Think your yard is too small for fruit trees? never say Never! Here’s the trick to growing healthy, full-sized fruit trees in small spaces!
Tips #1 for Growing Full-Size Fruit Trees in Tight Spaces
Have you ever wished you could harvest fruit in your backyard, but thought you just didn’t have the space to grow fruit trees?
You may need to reconsider that assumption!
I realized years ago that the assumed maximum size of trees is not fixed.You can do some amazing things with your fruit trees if you get the hang of pruning—This includes planting multiple fruit trees in a small space.
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While visiting the farm of someone who used to work at the University of Florida, I saw peach trees that were kept at 8 feet tall by aggressive pruning when young and were easy to pick.
Recently, I saw a fruit-laden tamarind tree being repeatedly felled by a local power company—Only about 6 feet tall! After the center has been chopped off, branches come out the sides low to the ground and grow pods. Instead of using long poles to pick fruit from 40-foot branches, owners can pick it by hand.
A full-sized tamarind tree can easily shade most or all of a typical backyard. A full-sized apple will do pretty much the same thing. However, the answer we often get to this question is “plant dwarf trees”.
Dwarf trees are deliberately grafted onto rootstocks that restrict the tree’s growth. Unfortunately, this also causes weaker trees to die earlier than standard fruit trees.
Aggressive pruning makes full-size fruit trees work in tight spaces
image from Christian Riedel from Pixar
What if you could plant a full-sized tree and have it under control?
This is more likely than you think. After all, isn’t that what bonsai growers do?
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You can actually plant a dozen or more fruit trees in a small backyard with less work than expected. How about growing a plum or lemon hedge? Or that three-trunk apple tree your kids can pick without a ladder?
Growing Multiple Fruit Trees in a Small Space
A few years ago I discovered a great book by Ann Ralph called plant a small fruit tree, This really brings together a lot of ideas I’ve been thinking about growing fruit trees in small spaces and provides easy instructions for making it happen.
As Ralph wrote:
“If you want small trees, you don’t need to buy dwarf or superdwarf trees. For centuries, Europeans have used pruning to keep common fruit trees short. Visit a historic garden in America and you’ll discover our founding The fathers often planted fruit trees very small.
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Once you understand the simple logic of pruning, keeping fruit trees properly scaled is easy. In fact, regular pruning is the best way to control the size of your fruit tree. (…) Deciduous fruit trees of any type will respond to keeping small pruning treatments – the oldest heirlooms or the more recent introductions.
Choose whatever variety of apricot, apple, cherry, fig, quince, persimmon, plum or pluot (plum-apricot hybrid) best suits your palate and climate. keep it small. Put away the ladder. You can plant more trees than planned, individually around the garden, in a hedge next to a fence in full sun, or even three small trees spaced close together and pruned to grow separately from each other (three fruit trees together, you think you only have one space).
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You can plant fruit trees into an existing landscape.you can accommodate favorite Need another tree to pollinate the fruit. With attention to ripening time, you can harvest moderate amounts of fresh fruit from your garden from late spring through winter.
If you live in a citrus-friendly climate, consider citrus fruit, which you can harvest fresh from your garden year-round. “
—plant a small fruit treeAnn Ralph, pg. 24–25
I am sold.
Imagine being able to reach and harvest all fruit!
image from Animal Oman from Pixar
In the book, Ralph shares simple tips for keeping fruit trees small, including when and how to prune.
If you’ve ever seen piles of broken fruit wasted under a towering tree, the idea of a small, pluckable tree producing perfect fruit that you can pick by hand becomes very appealing.
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I used to have to pick a poorly maintained orchard and it was a lot of work to dispose of the fruit and try to collect them from the ground.Thanks for the inspiration plant a small fruit treeI won’t let this happen to the trees I’m currently growing in my food forest and edible hedges.
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in growing fruit trees in small spaces. You can grow a lot more than you can imagine.
what do you think?
Are you growing fruit trees in a small space? What are the best tips for growing fruit trees in small spaces? Let us know in the comments below!
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