🍋 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.
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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 annually
- Why keeping a citrus tree alive is different from bringing its fruit to harvest
- His focus on breba figs
- Growing olives on Vancouver Island
- Why yuzu is especially well suited to coastal British Columbia
- The danger of keeping container-grown citrus too wet
- The thinking that led him to try growing these unlikely fruits in the first place
Near the end of one of our conversations, Bob summed up his approach in five words:
“So I thought to myself, ‘Let’s try it.’”
Bob died on July 20, 2026. My condolences go to Verna, Bob’s family, and the many gardeners who learned from him.
You can read more about Bob’s remarkable life—and find details of the August 24 celebration of life—in his
obituary.
What is Fig Culture: Helping You Grow a Fig Tree in a Cold Climate?
Want to grow figs but live somewhere with cold winters? Our passion is growing figs in cold climates.
We help cold-climate fig lovers grow a fig tree in a pot, grow figs in the ground, and, most importantly, conquer winter.
There are many ways of growing figs in cold climates. Find out how you can successfully grow figs in your garden. Learn about fig-tree care. And get creative ideas for winter protection.
Host Steven Biggs is a cold-climate fig expert, horticulturist, and the author of the award-winning book Grow Figs Where You Think You Can’t, the first book specifically about cold-climate fig culture. As a horticultural journalist, he interviews other fig experts, and writes about cold-climate fig culture for magazines and for his own blog at FoodGardenLife.com. His fig fetish began in 1993, when he spent a summer at the nursery with the UK National Collection of figs. He hasn’t looked back.