Everyone it's Ross and today we're going to talk pomegranates and these are my pomegranates here that I have in containers. I have one in the ground here in zone 7a, zero degrees Fahrenheit during the winter time. It's called salovatsky and it actually does pretty well. I haven't personally had it in the ground for very long but I have friends in the area that are in actually colder places than I am that I've had good success with salovatsky in the ground but for the most part I like to grow them in containers because I know how difficult they can be here especially with the colds but also with the rain and the humidity that we have here in Pennsylvania it's it's not really a fruit similar to figs that really struggles with the rain. Pomegranates can also split with excess humidity and rain so I think it's nice that we have some of these here in containers that we can get them an earlier head start you know I'll put these in the greenhouse just with the rest of my figs give them a nice head start and hopefully I get them to ripen the goal is to get them to ripen before the fall humid rainy weather sets in just like my fig trees and in that way I can hopefully reduce splitting and have an early crop of pomegranates but also pomegranates from really tasty interesting varieties these are not your standard wonderful that you get at the store these are really well researched interesting tasty varieties of pomegranates that actually have really weird and interesting flavors you know they're not just very tart like your standard wonderful some of these are full sweet some of them are white some of them are you know pink some of them are hard seeded some of them are soft seeded you know you can really get some nice variation in flavor just like you can with figs also in pomegranates and today you know I wanted to talk more about them because I haven't really touched on pomegranates really at all this season but at this video I want to talk about pruning them and specifically for pruning them in containers because I don't really grow them in the ground except for that one tree that I have and the strategies that you could use for pruning these guys in the ground is quite similar to how you would do it in a container just on a smaller scale and essentially what you want to do is that when you're training a younger pomegranate and I like to really realistically what they do is with with larger trees in the ground and warmer places is that they'll either have one or two systems either they train them as a single stem trunk or they'll train them as multi-trunked better a better description of that would probably be this one here or this one here you can see there's very few trunks that I've kind of over time in the process of training these trees and some of these are three to four years old now I've been growing pomegranates in these containers for I think it's actually three years I don't think it's more than that but you know you can tell that they actually grow well in these containers in 10 gallon sized pots the problems that I have in happening is really training them from a young age to get the the multi-trunk system that I want or either a single trunk system that I want and in the process of me doing that I you know heavily burn these guys to get them to the shape that I want this year and last year I just let them go so the first year of their life the first year year and a half two years of their life I really burn these guys heavily and this year and last year I didn't do a single perning on them so this year we're gonna do that and it should be done on an annual or semi-annual basis and that encourages fruiting spurs and you know I've been trying to figure out exactly what the deal was this year because some of my pomegranates did flower for me this year I was very surprised I was very happy you know they are getting some nice caliper on the on the trunks you know they're getting some age to them you know on two or three-year-old wood that's when you start to develop these spurs and I'm getting a closer look at some of these trees and I'm actually noticing what I think are spurs and here's I think this is a spur right here and this is probably really tough to see there guys but it's kind of different than your standard thorn that comes out of here like it's different from that thorn or this thorn right here you know this is different also different from your standard bud that you'll see along the wood so I think I'm actually getting some nice fruiting spurs on some of these trees some of them did flower this year like I said but mostly it was only male flowers they did not I don't think to my knowledge going back I did a video on the pomegranates finally flowering here in Philadelphia and I think they just were all male flowers and you need the combination of the male and the female and you can also hand pollinate them that way and if you know they're male they're eventually gonna fall off and that's exactly what they did they dropped off and I was really confused but now that we've kind of got a lot of these guys established and have them in the right form for the most part it's really all about kind of just pruning them back height wise you know I think I want to maintain about three canes at the base three trunks at the base or maybe five trunks at the base I kind of am trying to determine here what is the best system for containers and I know with figs having them in a container and pruning them as a single stem tree is actually a way better idea they become much more productive that way you'll see that every single one of my fig trees in containers guys is a single stem tree which then branches out from there and I think it has a lot to do with the nutrients that are then allocated to that single trunk that single trunk also gets thicker more mature I think it's just a better idea so but for me I'm not entirely sure with the pomegranates but I think I want to maintain this and you can see this one here this one really grew and I kind of let this one you know all of them really go and you can see there's all kinds of new trunks coming up from the base that I think we want to get rid of so what I'm gonna start out by doing is kind of limiting these trunks so I'll come in here right now we'll prune this out we'll prune these out as well on the side just took out three at the same time and that's gonna leave us with four and you can see one two three four these two on the on the left here are quite new they came up last year where these other two are in their their third year entering their third year now so you know this tree looks quite good the next thing I'm gonna do with all of these is I'm gonna take the height back I'm gonna look for look for these spurs not make sure I'm not taking off any spurs because I really want fruit off of these trees you know and I'm going to just literally if if this was a hedge just cut them back at a certain height and the reason for that is because of the storage the greenhouse so my greenhouse over here guys is only so tall you can see that there so if I can't get them in the greenhouse and have them sit in there all winter time and over winter there that's kind of a problem so that's that's number two after we limit the canes and then we're gonna go through here and potentially also thin out some of this growth that's going into the center we kind of want them to branch out more outwards also looking for spurs before we cut anything and that's kind of it that's really all I'm gonna do you know also obviously we're gonna have to look for diseased and damaged and deadwood the triple D's or whatever it is I think it's damaged disease and deadwood but you know something like this here this looks like it's pretty dried up this particular yeah see how it just came off like that there's no green here there's no cambium to speak of so we're gonna take this back to a certain height and kind of get that green to show you can see that there and that's where that living material is so we're gonna clean these trees up just a little bit I don't want to over prune but I don't want to underprune and I also want to keep them at the right height and that's really it that's all I'm gonna be doing today so you know if you guys want to see more about pomegranates and my journey throughout this you know throughout this venture that I'm going on growing these things here in Pennsylvania you know many many varieties I'm gonna be doing videos as many as I can on these these pomegranates and they kind of got tucked away in a little corner this year you know I had all the figs in the patio right here these are my older larger trees and then in between some of my other larger trees we stuck the pomegranates here along this wall and my intention was to get them to grow they would be large enough to grow over the large trees the large figs and the large you know stone fruits apples and pears and all that on the left but they kind of just got trapped in here and didn't grow that well I think what we're also going to do because they are suffering some from a bit of scale as we're gonna come in here and we're gonna give them a dormant spray after we do the pruning and that'll be it so yeah thank you all for watching and like I said if you want to you know hear more about these pomegranates let me know in the and the comments below and stay tuned for more videos on these things so anyway guys thank you so much for watching I'll talk to you soon take care