Ralph - Grow a little fruit tree: simple pruning techniques for small-space, easy-harvest fruit trees

Harvests from little fruit trees are bountiful but not overwhelming.

Then one day Ed Laivo, the sales representative and backyard fruit specialist from our wholesaler, Dave Wilson Nursery, arrived at Scenic with some samples of tree-ripe Arctic Glo nectarines. The staff adjourned to the parking lot and surrounded a flat cardboard box on the tailgate of Eds truck. He passed around slices of a rosy, midsize nectarine from the edge of his knife, its white flesh streaked red and dripping with juice.

When I sampled the tart-sweetness of that astonishing nectarine, I had what I can only call an in-body experience. Did time stand still? I think so. The flavor of that nectarine welled in me like, what? How to explain it? Maybe only perfect fruitness, but that was enough. That was plenty.

Human beings were put on earth to eat fruit like this. Fruit that, miraculously and without even too much trouble, could grow in ones own backyard. By that time, Id learned from my work at the nursery that this fruit, and indeed most fruit, would grow on a tree easily maintained at just my height. I didnt have a lot of space where I lived, but I had to try it. The following January, I bought a bareroot Arctic Glo and beheaded a sapling for myself. Early on, my little tree generated fluffy pink blossoms and, after only three years, it produced five nectarines as memorable as the fruit Id sampled in the Scenic Nursery parking lot. Eds sliver of nectarine began my career as a fruit tree enthusiast and emphatic pruner. Ive promoted the idea of pruning to create small-scale trees with an evangelical zeal ever since.

This book offers a revolutionary vision for backyard fruit trees: a simple and ingenious technique that uses timed pruning to keep fruit trees as short as six feet tall. Anyone who has tried to manage a large fruit tree in a backyard situation instantly appreciates the value of the small fruit tree. Little fruit trees require less garden space. They are easy to care for and produce fruit in quantities were likely to be able to use. Small trees create the opportunity to have more trees in the backyard and to plant different varieties of fruit to ripen all summer, through fall, and even into winter.

Yet, the idea that fruit trees can and should be kept small meets with more resistance than one might expect. People often think theres something wrong, insistently overbearing, and unnatural about controlling a fruit trees biological vigor. But the very scale of a small tree increases the probability youll engage with the tree and meet your seasonal obligations in a timely way. As a result, trees pruned to be small are sturdier and healthier than large ones. Pruning small trees takes very little effort. Thinning overabundant fruit is no trouble at all when you stand on the ground to do it. Obviously, you take better advantage of a harvest you can reach.

Fruit trees are healthier and more abundant, not in spite of what we do to them, but because of it. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan contends that fruit trees have used us to advance the fruit tree cause as much as weve used them to satisfy our enthusiasm for fruit. Our relationship with fruit trees is mutually beneficial. When we take better care of fruit trees, when our experience with fruit is a rewarding one, we benefit, and the trees benefit, too, not just as individual trees, but collectively; our interest, attention, and garden space create havens for more fruit trees and for varieties that might otherwise disappear from cultivation.

Fruit tree pruning, and any pruning, really, is less of a science than it is a conversation. You prune, the tree answers, you prune again. Pruning is one of the most necessary, neglected, misunderstood, forgiving, and rewarding aspects of fruit tree care. In a very real sense, the hand of the pruner creates a fruit tree, especially one that is trained to be small from the start.

The information contained in this book applies to many plants, but this is, first and foremost, a book about growing backyard fruit trees, specifically deciduous trees apples, apricots, cherries, figs, peaches, pears, persimmons, and plums and especially about the training and pruning of trees deliberately kept to a small and manageable size.

Most fruit tree pruning books emphasize differences. Here, I point to similarities. True, deciduous fruit trees are different from one another, and these differences have consequences. Some grow faster; some grow more slowly. Fruit sets on the tree in slightly different ways. Growth habits vary. But for backyard fruit growers, fruit tree commonalities far outweigh these differences. If you learn to prune one fruit tree, if you learn the concepts that drive pruning and how trees react to your actions, in most instances, you can apply the same tactics to all.

Caring for fruit trees is easy when your feet stay on the ground.

Fruit trees need not intimidate gardeners who, too often, guiltily neglect their trees because they dont know what to do. Grow a Little Fruit Tree concerns itself with basics, simplification, rules of thumb, and confidence. I hope it will be a first step for people who want to create a small tree for their personal enjoyment or to do right by a tree that already grows in the yard.