What fruit trees?

[DFB]

Dwarf trees planted 8' oc and 14 ft between rows = 388 trees per acre

 

[WoodChuckDad]

We are going to plant an orchard this year - in Central Va., zone 7.
What are ya'll planting for apple/peach/cherry/pear?
I have set aside about 2 ac -
We will be canning, cooking, and eating off the tree.

We are putting in 3 acres of trees this year in the mountains near Charlottesville. All Cider specific apples. And oddballs is right, if well spaced, 2 acres of semi-dwarf M-111 rootstock will produce about 1,000 bushels of apples at maturity.....approx 5 years old. That is a lot of apples. But if you love apples and want to sell some of them, it's a pretty good thing.

 

[2458n]

Planted a dwarf apple tree in 1977 that had 5 different apple grafts on it. Bare root type at a cost of 1.99. 39 years later I wish I had bought two.

 

[BoylermanCT]

Make sure you get cross pollinators when you choose your apple trees. I have 6 apple trees, and each tree has 2 pollinators next to it. As I recall red delicious and golden delicious are universal pollinators, and each other type will pollinate 1 or 2 other specific types. I had to map it out on paper to make sure I planted the right trees next to each other. Stark Brothers nursery's website will tell you which trees pollinate each variety.

 

[ustmd]

We are going to plant an orchard this year - in Central Va., zone 7.
What are ya'll planting for apple/peach/cherry/pear?
I have set aside about 2 ac -
We will be canning, cooking, and eating off the tree.

To be blunt--that is a butt load of trees if you are going to be planting them in any density. As others had mentioned, not only will it produce more than you can consume/give away, it will take a significant investment in time come harvest to properly process all of that fruit. Remember a good sized mature fruit tree will have a nasty habit of having almost all of its fruit ripen within the a week or two (three if you are lucky). To give you an example, we have 4 mature plums. When they start ripening fruit, my wife, FIL, me and the dogs cannot process/eat the fruit fast enough to keep it from spoiling.

 

[Spindifferent]

I suggest that you check with your state Agricultural Extension Service; they can give you mountains of information on what trees grow and produce well in your area and how to care for them.

This is very good advice!

Do your local research first before you plant trees that will not do well in your area or soil. Understand your soil, and understand which tree rootstocks will do best in the soil that you have.

 

[WoodChuckDad]

What kind of fruit are you looking to produce? How dense do you want the orchard to be? What rootstock are you using? What kind of disease control are you prepared to do and what level of soil amendment will you have to do? Those are some of the questions you need to address and answer to help yourself be ready for what you will face. And how will you deal with mother nature's uninvited dinner guests?

 

[EddieWalker]

We did some research, but found that everything we learned, we found something else that contradicted it. Finally we just went to Lowes and bought our fruit trees from them based on them selling what grows in our area. They have a money back guarantee that if the tree dies, they will replace it. We've replaced several apple trees because they died on us during the heat of summer. Apples seem like a bad idea, but Lowes has more choices and they keep giving us more trees to try. Figure it's just part of the overall fun of learning what works and what doesn't.

To water out trees, we place 5 gallon buckets next to them and fill each one up with the hose. Each bucket has a small quarter inch hole in the bottom of it, so the water drains out slowly. We feel this works better then sprinklers.

 

[Larry Caldwell]

Two acres is not too much ground for a homestead orchard if you vary the trees. Commercial orchards are designed to produce large quantities of uniform fruit. That's not what you want in a homestead orchard. Instead, you want a large variety of fruits from late spring to late fall. Many fruits, like cherries and some pears, are not self-fertile, so you need multiple varieties for pollination.

Apples have a lot of varieties. I love Gravensteins for cooking. They aren't the prettiest apple in the world, but they make great pies and applesauce. The new breeds like Fuji are very popular. You don't see many yellow transparents any more, but they are a very early apple that will give you fresh fruit a month before anything else, but don't keep well. Rome beauties and Jonathans are great winter apples if you have enough cold winter days, as is Granny Smith.

You need bing cherries, royal ann and pie cherries. You need 3 or 4 varieties of plum and Italian prunes. Don't forget figs, if your autumns are warm enough for them to ripen. Apricots. Bosc, comice, Bartlett and Asian pears. For peaches, I recommend sticking with free stone varieties if you want to can them. Paw-paws and persimmons. Don't forget the nut trees, like English walnut and hazelnut. Hazels are male and female, so plant half a dozen females and one or two male pollinators. There are blight resistant chestnuts on the market now, and there are also winter hardy almonds.

 

[Larry Caldwell]

Dwarf trees planted 8' oc and 14 ft between rows = 388 trees per acre

Planting trees that close together is a mistake. You want an orchard, not a thicket. '8 OC is espalier spacing. I would suggest planting on a grid that allows driving a tractor with mower or disc through the orchard in any direction, and of course you need at least 30' at the end of each row just to turn the tractor around. After the trees mature, even a 14 ft. spacing will be pretty tight. If you prune them to just an 8' crown you are left with only a 6' lane in the middle.