Fruit Tree basics - Podcast

Audio podcast on soundcloud: Fruit Trees

https://soundcloud.com/stacia-trapp/fruit-trees-101-stacia-t

Roots: How much do they matter?

                When we finally had figured out what trees we wanted and what trees would work for us

and then what trees we had room for we were finally able to start looking for those trees. We quickly realized though that we still had more to consider. One where would we find these trees? And two why is there so many root options and what does this information even mean…

                If you can find the tree you are looking for at your local tree nursery you are probably going to be bringing your new tree home in a pot. That’s how all plants come right? Well apparently not. We learned that there are 2 ways to buy trees bare root and potted. What is this bare-root thing im talking about? Well in short it means just that when you bring your tree home it just the tree with bare roots no pot and minimal to no dirt.

                The long answer reason trees come bare rooted is because they are much easier and cheaper to ship. But there are more long-lasting benefits then just that. The trees that are planted in your yard as bare root will take to your soil better they will have a stronger root system and live longer. They also tend to be cheaper. So why wouldn’t you always buy bare root trees?

                Well the catch is a bare root tree is hard to get from a basic gardening center (like Stuarts or Steins) you have to order them from a nursery and there are none of those near us so we had to order our trees from nurseries in other states. Then we had to wait weeks/months for our trees to come in. the other draw back to a bare root tree is that they take 1-3 years longer to start producing fruit.

                The next thing you will see is lots of rootstock types when you are looking for a tree bare root tree. This really stressed me out till I realized that information doesn’t mean anything to me. That information means little to nothing to most people unless you plan on graphing trees or starting your own nursery. In short for us (the people looking to just have some fresh fruit in the summer/fall) it doesn’t mean much more than the size your tree will grow and that’s the same as knowing if you are buying a dwarf, semi-dwarf or standard tree, and those three options are normally what you will find sellers advertising their trees as.

               

Choosing of Your Fruit Trees: Have you thought about their Pollination needs?

Now that we have considered our zone/location, and what our specific soil and sun exposure may be we can now start looking at trees that would grow in the area we have in mind.

For us we picked out: apple, cherry, peach, pear, and plum tree varieties. But when we looked into buying them we realized we forgot to consider their pollination needs. Each tree would need a second tree of its kind for cross-pollination. So instead of 5 trees we now would need 10! That is a lot of fruit to harvest once the trees reach maturity. 

After looking at our space we had picked out for our trees we decided not to get the plum trees as we didn’t think we would have room for 10 but 8 would work.

Now that we were thinking about cross-pollination we realized if we were going to get 2 of each we wanted to be sure and get 2 different varieties of each (like Bing and a Rainier cherry tree) we wanted this not only for a variety of flavors but also for to help spread out the harvest load.  

This then lead us to realizing that each variety would have a different blooming time as well so we would need to make sure the trees we picked out would have somewhat overlapping blooms so that they would fertilize each other’s blooms, as that was the reason we needed 2 of each fruit tree.

What we thought would be an easy “just pick the fruit tree you like to eat” proses had a lot more research then we were prepared for.