What to Know About Fruit Trees

If you have an apple, peach, pear or cherry tree, late winter or early spring is the time to prune it.  It's also the right time to apply a dormant oil spray and a lime sulfur, either separately or mixed together.  This aids in neutralizing over-wintering insects in our tree.  Lime sulfur is specially effective on peach trees, which can develop a disease known as "peach leaf curl" if not treated early in the growing season.

Next you'll want to get your tree on a regular spray program to guarantee a good fruit crop quality.  Started your spray program at bud break, then at 10-14 day intervals until a couple of weeks before harvest time.  Once established, most fruit trees product their fruit by the summer. A good 10-10-10 tree fertilizer applied in early spring will feed the tree, stimulate its growth and help assure a healthy crop.

Early spring is also the time to clean up all debris beneath your fruit tree, such as dead fruit, twigs and branches that dropped over the winter and that came off in your pruning. It’s also important to refrain from throwing dead fruit and branches into your compost pile. The reason is that these may very well contain over-wintering diseases and insects that you don’t want to recycle into your fertilizer mix.

Apple, cherry, peach, nectarine, plum and pear trees do very well in our area. Peach trees should be watched carefully for the effects of late frost.  

If you’re planting a new fruit tree this spring, the first thing you want to be sure of is its location. You’ll want an area that gets a lot of sun. Next, you’ll want to pay strict attention to the size of the planting hole, which must be dug two to three times larger than the size of the pot or container that holds the tree. It’s also important to get some good organic material in that hole, mixed well with the soil to assure robust growth. Bumper Crop Organic Soil Amendment works well in this capacity.  Peat moss or manure will also work  If the tree is in a plastic pot, you’ll want to take it out before planting. Fiber pots can go right into the ground, as long as large holes are cut in them to allow the trees roots to get out and into the soil. After the tree is planted, it’s a good idea to apply a mound of soil around the outside of the hole you dug to hold the rain water close to the tree. Also, a good root stimulator helps lessen the shock of transplanting. There are some with humic acid, which promotes root growth, contained in most starter fertilizers, which gets watered in.  We recommend Esbenshade's Transplant  Root Simulator.

Dwarf fruit trees, which are the most popular varieties (except cherry trees, which are available mostly in semi-dwarf sizes), produce fruit within two to three growing seasons. These trees are popular mainly because they can be kept smaller. At a height of seven to ten feet, one does not need a ladder to pick the fruit. They also produce fruit faster. Semi-dwarf trees produce fruit in three to four years. If well tended, your fruit tree will live at least 20-25 years.