Ruth the Grower
- Michelle Wood: SWCD
- April 18, 2010
- 860
For many years most of the information about growing fruit came from commercial orchard culture: methods that promoted maximum size for maximum yield but required 12-foot ladders for pruning, thinning and picking, and 400 to 600 square feet of land per tree. Most people today do not need or expect commercial results from their backyard fruit trees. A commercial grower would never consider using his methods on a 90’-by-100’ parcel, so why should a homeowner?
High Density Planting and Successive Ripening
Maximizing the length of the fruit season means planting several (or many) fruit varieties with different ripening times. Because of the limited space available to most homeowners, this means using one or more of the techniques for close planting and training fruit trees: two, three or four trees in one hole, espalier and hedgerow are the most common of these techniques. Four trees instead of one means 10 to 12 weeks of fruit.
Close planting offers the additional advantage of restricting a tree’s vigor - it won’t grow as big when it has other competing trees close by. Close planting works best when the rootstocks of similar vigor are planted together. In our climate, planting more varieties can also mean better cross-pollinating of pears, apples, plums and cherries, which means more consistent production.
Establishing Tree Size
Small trees yield crops of manageable size and are much easier to spray, thin, prune, net and harvest than large trees. And if trees are kept small, it is possible to plant a greater number of trees, affording the opportunity for more kinds of fruit and a longer fruit season.
Most semi-dwarfing rootstocks do not control fruit tree size as much as people expect. Rootstocks are for soil and climate adaptation, pest and disease resistance, precocity (early heavy bearing), tree longevity and ease of propagation. To date, no rootstocks have been developed which do all these things in addition to fully dwarfing the scion.
The only way to keep most fruit trees less than 12-feet-tall is by pruning, and the most practical method of pruning is summer pruning. In backyard orchard culture, tree size is the grower’s responsibility. Choose a size and don’t let the tree get any bigger. A good height is the height you can reach for thinning and picking while standing on the ground or on a low stool.
Two other important influences on tree size are irrigation and fertilization practices. Fruit trees should not be grown with lots of nitrogen and lots of water. Some people grow their fruit trees the way they do their lawn, then wonder why the trees are so big and don’t have any fruit!
The Need to Prune
Most kinds of deciduous fruit trees require pruning to stimulate new fruiting wood, to remove broken and diseased wood, to space the fruiting wood and to allow good air circulation and sunlight penetration in the canopy. Pruning is most important in the first three years, because this is when the shape and size of a fruit tree is established. It is much easier to keep a small tree small than it is to make a large tree small. Pruning at the same time as thinning the crop is strongly recommended. By pruning when there is fruit on the tree, the kind of wood on which the tree sets fruit (one-year-old wood, two-year-old wood, spurs, etc.) is apparent, which helps you make better pruning decisions.
Until next week, this is Ruth the Grower saying, “There is a definite sense of accomplishment and satisfaction, a special pleasure in growing our own fruit, in growing new varieties of fruit, in producing fruit that is unusually sweet and tasty, in having fruit over a long season and in sharing tree-ripe fruit with others. These are the rewards of becoming an accomplished backyard fruit grower.” Keep writing to ruththegrower@aol.com.