Now is the best time to plant fruit trees as they have the rest of winter and all of spring to establish before they hit their first summer.
I love fruit trees and other fruiting plants, having gathered a nice collection of various types, over a period of time.
When choosing what fruiting plants you are going to grow it is important to select the types of fruit that you and your family most enjoy and then to pick the cultivars that are most suitable and productive for your locality.
It is a waste of time buying say an apricot that needs a cold winter followed by a warm spring if these climatic conditions don’t exist in your region. It is better to buy one that bears well without a real winter chilling. A number of fruiting trees require a suitable pollinator to obtain good crops, which means you need to buy two different cultivars to ensure that you have a good fruit set.
For example, now days we can find plums that have a double graft, meaning that two varieties of plums will be produced on the same root stock.
The varieties chosen for the grafting will often be the pollinators, so only one tree is needed but two types of plums will be harvested. For a time some nurseries were producing triple or more varieties onto the same root stock. These were more difficult to produce and often one graft would fail in preference of the other two. Even if the three did take nicely it would mean some complicated pruning to ensure that the three parts preformed equally and in many cases one would ultimately fail. I not sure if these multi-grafted trees are still available and in many ways they can be a waste of time and effort. Even with a twin graft one has to monitor the two aspects to ensure both are growing equally well without one superseding the other.
With apples and some other grafted fruit you may have the choice of the type of root stock such as MM106 etc. The root stock type will help determine the ultimate size of the tree and thus the amount of fruit it can bear. These are MM106, 4-5metres MM793, 3.5-4metres and EM9 2.5-3m The latter is also referred to dwarfing root stock. This can be a great advantage for people with smaller sections.
