Read It & Reap

For me, there is little quite as gratifying as harvesting fruit from a backyard tree. Apples grown in Australia, held in cold storage, and shipped to a grocery bin can’t begin to compare to the ripe Fuji apples we grow here in the nursery rock garden. Our tree is a delight instead of a disaster simply because we maintain the tree at a human scale, six feet and no taller. It’s easy to prune and it’s easy to pick. Anyone who’s had a big fruit tree in their backyard needs no elaboration. The rest of you can think about three hundred apricots rotting on the ground.

Fruit trees absolutely require early training. An untrained fruit tree will be at best an eyesore and at worst a fruit-producing monster. Fruit trees grow rapidly to an unmanageable size and set fruit in quantities neither the trees nor the gardener can support. I often talk to customers about their untrained fruit trees. It’s three years old, they say. The tree is wimpy. The fruit is out of reach. What do we do? My honest and rueful answer is this: Cut it down and begin again.

A newly planted sapling must be pruned to an eighteen to twenty-four inch stub when it goes in the ground, a radical cut by any standards. This is the most difficult and important pruning cut you will ever have to make, but one that offers the best guarantee of fruit tree success. Because this cut is so important, we want to make it for you before you leave the nursery. We prune most of our container stock the same way, and for the same reason: this pruning cut is critical, not just for size control and aesthetics, but for the ultimate fruit-supporting structure of the tree.

Many varieties of apple, apricot, plum, pluot, fig, and persimmon perform admirably in our cool, coastal climate. Fruit trees are a joy in the garden, especially if you keep them small. Attend one of our pruning seminars for additional information and visit us in January for bareroot trees and our best fruit tree selection all year.

– Ann

Backyard Fruit Trees
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