The first tree many eager gardeners want to plant in their backyard is a fruit tree. Visions of juicy, sun-ripened peaches and tangy red apples are hard to resist.
Fruit tree nurseries offer few reality checks, making homegrown fruit look not only possible but easy. Catalogs feature plump cherry pies and children harvesting baskets of apples from miniature trees straining under a heavy fruit load. Growing apples and peaches certainly is possible, but tree fruits are among backyard horticulture's most challenging crops.
Rating them according to degree of difficulty is somewhat arbitrary. Climates vary, and that may give the edge to one variety over another in your region. In our garden in southwestern Pennsylvania, apples have proven the most challenging, quinces the most reliable. The caveat is that we've tried to raise fruit with the fewest number of least toxic sprays possible. Five seasonal sprays, combined with insert traps and proper pruning, have proved insufficient to produce quality apples. More sprays than that my husband is unwilling to "suit up" for, since full protective gear, including respirator, are part of our "bottom line."
Here, based on our success, are my fruit picks for home gardeners, with comments on each one that might mitigate its position, either on the list or in your garden.
- Quince (Cydonia oblonga): Not great for eating out of hand, quince is nonetheless useful in cooking. High pectin content makes it one of the best fruits for jelly-making. A bowl of aromatic yellow fruits on the counter in autumn fills a kitchen with a delicious spicy fragrance.
Quince is best used as an "edible ornamental." Gorgeous, pale pink blossoms follow silvery buds against glossy, dark green foliage. Grow quince as a small, single-stemmed tree or a large shrub. As an anchor in a formal herb garden, quince is perfect.
Quince trees are self-fertile, meaning they don't require two varieties to pollinate each other. Plants begin bearing at a very young age (we had fruits the third year from whips), and both the leaves and fruit are exceptionally pest-resistant.
- Asian pear (Pyrus serotina): Though not great for cooking, an Asian pear is the ultimate fresh fruit snack. Could their supermarket price be the reason many folks have never tried one?
The small trees are handsome, in or out of bloom, with thick, waxy green leaves that resist insects and diseases. Spraying is minimal. They begin to bear early, and compact growth makes them one of the prettiest trees for training as espaliers.
Asian pears require pollinators, so you must plant two varieties. 'Shinseiki' is said to be partially self-fertile, but I wouldn't count on it.
- Peach: Peaches are the lowest maintenance of the "standard" fruit trees, though far from a sure thing. Individual varieties are self-fertile, and trees range in size from genetic dwarfs (3 to 5 feet) to standard (15 feet).
In bloom, peach trees are magnificent with fragrant, double pink flowers and glossy, green lance-shaped leaves. Trees bear quickly, but die young; a 10-year-old peach tree is approaching old age. Once they discovered our trees, Oriental fruit moths and peach tree borers made short work of them. We didn't replant.
- Apple: Growing apples is a blend of art and science and a lot of hard work. From annual pruning to fending off bugs, we reached the conclusion after15 years that apple production is a job best left to professionals.
Today, we enjoy the "falls" from our dozen semidwarf trees and occasionally harvest decent fruit for cooking. We give it our all, but we have moved on to the other plant venues, jealous of our limited time and how much of it our tiny orchard demanded.
If starting today, we'd choose only disease-resistant varieties (they were just a gleam in breeders' eyes at the time we planted) which would certainly reduce, though not eliminate, the amount of spraying required.
(Lindsay Bond Totten, a horticulturist, writes about gardening for Scripps Howard News Service.)
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