Welcome back everyone to the Epic Gardening Podcast.

We are back with Kristi Wilhelmis.

She is the founder of Gardenerd.

She's the author of the upcoming book, Grow Your Own Mini Fruit Garden.

Okay.

We've talked about berries.

We've talked about soil.

I think the thing that a lot of us forget about when it comes to fruit trees, in the vegetable

garden, it's almost all we can talk about, sometimes it should be, you know, how do we

battle these pests.

But on fruit trees, what do we really have to look out for?

Is there something different in the way we tackle a pest problem?

Well, it always starts with really healthy soil.

I think as we, you know, we talked about earlier, it's in soil preparation that that's the

most important piece because if trees are suffering, they're going to be more susceptible

to pests, pests sense weak plants and they show up and they start to colonize.

And so healthy soil is the most important thing you can do.

One of my favorite things to do is to put down worm castings around my fruit trees because

worm castings not only has a great micro level of nutrients and some even, you know, bigger

levels of certain things, but they have a pest control element to them and that they

have an enzyme called kaitanase.

And kaitanase is taken up by the tree and it comes out in the leaf surfaces and it's

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