As I mentioned in Part 1, I am writing this series to
describe my real-life experiences in growing various fruits and nuts. I won’t
be showing you pictures of flawless fruit or claiming that growing any of these
plants will rescue us from the follies of treating a limited supply of fossil
fuels as a limitless source of energy and riches. Rather, I’ll tell you
honestly, and sometimes grumpily, what I’ve learned from growing them, in the
hope that it will help you enjoy the fruits (and nuts) of your labor and save
your neighborhood from the hazards of overfed wildlife.
In Part 1 I considered plants that can provide fruit in a
single growing season and those that provide good crops after 2 or 3 years, for
the benefit of those of you who have limited growing space or expect to be in
your current location for five years or less.
For those of you who expect to remain in your current
location for somewhere in the 6 to 10 year range and who have access to some
land on which you can grow shrubs or trees, more possibilities lay before you. While
I’m not going to go into the details on how to grow any of these plants, I will
mention the things that I wish I had known before I planted them.
Blueberries
I have about 10 different blueberry plants.
They are long lived and easy to care for, requiring only a winter pruning. Most
people like blueberries and know how to use them in the kitchen. The plants are
pretty when they bloom and the leaves are colorful in the autumn as shown above, so they are
an attractive landscape plant as well as potentially providing delicious fruit.
I was quite excited when my plants began making berries for
what I hoped would be several weeks’ worth of breakfast fruits. But I was not
the only one watching the berries, and the birds won’t wait long enough to
harvest ripe fruit. It wasn’t long before I caught a bird in the act of eating
the unripe berries. OK, I thought, I’ll just get some bird netting and put it over the
plants. Problem solved, right?
Wrong.
If you haven’t worked with bird netting, let me assure you
that it is no fun at all. The material readily tangles with itself and with
stray twigs, stems, and other small bits of poky stuff. Assuming you get it
untangled and arrayed over the blueberry plant, you’ll have to figure out how
to close off the bottom to keep the birds from walking under it. No, you won’t
be able to neatly tie it around the stem of the plant like the catalog
illustrations show you; the stuff is far too bulky when it’s gathered together
in that fashion to secure. You’ll have to lay it on the ground and put weights on
the edges to hold it down against the wind, or attach it to stakes around the
plant. Don’t lay it down next to grass that you intend to mow, because sooner
or later your mower will catch it.
And this isn’t the end of your problems with netting, not at
all. For you’ll soon find that the plant is quite happy to grow through the net,
rendering it more difficult to remove than it was to put on. Nor does even well weighted down or staked
netting keep out all the birds … and some of those birds will die before you
can remove them. And then you have to figure out how you are going to get into
the net to get the ripe fruit. My advice on bird netting: skip it. And don’t
bother with scare balloons or any of the other bird “repellents” being promoted
to gullible growers. Take a deep breath and accept that the birds will eat more
of the blueberries than you will. Maybe all of them. If you’re lucky, the
neighbor’s mulberry tree will have ripe fruit at the same time your blueberries
are ripening and the birds will spend enough time in the mulberry tree to leave
you a few half-ripe blueberries to eat. That’s the only time I’ve ever eaten
any blueberries from my plants. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Serviceberries
I have both the native serviceberry, a large
shrub to small tree, and one of the smaller shrubby species that are grown in parts
of Canada as a cold-tolerant fruit crop. Both species bloom early and are very
pretty in bloom but don’t bloom for long. I like the taste of the few fruits
I’ve been fortunate enough to eat, which ripen about the time the strawberries
finish, but the birds like them at least as much as I do and eat the vast
majority of the fruit. If you plant it, plant it for the spring show of flowers
and for the birds. As long as you don’t expect to eat any of the fruit
yourself, you’ll be happy with serviceberries.
Nanking cherries
Nanking cherries are shrubs in the same genus as cherry trees. They make fine landscape plants with their attractive white flowers and red fruits. You may harvest some cherries from if you
catch them just as they ripen, before the fruit-eating birds have looked up
from the nearest mulberry tree long enough to notice that the Nanking cherries are also
ripe. The cherries are small enough to preclude eating out of hand (they have
inedible pits just like their larger cousins), but they can be juiced and the
juice makes a good wine. My shrubs did fine until the severe drought of late
spring and summer 2012. The following year all three shrubs died. Possibly they
would have lived had I irrigated them the previous summer, but I chose to focus
my irrigation efforts elsewhere, and I decided not to replant them in favor of
fruits that do better in my conditions.
Elderberries
This fruiting shrub has earned a place of
honor in my heart, yard, and diet. These spreading, 10 to 12 foot tall shrubs
leaf out early in the spring but don’t flower until late May or June, long past
any danger of frost. The showy white flower clusters stand out since no other
shrubs or trees bloom at this time. Best of all, the small red-black berries of
the native elderberry make a delicious deep red wine, and although the birds do
eat them, they will do so at a leisurely pace, allowing you to harvest enough
for 2 or 3 gallons of wine from just two shrubs. If I only had enough room for
one kind of fruiting shrub, this is the one I would choose. But the fruit isn’t
tasty to eat out of hand, and it takes time and patience to pull off only the
ripe berries on each cluster (there will always be some unripe berries to avoid
picking). Still, if you decide you don’t want to bother harvesting them, the birds
will happily do so, and you’ll still have the beauty of their flowers to enjoy. Or you could make elderflower wine from the flowers, if you can bear to remove them.
Mini-dwarf and columnar apples
If you want to have apples
but don’t plan to stay in the same place past 10 years or have minimal
space in which to grow them, consider the columnar apple trees or the
mini-dwarfs. According to the nursery catalogs I receive, these will begin to
bear within a few years. Dwarf apple trees may also bear well in this time
frame; check with the seller to be sure. My apple trees are all semi-dwarfs and
didn’t begin to bear well until they were 10 or so years old. I’ll discuss them in Part 3.
Pears
Mike is very fond of ripe pears and I like them too,
so I planted two pear trees, one ‘Seckel’ and one multiple-cultivar tree. Soon I ran
into the first problem: maintaining the multiple-cultivar tree so all four
cultivars grafted onto the truck grew reasonably well. Pear trees would much rather send all their
resources to only the highest-up cultivar, as my tree proceeded to do. For
those of you who only have room for a single pear tree and need the
multiple-cultivar trees to allow for cross-pollination, you must do a better
job than I did to properly prune the tree to force it to devote resources to
all of the cultivars.
Don’t think that just because you have enough room for two single-cultivar trees that
will pollinate each other, you will harvest many sweet juicy pears. Most pear cultivars are very susceptible to fire blight, a bacterial
disease that spreads rapidly during the warm, wet spring weather that we are
prone to. While the ‘Seckel’ pear has not been affected too badly, the
multiple-cultivar pear is nearly dead from this disease. Only in the dry and
hot spring and summer of 2012, during which I noticed very little fire blight
infection, did I get a large enough crop of pears from the tree to be
worthwhile. And squirrels have proved willing to take more than their share of the
pears. My advice: unless you live in a place with a dry growing season and
you’re willing to irrigate the trees, leave the pears to others.
Peaches, plums, and apricots
While I grew the pears more for Mike than for
myself, I grew peaches, plums, and apricots for me. A ripe, juicy peach is one
of the best gifts of summer in my opinion, and having apricots and plums,
delicious in their own rights, would extend the availability of fresh
home-grown fruit. My trees were bearing by the time they were 5 or so years old.
Of the two peach varieties I planted, the dwarf peach tree died young while the
white-fleshed cultivar is still alive and fruiting. All of the apricot and the purple-leaved plum
trees (you can see the purple-leaved plums in the photo above) are in good shape. I’ve also grown the smaller native American plums.
Sadly, none of these trees have lived up to my hopes for
them. The culprits include late frosts that kill the flowers and hence the
fruits, brown rot afflicting most of the plums and peaches, a caterpillar that
finds the area between the flesh and the pit to be its favored abode, and
squirrels and birds eating most or all of the fruits before they ripen. Some of
the the native American plums sport vicious thorns and all of mine produce sour
fruits. You might be luckier with the stone fruit trees than I am if you are
careful to remove all the fallen fruits (to reduce brown spot and perhaps the
caterpillar attacks) and if you can protect the trees against late frosts or
they are not of concern where you live – and if you don’t have squirrels or
birds who are looking for an easy snack.
Hazels
I have grown both the native, shrubby American
hazelnut and the European hazel tree. The shrubs come into bearing within 2 to
3 years, the trees a few years later. If you don’t have squirrels you will find
these shrubs and trees will happily bear nuts for you. On the other hand, if
you have squirrels, they will harvest the nuts for you, and the
squirrels around here do not believe in sharing the harvest. A few years back I removed the
hazel trees to allow more sun to reach the nearby apricots and pears. The American
hazels earn their keep by screening the view of the lots next door and providing shelter
and food for all the other lives in the yard, plus the autumn color, shown above, is attractive.
Part 3 will take a look at some fruit and nut trees that
take a longer time to bear but are so worth it when they do.
