Fruit trees thrive or die based on their locality. A Granny Smith for example, won’t do you any good up north, say in New York, because it needs too long a warm-weather season to ripen.
Most box stores stock what’s popular and don’t really care if their fruit tree is going to thrive, never mind survive, on your property.
Homeowners often get confused when growing fruit trees, because a lot of times the WRONG tree will actually grow… it just might never fruit, continually lose its blossoms to late frosts, or slowly succumb to disease over a number of years.
Every year I try to work with a number of new varieties in an effort to assess what thrives in our area.
Of course, these varieties aren’t new to the world–I’m personally more interested in older varieties with history and nostalgia–but these varieties are new to me!
I offer my time and space to find out first hand how these trees really respond to our local conditions.
Here’s some of this year’s new contestants:
Frazier’s Prolific – largest tree record holder and massive cropper out of Washington state.
Dabinett – Super disease resistant cider apple.
Edelborsdorfer – German variety from the 12th century.
Gilpin – 1817 American heirloom.
Reinette Du Mans – French apple catalogged in the Ark of Taste.
Birkenfelder Rotapfel – German heirloom also catalogged in the Ark of Taste.
Chieftain – 1960’s Iowa.
Dayton – 80’s Rutgers. Overall solid apple.
(For the most part the 80’s is my cut off for varieties. I work with very few varieties later than the 80s.)
Black Oxford – Maine 1700’s. Similar to Arkansas Black, but NOT a triploid.
Detroit Red – Large dark red multi-purpose apple. Detroit by way of France, late 1800s.
New Season apples may or may not be available in the spring.
If they leave in the spring, I haven’t really had time to assess how they are going to do, so I generally like to hold them until the fall, or at least mid summer.
- If one of the new season apples is a variety you’ve specifically been looking for…
- if you’re just more inclined to take risks…
- or the variety is specifically known for high disease resistance…
then we can talk about taking a new season tree first thing in the spring.
Keep in mind, brand new spring trees will always be smaller than brand new fall trees.
A reminder about Cider apples.
True cider apples are far too bitter to eat fresh off the tree. However, cider apples are generally more disease resistant, hardier trees. They can also have later or extended bloom periods.
For these reasons, planting a cider apple variety as a pollinator can be a viable decision.
Peach Trees
This spring, I’ll have the fantastic Winblo peach; 1950’s Sandhills NC variety. And as a companion tree, Flame Prince; 1980’s USDA Georgia peach
Also, Cresthaven, a 1950’s Michigan offspring of Redhaven. And as a companion tree, Norman, another Sandhills NC variety, from the 60s.
These are all top notch varieties.
Generally speaking, for some reason, peach tree bloom periods aren’t as accurately documented as apples. Mainly, peach trees are grouped by Chill Hours under the assumption that trees of similar chill hour requirements “wake up” around the same time.
Of course, some peach trees are known for blooming particularly early, OR particularly late. In such cases they will be noted.
While they are some great peaches that bloom early, in our area, known for late April frosts, I recommend later blooming varieties. It’s fine to plant a small percentage of your peach orchard with early bloomers, but you have to realize, you might only ever see peaches on them during ‘special’ warmer years. (unless of course, you take the time to defend blossoms against late cold snaps, with wraps, fans, sprays, etc.)
Fig Trees
The fig tree page is now up.
The fig trees are really more of a specialty thing that I do. I don’t do many of them and I only sell the ones that are showing the greatest potential.
Don’t forget, you can preorder (without putting any money down) your trees NOW!
Just add the trees you want to the shopping cart, fill out your info and complete the “purchase.” No payment gateway is attached to this website, so when you click purchase, all it does is send me a nicely formatted email of your order.
As long as your order is not some huge number of trees, it’s not a big deal if your plans change and you decide not to pick up the trees. Just let me know, so I can release them to someone else.