Posted by Janet Harriett on Jul.12, 2010

ⓒ Janet Harriett

Planting a fruit tree or two is a great way to increase your family’s fruit consumption. A mature standard apple tree produces around 10 bushels of apples. To put that in perspective, a large laundry hamper holds about 2 bushels. Those five hamper loads of apples are ready for picking over the course of a couple of weeks.

If you don’t want to learn to can - though it’s not that hard - dwarf fruit trees produce smaller crops of the same delicious fruit varieties and take up less yard space, making them great for smaller lots. No matter what size fruit tree, growing tree fruits requires some homework.

Varieties

At the market, apples are commonly sold by the variety - in orchard parlance, the cultivar, short for cultivated variation - but all fruits have multiple cultivars. Some grow better in some growing zones than others, some grow on the buddy system requiring a second cultivar for pollination, and some have better disease resistance. While you can grow a decent fruit tree by picking something up on impulse at the home improvement center - my sour cherry tree was just such a purchase and has turned out well - a little homework can save you from planting a tree that blooms out before the frost is done, or is prone to multiple diseases.

Researching your particular needs and pick out a cultivar before buying the tree saves the time and trouble of planting a variety that won’t thrive in your area. Extension offices often keep lists of recommended cultivars. Many nurseries sell trees by mail order, so you can almost always obtain the right cultivar for your situation.

Pruning

Fruit trees are not plant-and-forget. They need pruning and training to encourage optimal yields. Left to their own, without removing some of the branches, the trees will produce lots of vegetative growth and eventually become good shade trees, but the quantity and quality of the fruit yields will be low, if you get any fruit at all from them.

Each type of fruit tree has its own optimal training system. Some produce better as a cone-shaped tree with layers of branches, and others produce better with the middle part of the tree open, so the tree is vase-shaped. County extension offices often provide pruning clinics and resources for proper pruning techniques.

A Word About Sprays

When growing fruit trees, spraying is a fact of life if you want edible fruit at the end of the season. Fruit trees are susceptible to a multitude of insect pests, bacterial infections and fungal diseases, which can kill the crop, or in a worst-case scenario, the whole tree. Sprays control these, for the health of the tree. However, insecticide, fungicide and bactericides are intended to kill the organisms causing the damage. By definition, these are toxic, organic or not. When dealing with any kind of spray, follow the label directions for application, and be sure to wear full-coverage clothes, gloves and eye protection, then shower and wash your spraying clothes immediately after applying the spray.

I don’t grow my fruit trees entirely organically. My orchard, which is fairly well tended, is beset with cherry leaf spot, peach leaf curl, fire blight, plum curculio, sooty blotch, flyspeck and japanese beetles. Whenever possible, I control these with good orchard hygiene and organic control, but I occasionally resort to synthetic sprays. When I do go synthetic, it’s because I’ve thoroughly researched the options and found a synthetic spray with the lowest mammalian toxicity class. Depending on the specific problem, botanically-derived sprays can be more toxic to both humans and beneficial organisms than synthetics. No matter what I’m spraying, though, I never spray between blossom and harvest, when the fruits are forming and growing.

Patience

Growing tree fruit is a long-term proposition. For first three years after a tree is planted, the tree is establishing root and branch systems that will feed and support the eventual crop. Not until the fourth year should you even consider getting any fruit from trees, and those ten bushels of apples won’t come for a few more years after that. My sour cherry tree’s first crop was just enough to make one pie, though it is expected to produce a bushel or more when it’s in full swing.

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Posted under Home Environment, Organic Garden.