How to Select Fruit and Nut Trees
Whether you purchase trees and shrubs from a local nursery or from a mail-order company, this expert advice will help ensure that your plants are healthy and happy in their new home.
October 21, 2009
By Lee Reich
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With a little foresight, you can enjoy homegrown fruit for years to come.
KZENON/FOTOLIA
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The following is an excerpt from Landscaping with Fruit by Lee Reich, Ph.D. (Storey, 2009). Reich is an author, lecturer and consultant whose books also include The Pruning Book, Weedless Gardening and Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden. Reich grows a broad assortment of fruit plants in his own garden, which has been featured in numerous publications. Whether you purchase trees and shrubs from a local nursery or from a mail-order company, this expert advice will help ensure that your plants are healthy and happy in their new home.
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How to Select Fruit and Nut Trees and Shrubs from Local Nurseries
All your efforts to give your plant the best possible care are for naught if you don’t start out with the best possible plant. The best way to get such a plant is to purchase it from a reputable nursery. Look for a plant whose tops are no more than three times the size of the roots, and whose roots look healthy, plump and neither congested nor sparse. The stems should be plump, and without dark, sunken areas or rot that could indicate disease.
Nursery plants can come potted, bare root or, less commonly, balled-and-burlapped. My preference is for either of the first two. Such plants can be shipped — and so are available in the widest selection — and root damage is less likely to occur between the nursery and your yard. Balled-and-burlapped plants are heavy and any fracturing of the soil also tears some roots. The size at which a plant can be taken out of the soil bare root and then replanted successfully is obviously limited, usually to 4 or 5 feet in height, but that’s a very reasonable size for planting. Watch out for potted plants that have spent so long in their containers that their roots do nothing more than grow in circles — something that continues after the plant is put in the ground, resulting in self-strangulation. Slide a potted plant out of its pot and examine the roots if possible.
Restrain yourself from always seeking out the largest possible plant in an effort to get the quickest landscape effect and harvest. Larger plants, if bare root or balled-and-burlapped, lose proportionally more roots in transplanting than do smaller plants, so suffer greater shock and need more care — mostly watering — for longer. Even a large, potted plant takes longer before enough roots explore surrounding soil to make the plant self-sufficient. Recent research has demonstrated that initially smaller plants, because they suffer less transplant shock and establish more quickly, often overtake their initially larger counterparts after a few years.
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