One of the great pleasures of gardening is picking perfectly ripe produce from your own plantings. Fruit trees are a particularly nice source of tasty, healthful home produce if you can satisfy a few requirements.
First, you need space. Many fruit varieties are not self-pollinating (apples, pears, nearly all plums, and most sweet cherries), so if you’ve selected one that isn’t, you will need at least one more tree of a compatible variety so they can cross-pollinate each other. No cross-pollination means no mature fruit, so one tree must become two. You can stay with one tree if your neighbor has a compatible tree within 50-200 feet depending on the fruit variety.
Next, you need to consider how big the tree will become at maturity. Fruit trees consist of two parts: the scion (the variety you chose, such as Honeycrisp or Jonagold) grafted onto a root stock that will determine the ultimate size and hardiness of the tree.
It’s essential to understand the size of the root stock. A standard apple tree can grow over 20 feet tall, while a full dwarf stock won’t top 9 feet — a substantial difference! There are multiple sizes available for each fruit variety, with some very close to standard size, so choose carefully based on your available space.
Your two trees will need to be planted from 8 to more than 20 feet apart depending on the root stock selected. You’ll also need to plant about 3 feet off sidewalks and driveways and 6 feet or more off the sides of buildings to allow sufficient space for the roots and branches to spread.
Your patience in waiting for fruit to appear can also affect the root stock you need. Standard trees may take over eight years to bear fruit, while dwarf trees can produce in three to four.
If you can meet the space requirements, the next essential is sun. Fruit trees need at least six hours of unobstructed sun each day in the growing season.
The next requirement is known as “chill hours”: the number of hours the tree spends in temperatures between 32 and 45 degrees. Many fruit trees set buds for the next year’s fruit at the end of summer. In order for the buds to survive winter, the tree goes to sleep (dormant) and slows down all its processes. This way a warm winter day won’t cause the buds to wake up too early and be lost to frost.
The Portland area had more than 1,300 chill hours this past winter, which will satisfy even high chill-hour varieties of apples needing 1,000-plus hours. But you can’t just focus on the high hours — while high-chill plants placed in low-chill areas will probably never fruit at all, low-chill plants in high-chill areas will likely lose their entire harvest to an untimely frost that kills buds awakened too early.
You must understand the number of chill hours for your geographical area in order to determine what varieties can grow successfully here. Remember that fruit varieties that thrive in the more extreme temperatures of the eastern side of the Cascades may not grow as well here on the western side.
Watering
Another requirement is water. If you’re not looking to install drip irrigation, a simple and effective watering system is drilling a small hole low on the side of a 5-gallon utility bucket and placing the bucket a few inches from the base of the tree with the hole pointing toward the trunk. Fill the bucket once a week and allow the water to slowly trickle out at the base of the tree. In the first couple of years, you may find you need to water more frequently than once a week, but once the trees are established, weekly watering should be sufficient through late August, when watering should be slowed to assist bud setting for the following year.
If you’d like to go ahead and plant fruit trees in your yard, the “Fruit Handbook for Western Washington” (EB0937 ) is available online from the Washington State University Extension and provides information on a wide range of fruits that will grow in our area. It not only addresses a number of fruit trees, shrubs, and vines and related root stocks, but also explains soil needs, pruning, thinning, fertilizing, and other concerns and includes a calendar of tasks for growing fruits.
To learn more about growing fruit trees, attend a free talk by WSU Clark County Extension Master Gardeners on the importance of pruning, tree maintenance, fruit thinning, and disease and pest management. Emphasis will be on organic practices.
This workshop is put on in collaboration with Clark County Public Health — Solid Waste Outreach at 10 a.m. Aug. 18 at the Luke Jensen Sports Complex’s Bud van Cleve Community Room; 4000 NE 78th St, Vancouver. It’s free, and no registration is necessary. For more information: 360-397-6060 ext. 5738 or Erika.d.johnson@wsu.edu.
Visit us online at http://extension.wsu.edu/clark/gardening/workshops-events
Under Washington state law, you are responsible for controlling pests and diseases in fruit trees on your property. Take regular tours of your trees looking for any problems, address them promptly, and call the WSU Master Gardener Answer Clinic at 360-397-6060, extension 5711, if you are unsure of what you are seeing.
Susan Cox is Master Gardener volunteer with the WSU Extension.
