Buy the Skinny Fruit Tree and Pick Off the First Apples

Quick answer: Buy a bare-root tree on the right rootstock for your zone, plant it while it's dormant, and pull off every fruit for the first two seasons. You'll be eating more by year five than the neighbor who bought the big tree with peaches already on it.

The fifteen-gallon peach at the home center in May looks like a shortcut. It's five feet tall, it's leafed out, and it has three little peaches hanging on it. It's also often north of a hundred dollars, and its roots have probably been circling the inside of that pot since last summer.

The bare-root tree from a mail-order nursery shows up in March as a stick in a plastic bag. It usually runs around thirty to fifty dollars. It looks like a mistake.

Buy the stick. It was dug while dormant with most of its roots intact, it hasn't learned to grow in a circle, and it settles into your soil fast. Within two or three seasons it usually catches the bigger tree and passes it.

Zone first, then chill hours

Your hardiness zone tells you whether a tree survives the winter. If you don't know yours, start with Your Hardiness Zone Decides What Lives and What Dies. A Honeycrisp apple shrugs off a Minnesota January. A fig mostly won't.

The number that gets people in the South is chill hours. Apples, peaches, pears and cherries need a certain amount of cold winter to bloom properly. Most standard apples want somewhere north of 500 hours. Plant one in coastal Texas or central Florida and it'll leaf out weakly, bloom sparsely, and sulk for a decade.

If your winters are mild, look for low-chill varieties. Anna and Dorsett Golden apples, Tropic Snow and Florida Prince peaches. Up north, the problem flips. Pick varieties that bloom late, so a cold snap in April doesn't kill the flowers.

Call your county extension office before you order. They keep a list of what actually fruits in your county, and it's free.

Pollination is the part the tag leaves out

This is the mistake that costs people five years. They plant one apple tree, it blooms beautifully every spring, and it never sets fruit.

Most apples and pears need a different variety blooming at the same time nearby. Bees carry the pollen, so keep the two within about fifty feet. A neighbor's apple tree or a flowering crabapple down the block can do the job. Two Honeycrisps can't, because they're genetically the same tree. If you want the background, Your Zucchini Rots Because Nothing Visited the Flower covers how this works in the vegetable bed.

Good news for small yards:

• Most peaches, nectarines, apricots and sour cherries like Montmorency are self-fertile. One tree works.
• Most sweet cherries need a partner. Stella and Lapins are the self-fertile exceptions.
• Check the nursery's bloom-group chart and match apples by group.

Rootstock decides your spacing (and your ladder)

The variety is the fruit. The rootstock is the size of the tree. Same Liberty apple, wildly different trees:

• Dwarf (M.9 and similar): about 8 to 10 feet tall. Space them 8 to 10 feet apart. They fruit soonest, often in year two or three, but the roots are brittle, so they need a stake or trellis for life.
• Semi-dwarf (M.111, MM.106 and similar): about 12 to 18 feet. Space them 12 to 15 feet apart. Fruit in three to five years. The best fit for most backyards.
• Standard: 20 feet and up, spaced 20 to 25 feet. Five to eight years to fruit. Beautiful, long-lived, and you'll be on a ladder until you're seventy.

Leave the room. A tree planted eight feet from the house looks fine in year one. In year eight it's scraping the gutters and shading your tomatoes into mush.

What to buy, what to skip

Buy:

• Disease-resistant apples like Liberty, Enterprise or Freedom if you'd rather not spray much.
• Semi-dwarf rootstock unless your yard is truly tight.
• Bare-root, from a nursery that lists the rootstock by name.
• Two compatible apples or pears, or one self-fertile stone fruit.

Skip:

• Any tree whose tag doesn't name the rootstock. You're guessing at its adult size.
• Container trees with roots circling out the drainage holes.
• "Fruit cocktail" trees grafted with five varieties, unless you enjoy pruning puzzles. One branch tends to take over and the rest fade.
• Sweet cherries in humid climates without checking with extension first. They crack and rot.

Planting day

Plant bare-root trees while they're dormant. That's late winter to early spring in most of the country, and through the winter in mild zones.

1. Soak the roots in a bucket of water for a few hours. Not overnight for days.
2. Dig the hole twice as wide as the roots and no deeper than they need. Wide matters more than deep.
3. Backfill with the soil you dug out. Don't fill the hole with bagged mix, or the roots stay in the soft stuff and never leave.
4. Keep the graft union, that knobby scar near the base, two or more inches above the soil. Bury it and the top can grow its own roots, and your dwarf tree turns into a giant.
5. Water it in slowly. No fertilizer at planting.
6. Spread a mulch ring about three feet wide and three inches deep, pulled back a hand's width from the trunk. Finished compost underneath helps; Compost That Doesn't Stink or Feed the Rats shows you how to make it.

Then do the part that hurts. Cut an unbranched apple whip back to about 30 to 36 inches tall, and a peach to about 24 to 30. It feels like vandalism. It's what makes the tree branch low, where you can reach the fruit.

Wrap the trunk in a hardware cloth guard. Rabbits and voles will chew the bark off in one winter and kill a tree that took you two years to grow. If you have deer, you need a cage or a real fence. A deer can strip a young tree overnight.

Year one: roots, not fruit

Your only job this year is roots.

Water deeply once a week when it's dry, more often in a hot spell. A five-gallon bucket with a nail hole in the bottom, set by the trunk, delivers a slow soak while you do something else. Keep grass and weeds out of the mulch ring, because turf steals more water from a young tree than you'd believe.

And pick off every fruit. Every one. A young tree that sets fruit spends its energy ripening three apples instead of building a root system to carry three hundred.

Paint the lower trunk with white latex paint diluted half and half with water. It keeps winter sun from splitting the bark on the southwest side.

Year two: give it a shape

Prune in late winter while the tree's dormant.

Apples and pears get a central leader: one main trunk with tiers of side branches, like a Christmas tree. Spread those branches to about 45 to 60 degrees with wooden spreaders or clothespins. Flat-ish branches fruit sooner. Upright ones just grow.

Peaches and plums get an open center: three or four main branches forming a bowl, with the middle cut out so sun gets in.

Pull the fruit again this year on most trees. On a vigorous dwarf apple, leave a handful if you can't stand it.

Year three: the first real crop

Now you let it fruit, and you thin hard. Leave one apple per cluster, spaced six to eight inches apart. Thin peaches to the same spacing. It'll feel like you're throwing away half the harvest. You are. What's left grows bigger and sweeter, and the branches don't snap.

Start watching for trouble: codling moth in apples, fire blight blackening pear tips, borers at the base of peaches. Extension will tell you what's active in your area and when to act.

Plant an apple the spring your daughter's born and she'll be picking from it in second grade. Her own kids could still be picking from it someday. Not much else you buy for forty dollars works out like that.