Bonus: Remembering Bob Duncan—“Let’s Try It”

🍋 Lemon Camp: September 17 and 24

Grow a healthy, productive lemon tree in a pot. In these two live online sessions, Steven Biggs covers watering, feeding, pruning, repotting, pests, flowers and fruit—and how to get a lemon tree through the winter.

Recordings are included, so you can watch afterwards if you can’t attend live.

Learn more and register for Lemon Camp

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Bob Duncan showed Canadian gardeners that the line between possible and impossible isn’t always where we think it is.

At Fruit Trees and More, the nursery and demonstration orchard he ran with his wife, Verna, on Vancouver Island, Bob grew figs, lemons, olives, yuzu, loquats, feijoas and many other fruits that gardeners might not expect to see growing in Canada.

Bob was also extraordinarily generous with his knowledge. I wrote about his work in my books about growing figs, lemons and olives—and turned to him many times with questions.

In this special tribute episode, I’ve gone back through recordings from my visits and conversations with Bob. Some were made while we walked through his garden; others come from longer interviews about citrus and unusual fruit.

You’ll hear Bob talk about:

His enormous Meyer lemon tree, which produced more than 400 lemons annuallyWhy keeping a citrus tree alive is different from bringing its fruit to harvestHis focus on breba figsGrowing olives on Vancouver IslandWhy yuzu is especially well suited to coastal British ColumbiaThe danger of keeping container-grown citrus too wetThe thinking that led him to try growing these unlikely fruits in the first placeNear the end of one of our conversations, Bob summed up his approach in five words:

“So I thought to myself, ‘Let’s try it.’”