Garden Medley

There’s nothing like fresh fruit from your own garden. The taste is wonderful, like nothing you can find in the grocery store, and you don’t have to worry about what’s been sprayed on it. You can pick your fruit when it is just perfectly ripe or exactly when you need it.

But first you have to get it into the ground and growing strong. Trees can take a little work to get going, especially when it’s going to be growing something as heavy as a full load of fruit.

When you get your tree home, you will need to dig a hole about twice as wide as the container the tree came in, and just as deep. That may not be easy, depending on the size of tree you have chosen, but it is necessary. This makes it easier to fill in the hole after you have put the tree in. Any extra dirt you have can go to your compost pile, be spread in places in your yard that need a little extra dirt, whatever you need it for. You can also use the dirt to create a mounded circle around the tree, to encourage water to stay around your tree.

Do not plant the tree any deeper than it was in its container. With most fruit trees you will notice a graft line, which is where your tree has been grafted onto the roots of a different fruit tree. This is very common practice – in fact, you can buy fruit trees that will grow more than one kind of fruit for you! If the graft line gets buried, the tree may revert to the kind of tree the roots came from.

Young fruit trees often need stakes to help them stay up when they are first planted. This is not too hard to do. Buy one or two stakes, depending on your preferences, and pound a couple inches into the ground a foot or so away from the tree. Use some twine, rope or even an old nylon to tie the stake to the tree. This does not need to be too tight, as the tree does need to grow. It’s just a little extra support for the tree. Remove it when the tree is properly established in a year, more or less.

Your tree may try to start producing fruit its first year or so in the ground. I suggest the first couple years you do not allow it to do so, as the tree really needs to use that time to get established. Take blooms and/or young fruit off immediately.

In a couple years, the tree will be sturdy and you will be able to let it produce fruit. Your entire family, and possibly your entire neighborhood will appreciate what your tree can produce.