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Getting Started: Fruit Garden Basics
by Lee Reich
If you plan your fruit garden carefully, and tailor your plant selections to your site and needs, you'll find growing fruits rewarding and enjoyable. The first and most important rule in garden planning is to choose fruits you love to eat. But don't be afraid to experiment and try new varieties of familiar and unfamiliar fruits. No matter what you grow, you will be pleased with the different—and superior—flavor of home-grown fruits.
Pollination
Once you've made a list of the fruits you'd like to grow, find out whether they require "cross-pollination," or fertilization with pollen from a different plant of the same species in order to produce fruit. If you have chosen a fruit that needs cross-pollination, but lack space for two plants, don't despair: your neighbor might be growing a suitable pollinator, or you could put a pollinating bouquet, kept fresh in a bucket of water, near your plant-or you even could graft a single pollinator branch onto your plant.
Plants that do not need cross-pollination are "self-fruitful" (sometimes called "self-fertile"), and can fruit in isolation. Some plants will even bear fruit without any pollination whatsoever-either with their own pollen or that of another plant. As with self-fruitful plants, you can grow just one of these plants, and their fruits will be seedless.
Spacing & Yields
The next factors to consider are how much of each fruit you will want to eat and how the plants fit into your garden. Plants need adequate spacing not only to make harvest easier, but because crowded branches tend to get less light, water or nutrients. You'll need to know the planting distances and approximate yields of the various mature fruit plants you want to grow. Note that dwarf trees listed bear full-sized fruits.
Site & Soil
For all their differences in geographical and botanical origins, fruit plants are remarkably similar in their site and soil needs. The ideal site for most fruits is bathed in gentle, drying breezes and full sunlight (at least six hours per day of direct summer sun), and offers some shelter from frigid winter winds. Avoid low-lying areas, where cold air collects in spring and can subject early blossoms to killing frosts.
Don't let a less-than-ideal site discourage you from growing fruit, though. If your site is adequate but not perfect, you should still reap some harvest, albeit a smaller one. Tailor the fruits that you plan to grow to the microclimates in your yard. You might plant late-blooming medlars in that frost pocket, for instance, heat-loving peaches against a south wall, or shade-tolerant currants in the dappled light beneath a locust tree.
Wherever your site, you can alter the soil itself to suit fruit plants. Most of them thrive in a well-drained soil that is rich in humus and moderately fertile. Your first consideration is adequate drainage, which you can determine by digging a test hole and filling it with water. If your soil drains well, the water will be gone within 12 hours. If the soil is poorly drained, install ditches or underground perforated pipe to carry water off to a lower location, or else plant your fruits atop wide mounds of soil.
Abundant amounts of organic materials, such as compost and rotted leaves, hasten drainage in clay soils if mixed into the top 12 inches. While digging the soil, also mix in ground limestone or sulfur to raise or lower the soil pH, if needed.
In fact, organic materials are beneficial for all soils. They keep soil biologically active, hold moisture and air and buffer acidity. Once you have planted, continue to enrich the soil with organic materials by laying them on the surface as mulches. Mulches protect roots from hot sun, slow evaporation of water and smother weeds; leaching and earthworm activity gradually work these materials down through the soil. Replenish mulch whenever bare ground is beginning to show.
For many fruit plants, the mulch, especially if it is a nutrient-rich material such as straw-rich manure, provides all the nutrients needed. But keep an eye on growth. If leaves lack a vibrant green color or show burning at their edges, supplemental fertilizer might be necessary. Nitrogen is the most evanescent of soil nutrients, and a general rule is to spread 0.2 pounds per 100 square feet (the same area as the spread of the plant's leafy canopy). The actual amount of fertilizer to use depends on the percentage of nitrogen it contains, so if you have a fertilizer that contains 7 percent nitrogen, use it at the rate of three pounds (0.2 pounds divided by .07) per 100 square feet.
Training & Pruning
Annual pruning is a must for most fruit trees, bushes and vines, beginning right when they are planted, so that the plant's branches are always bathed in sun and air and are sturdy enough to support bountiful yields.
Fruit trees are trained to one of two basic forms. The central-leader tree is shaped like a Christmas tree, with a single main stem—the central leader-off which grow progressively shorter scaffold limbs. The open-center tree is shaped like a vase, with three or four scaffold limbs growing upward and outward atop a short trunk.
A nursery tree is usually sold as a "whip," which is just a single stem, or as a "feathered tree," which is a single stem with side branches. Right after planting, cut back the whip by a quarter to a third to stimulate growth of side branches, some of which will become scaffold limbs. As the tree grows, select as scaffold limbs the basic structural branches of the tree, side branches that originate in a spiral fashion around the leader and are at least six inches apart. Remove all other growth as soon as you notice it. If there is a wide angle between a scaffold limb and the leader, the attachment between the two will be stronger, so select wide-angled scaffolds. You can also widen the angle by weighing down the scaffold branch or by wedging a piece of wood between the limb and the leader. The feathered tree already has side branches, so save ones that meet the above criteria and remove the rest.
After this initial shaping of the tree, your pruning technique will depend on the form of tree you desire. In the central-leader tree, growth from the top bud becomes a continuation of the central leader. In subsequent seasons, shorten the leader, as if it were a whip, to keep new scaffold limbs developing and the central leader growing. Choose three or four vigorous limbs as main scaffold branches for an open-center tree, then shorten each of them after a season of growth in order to get them to branch. In subsequent seasons, remove any branches crowding too close to the trunk along a scaffold branch, and shorten any limbs that you want to branch more.
Train a fruiting vine to have a permanent trunk and, perhaps, one or more permanent horizontal extensions called cordons. Temporary fruiting arms grow off the trunk or the cordon(s). When you plant, begin developing the trunk by cutting back all stems except the sturdiest one. Tie the stem as it grows to some sort of support, pinching back any side shoots that attempt to grow along its length or from the ground, except, of course, side shoots destined to become either fruiting arms or cordons.
Fruit bushes do not need training because none of their stems are permanent; over the years they are renewed by young sprouts from ground level.
As fruit plants-trees, vines or shrubs-attain maturity, prune them each year in order to keep them within bounds and open to light and air, to thin out excess fruits and to stimulate enough new growth for the coming season's fruit. Tailor your pruning to suit the growth and fruiting habit of each plant.
Lee Reich is devoted to fruits both as a vocation and avocation. He earned his doctorate in Horticulture at the University of Maryland, and since retiring from fruit research at Cornell University has been a horticultural consultant and writer. In addition to magazine and newspaper articles, his books include Uncommon Fruits Worthy of Attention (1991), A Northeast Gardener's Year (1992) and The Joy of Pruning (1996). He also has an extensive planting of backyard fruits—both common and uncommon varieties.