Tree Fruit
Hints and Tips

OK it seems simple, but what do you or your family like to eat? What is available plentifully locally or from your friends and neighbors and what does hardly anybody grow? Grow whatever you like and only that. If you never make apple pies, then don't grow cooking apples, if you love plums (like I do) then grow plum trees. If you have moved into a property with too many of what you don't want - like I have with 3 poor quality apple trees - then think about removing them and growing what you do like instead, fruit or not. There's far too many of some types of fruits grown without thinking about it. My neighbor has a huge old pear tree which produces piles of cooking pears - who cooks with pears or preserves them any more? He certainly doesn't, but he does look after and frequently prunes his pear tree (badly).

It is better to get trees for domestic use on the most dwarfing rootstock that you can. Many varieties don't keep too well and proper storage takes extra time and effort that most people won't put in. You may think you'll give the apples away to grateful and receptive friends and neighbors, but it never works out like that. Last year a neighbor I'm on the briefest of nodding terms with came to the door gleefully bearing a large bag of apples I didn't have the heart to tell him that we already have three over productive trees of our own (to be "rationalised" soon) in our back garden. A small tree will provide plenty of apples for an average family, the same goes for other fruits too.

If in doubt buy a plum tree, I've never thrown plums onto the compost heap in the way I have apples.

In order, apples, plums, pears and hazel nuts. Tree fruits are generally pretty easy to grow as they are so vigorous and productive, attacks by pest or disease may take a toll but there's usually fruit to spare. Like all trees, they should be nursed through their first summer (or two) with extra water in dry times - an occasional thorough soak is better than a daily dribble - and kept clear of weeds and grass at their bases for at least a foot radius circle from the trunk and preferably 2 feet.

Pears - pears are not as all round tough and resilient as apples. They don't like exposed positions, shady positions or frost pockets. Early flowering means that the flowers may be damaged by frost and that there are less pollinators around. Pears need another pollinator tree generally and there are usually less pear trees around than apple trees in neighboring gardens, so you need to provide your own.

Pears also need more sun and fall warmth to ripen the fruit. A final and possibly important reason is that allowing grass to grow under a pear tree will make conditions more difficult for the tree as pears don't like competition.

Plums - plums are early flowerers in the spring and may be affected by frosts as are pears, but if pears do well locally, you need to look to other reasons. Drupes - fruit with a single large pip or stone - tend to need soil with more nutrients than pomes - fruit with many small pips such as apples and pears. Drupes also need a reasonably limey alkaline soil to do well so a dressing of lime and fertiliser will help them to do better.

Wassailing was an annual custom in Britain where fruit orchards were common right up to the early 20th century. It entails celebrating good health to the fruit trees and an encouragement to fruit well, usually taking place early in the New Year on the 17th of January (old twelfth night). You go out and toast the trees and throw your toast over the trunk of the largest tree. Dancing around them and generally making merry is equally as effective.

Wassail the trees, that they may beare,
You many a plum and many a peare,
For more or less fruits they will bring
As you do give them a wassailing.
Robert Herrick1591 - 1674

Yes you can be naked if you want, but it doesn't make any difference - someone always asks this question for some reason!

Yes you can, but in general I wouldn't bother. If you buy fruit trees, you usually get a grafted named variety on a particular rootstock that pre-determines the tree's size. In other words, you're buying a "pedigree". If you grow from seed you're growing a mongrel, now while mongrels might be great dogs, they're no so great when they're trees.

The most likely thing to happen is that you'll get a large vigorous tree that has so-so fruit, less likely you might get a poor or good tree with an equal chance of either. So you might as well pay not a lot of $$ (over the lifetime of the tree, easily less than a dollar a year) to get something that is pre-determinedly well worth having). A seed grown tree generally won't flower for at least 5 years - considerably more than a named grafted variety. If you've the space, time and inclination, it might be fun and you might even equal the luck of retired London brewer Richard Cox, who in 1825 grew a seed from a "Ribston Pippin" into "Cox's Orange Pippin" one of the all time great apples. Some of you however will notice that it happened in 1825 and there's no other similar story from the last 180 years to match it.

The only notable exception to this rule of thumb is peaches which will produce trees that produce fruit almost identical to the peach that supplied the stone in the first place.