A push for fruit trees

When I first started talking about planting fruit trees, almost everyone I mentioned it to wanted to make very sure I understood that I wouldn’t be getting any fruit for a long time. What does that mean, a long time? A couple years? Ten years? And more to the point, if it was in that 2-10 year window, I just kept mentally shrugging my shoulders when well-meaning people would tell me this thinking, “Well, I just had a baby and we owe a bundle of money to the mortgage company for this house so, we’re not exactly going anywhere.”

And so I carefully picked our first trees, nervous and excited, thinking about root balls, graft unions and last frost dates.  My game and hard-working husband dug out the grass across a 10 foot wide strip in the front of our yard up against the chain link fence that separates us from the sidewalk. One of the reasons why I love him is for his calm conviction that I can do anything. When I told him I wanted to plant fruit trees, he said where do you want them? When I told him I wanted chickens, he said ok, let’s look for a coop. And when I told him that it was silly to just dig up a small part of the front yard and that we should just rototill the whole thing, he said, "Good idea, it will save me from mowing around things." Bless his heart, if he has doubts he checks them and shows up with his shovel and I love that.

In a tall, triangle shaped cardboard box came my first fruit trees: two apples, two sweet cherries and a peach. They come bare-root, which is darn unnerving at first. Imagine a 4-6 foot long sapling, devoid of any leaves or buds whatsoever, with stubby, pre-pruned roots and straggling root hairs. They can’t be exposed to sunlight, so a cloudy day is best, but if it is sunny, the roots have to remain covered right up until the hole is dug and the pile of dirt waits close by to fill the hole back up and cover them up. A wet towel is a good cover while the digging is happening and it’s always best to decide BEFORE you get the trees where you are going to put them. Local nurseries will have trees in large pots, true, but they can’t beat the selection offered by bareroot shipping from places like Stark or Raintree.

So we, and by we I mean my husband, got the holes dug and I carefully put the tree in the hole. Eric backfilled the dirt while I held the tree at the proper height and fretted. Over what, you might ask, besides the fact that it very much appears that a dead stick is being planted. It’s very important that trees are not planted too far below or above where they are meant to be. There will be some vague indications on the trunk of where the dirt-line is, not because there is still dirt clinging, but because the bark looks slightly different on the part that’s been above ground and the part that’s meant to be below ground. 

A word about grafting--Adding to the newbie-orchardist confusion is that almost all the fruit trees you buy will have already been grafted. This means that two different kinds of trees with two different genetic growth directives are spliced together to create something that will have characteristics of both plants. Most applicable to the orchardist, fruit trees with the fruit we want are almost always grafted to a root stock that will direct the tree to grow shorter that it would otherwise grow, hence the term dwarf or semi-dwarf tree. They might also graft for increased or decreased vigor, resistance to various diseases or even twisted or weeping branches. 

If the tree is planted so the dirt-line is above the graft point, it could encourage the tree to produce sucker-type growth of the root stocks variety, not what we want to do. So usually, the dirt-line is an inch or a couple inches below the graft point. The graft will look like a scabby or bumpy line that goes all around the tree near the bottom and it gets easy to spot the graft with a little practice. The other thing that will help get the planting depth right is to have a hose on hand to water the soil as it is replaced. The dirt will naturally settle some, and it can lower the tree with it so your tree ends up in a shallow hole. Under certain circumstances you might do this on purpose, but most of the time the tree depth should be the same as the area around it. Watering the dirt as you replace it will keep this from happening and get your tree off to a good start. Don’t compress the dirt around your tree after it is moist as this will compact the soil.

I carefully inspected them each day and my little trees grew leaves in a month or so. I watered them well and fertilized them lightly, and while they didn’t grow any new branches that first year, they grew leaves on the branches they already had, and I knew important things were happening under the surface. The next year, the peach and the cherries each got a couple blossoms and while I picked off most of them to encourage the tree to put it’s energy into growing, I did leave a couple on to ripen. 

And I guess this last part is the point I want to make. The trees were worth something to me as an investment of fruit in the future, true, but they were worth something to me from the time I planted them until the time they regularly started bearing fruit.  Some of them are starting their 5th spring post-planting and I’m very excited to see how much I get this year. Last year my one peach gave me a bushel and a half of juicy, beautiful peaches, some of which I froze and we have been enjoying this winter. Between the two cherries, I got about 12 pounds of peaches and a promise of much more to come this year.

When I look back on people telling me it was going to take a super long time to get fruit from my trees I end up having two parallel thought-lines. One is that it didn’t take forever, it took two years. The other is that I loved caring for them even before they gave fruit, just for their own sake. And it didn’t matter to me that I didn’t get the big payoff right away. Maybe it comes down to faith.

So if you want an apple or peach or cherry or whatever, do your research and get planting. Urban orchards are here to stay and I’m so happy I decided to be a part of this movement.

Get dirty & Ciao!