is about March to April when the plant will produce flowers and fruit and from June through October they will keep getting bigger and you will get a lot of fruits by the time at around September or October and it's October when you actually start harvesting your fruits here you can see in 2016 we are harvesting these pomegranates they are pretty large in size and in 2016 I think we the stage where I can say that the fruit tree produced the most amount of pomegranates and also some of the biggest quality fruit that we saw now this pomegranate tree is self pollinated which means that it does not need another tree to pollinate and set fruit and that is a really good part about the pomegranate tree you do not require companion plants companion trees all you need is just one pomegranate tree in your backyard or in your garden and you can get a lot of fruits from that tree now let's look at another fruit this is the full size fruit the fully mature fruit which is harvested in 2016 and I know there are a lot of techniques to remove the pomegranate feeds from the fruit so if you know of any good techniques do share those with us and I would love to hear them and now I want to talk a little bit about the watering for your pomegranate trees now pomegranate trees are quite draught resistant they even grow in arid climates so in hot summers I would recommend that you water your pomegranate tree at least two to three times a week and in the cooler days the winter days you can sparingly water your pomegranate tree so that should give you high quality fruits but really how much you water depends on the kind of climate in your area now let's talk about adding fertilizer for your pomegranate trees now I recommend that you use a good quality organic fertilizer recommended for fruit trees like the one you see on your screen and use about one cup of fertilizer per foot of your tree so if you have a six-foot tree use six cups of fertilizer if you have a five foot tree use about five cups and so on now once your three matures to about six feet which takes about four or five years just use five to six cups of fertilizer every season spread them around your plant your pomegranate tree and then add some compost on top of that and by using just the simple technique during the growing season you will get beautiful pomegranates that you will enjoy and finally in 2017 you can see that the tree requires pruning again so I usually prune my tree about once in every two years so you stick a nice pruning shear and then cut off all the dead branches and then here's how your trail should look like this is how I train my tree so there we have it folks that was our episode on growing the pomegranate tree I hope you liked this episode and I hope you got some tips on growing the pomegranate tree I hope that inspires you to grow a tree in your garden you can even grow them in containers it's very easy just make sure that if you're growing in containers that you report your plant every 3 to 5 years and just by doing that you're going to get a beautiful pomegranate tree in your garden