A must have for any SoCal gardeners collection.
Bar-none – this is absolutely the best Southern California Gardening Fruit book out there.
The first half of the book is dedicated to providing accurate and actionable information to select, plant, and maintain your fruit trees, bushes, and plants. There are a lot of helpful (and beautiful) illustrations and pictures with the information being organized in a way that is easy to read and understand.
The second half of the book is dedicated to individual fruit types – 38 to be exact – in alphabetical order from Almonds to White Sapotes which makes it easy to find what you need when you need it. Each fruit has two pages chock full of important information including the flowering and fruiting season, if the fruit can be grown in a container, where and how to plant it, what kind of soil, watering, fertilizing and pruning requirements each type of fruit plant has and how you prune, thin and prevent or treat major pests and diseases. A cool addition I haven’t seen in other books is how to harvest the fruit, how to store it, secret growing tips, and nutritional nuggets.
I love that many of the pictures are from the authors’ gardens and one can see how the fruit is grown for real in Southern California. Honestly, this is the most concise and easiest to understand information for SoCal Fruit Gardening reference.