Grow Free Fruit Trees

(Page 3 of 3)

June/July 2008
By Lee Reich 
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The better the growing conditions, the sooner your tree will bear fruit. Good growing conditions for peaches and their kin mean fertile, well-drained soil with a near neutral pH. If you must plant where the soil tends to stay wet after rains, haul in some well drained soil and build up a 3-foot wide mound at least a foot high for each little plant. Mix in lime if a soil test shows the pH is too low.

Pruning will delay bearing, so trim your seedling trees only to remove dead, diseased or broken stems, as well as those that grow low on the trunk or are crowding others. Most seedling peach trees will grow to 20 feet or so, while apricots typically grow 12 to 15 feet with annual pruning. Pay attention to weeds, water and nutrition. An organic mulch such as compost, leaf mold, leaves or straw goes a long way toward taking care of all three needs. Create a circle of mulch over the root zone that’s a couple inches deep and 3 feet or more in diameter. Keep the mulch a few inches from the trunk to avoid rot and rodent damage. A better solution for keeping rodents at bay is to surround the trunk with a cylinder of quarter-inch mesh hardware cloth. Various insect borers can be deterred by wrapping the trunks with scraps of garden row cover to prevent them from laying eggs in bark crevices.

Peaches self-sow so easily that naturalized peach groves became extensive in America not long after peaches were introduced. Early botanists assumed peaches were native to this part of the world, though their origin has since been traced to China. Sow a few peach pits around your homestead, and before you know it you’ll have a lovely tree that covers itself with beautiful pink blossoms every spring, and homegrown, tree-ripened fruit with flavor to die for.

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  • The Herbangardener 8/1/2009 8:27:18 PM

    This is a great article, and it's what prompted me to save seed from local peaches and plums last year, and grow my own fruit trees! I followed the instructions outlined in the article, and it worked perfectly! I ended up cracking the seeds with a hammer on the sidewalk (just hammer the edge of the seed to crack it in two). I had tried cracking them with a nut cracker, and the nut cracker BROKE! My seeds took about a month longer in the fridge to sprout, so I was getting discouraged...but lo and behold, they eventually did sprout, and now I have 18 peach trees and 35 plums!

    The Herbangardener
    www.herbangardener.com

  • James Beistle 4/26/2009 12:19:37 AM

    Mullberry trees grow to be quite large. They are found all over the souther USA and great for shade and birds love them ... fruitless mullberrie trees make for great shade ... http://www.crfg.org/pubs/ff/mulberry.html even diabetics can throw a few of these wonder berries into a bowl of cerial. We need to know about care to deal with bores in fruit trees without strong chemicals that may linger in the soil or be passed to the fruit or eco system niches "birds" thanks ... Mother Earth has been my source for over thirty years ... can remember but I at one time had the first issue ... the good ole days ...

  • nikky 9/11/2008 2:00:31 PM

    wanda, there are several different kinds of mulberry trees there are also fruitless and fruited the fruited ones have varigated edges and they come in black, red and white fruit around where i live the best way to get starts ive found is by digging up a rooted sucker of the kind u like and planting it. they can grow very tall very fast so you have to be agressive with your triming other wise they will be a bigg messy shade tree. they really dont have showy flowers and the flowers tend to look llike those that come on a birch tree in the spring. thats what turns into the fruit.if u have any more q i can try to answer what i know p.s. they originated in china

  • Wanda 8/2/2008 6:26:35 PM

    I would like to know what a Mulberry Tree looks like, and where to get them and how to care for them and where they come from....and do they have to be a male and a female to produce.....The berries are so sweet, if I remember correctly.....and I do not remember what they look like or if they had flowers in the spring....Mother Earth News can you help me with this information and possibly others like myself...

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