So if you've followed this podcast for any amount of time, you know that one of my biggest

issues as a homesteader is growing, well, really growing anything, but especially fruit.

I figured out how to stumble along with a lot of vegetables here on the Wyoming Prairie, but

fruit trees are something I have completely given up on. I don't even think about it anymore

until the other day when I happened across an email in my inbox talking about a new book

coming out all about growing apples in cold climates. So I hit reply immediately to

schedule the author for a chat because I am bound to determine if there's a way to grow an apple

in Wyoming, I'm going to figure it out. So welcome to the podcast, Bob. Thank you very much.

I am very excited for this conversation, but before we get into all of my woes around growing apples

or not growing apples, can you give us a little background on what got you into this area of

interest orchards and apples and all that good stuff? Well, in the 1970s, Iowa is a cabinet maker

and then I went out and bought five apple trees at the local store, planted them,

and they really did terribly. They some of them killed back, some of them never ripened,

and it got me interested in different apple cultivars and then I got interested in root stocks

and so forth. And it sort of took off from there and I learned how to graft and learning how to

graft was like learning a sort of magical procedure because you take this little piece of wood from

the apple that you want, stick it onto a root stock and somehow it unites and low and behold,

you have a new apple of the kind you want. And I just thought that was miraculous.

So my father actually had bought an old farm near us and just to be near us and I

had great soil and where I was living before it was a gravel pit in a frost pocket.

So I moved over here and we started to graft apples, then gradually we ended up, now we

grow about a thousand different cultivars and species of eating perennial and hardy. So

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