cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/21789538
Not necessarily your favourite fruit to eat, but what is/are your favourite fruit tree(s) to grow based on survival rate, fruit yield, ease of maintenance, ease of harvest, grass-killing prowess, and any other combination of factors? What is/are your least favourite? If you have photos or diagrams to illustrate your point, even better!
(If you provide your region and/or Köppen-Geiger or Trewartha climate zone, it will help others to know what to plant or what to avoid!)
Pawpaw. It’s such a fun tree, native to where I live (East Tennessee, 7a), puts out delicious fruit for a very brief moment, and has a fun history.
Yuzu.
So good and versatile to use!Rhubarb tree.
Okay, that’s enough out of you.
That’s a tree?
Just a joke.
Peaches are great to have because they’re so different from what you get at the grocery store. A peach ripened on the tree is much more flavorful than once picked unripe, but a ripe peach is so soft that they pick them unripe for shipping. Pulling a ripe peach off the tree and eating it is a religious experience.
When I was a child my neighbor had a peach tree. Me and my brothers would hop the fence and grab a bunch whenever they started to ripen. So much better than store brought peaches.
Amen brother hallelujah!
Cherry plum tree. They’re everywhere here in Romania and they require minimal care. The fruit is great both unripe (eaten with salt - they’re in season now in their unripe form) & ripe (you can also make jam and compote out of it).
How big do those trees get?
Google “corcoduș” or cherry plum tree and you’ll see pics.
The dwarf lime tree is the most productive in my yard. The people recommending loquat are not kidding, those are so easy. I want a Jaboticaba this year too.
I’m in zone 10, humid subtropical. Apples do not work here, most peaches don’t, but mango, papaya, bananas, carambola, loquat, longan, a lot of fruit trees are happy here.
Loquat, If my backyard was big enough I would plant one. It is described as shrub or small tree but in my area they grow quite a bit.
Great fruit that is ripe through spring and early summer, plenty of fruit to share (maybe too much once the tree is big) and super easy to grow.
Too much fruit is never really too much! Plant your own, grow your own, harvest your own, and share…
You can hedge a loquat - one of my neighbors did this, and it keeps the fruit where you can reach it too.
I must try that.
They’re delicious too
I like to grow all kinds of stuff. We have peaches/nectarines, paw paws, Asian pear, pear, apple, crabapple, blueberries, blackberries, and figs. As for ease of maintenance and yield, our blackberry vines are probably the easiest to take care of and they produce tons of berries. A close second would be our figs - the trees need pruning every year, but are easy to take care of otherwise and produce lots of fruit. I’m in zone 7b so lots of things grow here.
You are not the first to answer blackberries, and I just wonder, do blackberries not grow out of control in other places? Sure they’re easy to keep alive once established, but to actually keep them manageable, is there not a lot of pruning required?
(Asian pears are awesome, by the way. The fruit, anyway. Tried it once, and it puts the common pears to shame.)
They’re pretty easy to take care of as long as you prune them back regularly. And agreed on the pears!
I’m going to stretch the definition of tree and answer with blueberry bushes. I have planted all sort of fruit trees, but in my climate it’s difficult to get high quality fruit without using pesticides. Pest pressure is significant. The blueberries on the other hand require little maintenance and they thrive even in depleted soils. I also like that the berries ripen over the span of a few weeks, so it’s not as much of a rush to pick and process everything all at once. I’m in zone 7b/8a, but there are a variety of cultivars that do well from USDA zones 3-9.
I don’t grow blueberries, but I’ve seen videos of high-bush cultivars in the UK, and they certainly looked prolific and easy to manage. From what I’ve heard/read, I imagine that they would do well in poor, acidic, sandy soil like in pine forests. Is that the kind of soil that you have?
The soil type you describe is what is usually recommended. I have a lot of clay in my soil so I planted my bushes on a slope that is too steep to mow. That seems to provide enough drainage. They did have a brief fungal infection on their second year, I treated with sulfur powder and haven’t had any problems in subsequent years. A cheap pH meter says my soil is around 5, but I don’t put a lot of confidence in its measurements.
The flowers are also beautiful and have a pleasant aroma.
I used to have a Red Devil apple tree that had a mast year every year and the apples were delicious (and kinda spooky).
Spooky due to the blood-stained insides?
I used to have
mast year every year
Did your tree live fast and die young?
Blue berries, though guess it’s technically a bush, isn’t it?
Yes, that is a bush. What do you like about it?
The fruit yield, mostly. I think it might grow up to three full sets of blue berries in a year. Also it is very easy to maintain and delicious.
I also have black berries, which have the same properties. But they’re thorny and grow everywhere you don’t want them.
Continuous harvest is the best! We can’t just stop eating when the plants stop fruiting, so having successive fruiting seasons in a year is really helpful. If durian fruited year-round… monoculture would be tempting.
Do you trellis the blackberries or just let them sprawl everywhere?
I cut my blackberries every two years, except for some main branches that cover the hedge between my garden and my neighbour. It gives a good coverage during the winter when the hedge looses some thickness.
Two years… If I waited that long, it would be a disaster! Glad it works for you though!
