My Backyard Fruit Orchard

The project I have been working on lately is one I can't wait to see the fruits of (pun intended haha) and taste them too! We have decided that this is the year we are putting in fruit trees. We want to buy our trees from a nursery rather than home depot like we did at our other house just to see if we can get some better trees for our money. So I did some sleuthing online and here is what I found:

There are a few websites that look good for buying trees from. Adam's County Nursery which is in PA is great place to start. They give you a good selection to choose from and tell you when the fruit matures so you can compare and decide what fruit is best for when you want to harvest it. They also tell you what stock your fruit is grafted on and for the apples they have a really handy graph to show you what size you would expect your tree to grow to. Plus they have some good information on each tree: when they flower, when the fruit matures, whether or not they need a pollinator. The only downside is they run out of stock quickly and you may not find just what you want even though they grow it. They seem to do a lot of wholesale business selling to area orchards and nurseries but if you buy at least 3 trees they will drop the shipping charges.

Willis Orchard Company is in GA. They also have a great assortment of fruit trees, nuts and grapes. They also sell you trees that range from just a couple years old to fruit bearing age and instant orchard age which I assume to mean that you can get fruit from it the year it is planted. They also have some really nice pictures to see what the fruit looks like. It is also one of the two main nurseries that come up if you do a google search for fruit trees for sale.

Ty-ty Nursery is also in GA and is the other of the two sites that come up in the google search. They have lots of "tempting" pictures and appear to have a good selection but their "helpful" information is useless. They are all talk and apparently no substance. In fact a google or even amazon.com search for them will turn up a lot of negativity and unhappy customers. They appear to be a fraudulent company so keep away. If they are legit they need to work better on their PR.

Miller Nurseries has some good reviews from posts I found online. I wouldn't have found them without the chatter because they didn't come up on the first page of the google search from what I saw. I am glad though that I found them. They have good selections. They also sell dwarf and compspur trees. The other places above sell the dwarf but I wanted to make sure I could get a dwarf cherry and here I can.

There are other places too but these are the ones that stood out and were most worth mentioning.

So, some information on fruit trees. First there are many different types of stock that the fruit is grown on. The largest is standard stock. These are the giant apple trees you might find out in a field that are not easy to harvest. You would definitely need a ladder. These can be 20 to 30 foot trees.

Semi-dwarf trees are more accessible. The can grow to 20 feet and you might still need a step-ladder to harvest from them. But you can also keep them pruned shorter. Their range is about 10-20 feet.

Dwarf trees are the pick for a backyard orchard. They are short enough to harvest from the ground with a range of 6-10 feet. The rootstock on these can be weak though and they often need staking to protect them under the weight of the fruit.

Then there's a more compact tree called a compspur. Comp = compact Spur=the fruit grows from little spurs from the trunk. They say that compspur trees can produce more than a semi-dwarf tree. Plus you can plant them closer together and their height averages 10 feet. The only nursery I found online that sells these is the Miller Nursery and I've only seen compspur apples. But there may be other places that have them.

The shortest trees I have found are the mini-dwarf or natural dwarf. I might have the term wrong but they average between 4-6 feet tall and are good for patio planters and small backyards.

Apples come on all the above. Peaches and nectarines are grown on standard stock but they are still small in nature growing about 10 feet high. But check before you buy them to be sure. Cherries are mostly semi-dwarf but you can get them as dwarf trees.

Apples, unless otherwise stated by the nursery, need a pollinator. A pollinator is another type of apple or crabapple that flowers at the same time and the bees can pollinate them. Without a pollinator you won't get fruit so you would need two trees. My favorite apples Gala, Honeycrisp and Grannysmith apples work well together because they flower at the same time.

Nectarines and peaches are self pollinating. Only one tree needed here! Also, I learned that a nectarine is in fact a peach. It was discovered in an orchard growing between two peach trees. Sometimes a nectarine sport will grow from a peach tree and a peach sport will grow from a nectarine. The gene for the smooth skin of the nectarine is recessive and of course the fuzzy gene is dominant. So it's just a matter of preference. Do you like the fuzz or not? I don't like the fuzz.

For the cherries it depends on what type you want whether you need to get two trees or just one. Sweet cherries like Bings need pollinators. Tart cherries like Montmorency are self pollinating. Tart cherries are the best for pies and jams.

So what am I putting in my garden? I have ordered dwarf Grannysmith and Honeycrisp apples and a white fleshed nectarine called Emeraude from Adam's County Nursery. I love that I can keep those local. I will be getting a dwarf tart cherry probably from Miller Nursery. We will also be planting blueberries - which I have ordered from a very local New Jersey blueberry farm Grover's Blueberries. I think we will also do Concord grapes which are great for jam and juice.

Yes, our backyard will be turning into a fruit orchard and I SO can't wait to see it all come to fruition (haha, like the pun?) over the next couple years! I just hope we're here long enough to enjoy it!