Site Selection and Soil Preparation
Fruit plants are most productive if you carefully match them with the proper planting site. Very few sites are naturally ideal. To succeed, you may have to overcome some combination of weeds, diseases, pests, poor drainage, low soil organic matter, and poor soil fertility. Each of these can severely reduce the size of your harvest and the health of your plants. So it's best to take care of them before planting. Once plants are in the ground, it is very difficult to reduce soil pest populations...
Pawpaws
Pawpaws are small deciduous trees that are hardy in Zones 5 to 8 and usually grow 15 to 20 feet tall up to 40 feet under ideal conditions . They are attractive, with large showy leaves and a pyramidal shape. Sometimes suckers form, creating a pawpaw thicket. Like persimmon trees, they are more commonly grown in the South. Pawpaw flowers are maroon and inconspicuous, about 1 1 2 inches across, and appear in late May before the leaves expand. Depending on pollination, trees bear clusters of one...
Highbush Cranberries
Viburnum trilobum, Viburnum opulus var. americana Highbush cranberries also known as American cranberry bush are in the same family as elderberries. The size and color of the fruit are the only characteristics this species has in common with commercial cranberries. Bushes grow to 15 feet tall and become rather formal and rounded in shape. They make a great hedge or privacy screen. The flowers are very small and white and are borne in large terminal cymes that are 3 to 4 inches across, similar...
Pruning and Training Basics
Apples, pears, cherries, and plums produce their best fruit on two- to three-year-old wood. Peaches bear their fruit on the last year's vegetative growth. One of the prime reasons for annual pruning is to encourage lots of productive fruiting wood one-year-old wood on peaches and two- to three-year-old wood on the others. Unpruned trees can quickly become unproductive, while 70-year-old fruit trees can still bear lots of fruit because annual pruning promotes the right amounts and kinds of...
Diseases and Insects
Your ability to grow terrific tree fruits depends in large part on your ability to control pests and diseases. You will face many of the same challenges as commercial growers, but it's unlikely that you will have the same powerful pest control tools that they have. For example, home fruit growers typically use hand-operated sprayers or those run by small electric or gasoline motors. Compared with commercial-sized sprayers, these machines have a smaller capacity and lower pressure and require...
Diseases and Pests Gxr
Fortunately for home gardeners, blueberries have fewer pest problems than other fruits. There are, however, some diseases and insects to watch for, which are described below. For more help identifying these and other problems with blueberries, see www.hort.cornell.edu diagnostic. Fusicoccum canker. Jersey, Earliblue, and Bluecrop are all very susceptible to this disease, which appears as small reddish spots on the canes, frequently at a leaf scar near the ground. As the canker enlarges, a...
Hardy Kiwifruit
While their tastes are similar, hardy kiwifruits are different from the kiwi-fruits you find in the produce aisle at the supermarket. The hardy kiwifruit Actinidia arguta is native to northeastern Asia, while its commercially available cousin A. chinensis is native to southern China. In the eastern United States, the commercial kiwifruit grows only as far north as Maryland and then only in protected spots. Hardy kiwifruit plants tolerate temperatures as low as -25 degrees F or so, but they are...
Training and Pruning Young Apple and Pear Trees
Pruning is especially critical just after planting and during the first few years of growth to make sure that the overall structure of the fruit tree is correct and to encourage early fruiting. Pruning cuts on young trees stimulate vegetative growth below the cuts and delay fruit bearing. So keep the number of cuts made on a young tree to a minimum, making only cuts that are necessary for proper structural development. If you do a good job of pruning and develop a structurally strong tree with...
Pruning and Training Peaches
Like cherry and plum trees, peach trees are best pruned in the late spring. They are unique among major tree fruits in that they bear most of their fruit on lateral buds in the lower half of vigorous one-year-old shoots. To maintain a constant flush of this growth for the next crop, prune peaches hard every year. Peach and nectarine trees are very susceptible to perennial canker, which is caused by a fungus that infects open wounds when temperatures are cool. Don't prune them unless the weather...
Site Selection 1
Strawberries grow best in a sunny location with deep, well-drained sandy loam soil with a pH of approximately 6.2. The plants do not tolerate extremes in pH, either below 5.5 or above 7.0. Determine pH by testing the soil, and follow recommendations to adjust the pH accordingly a year before planting. Contact your county's Cornell Cooperative Extension office for more soil test information. See www.cce.cornell.edu local_offices.cfm. Lime and other soil amendments that are used to adjust pH...
Mulberries
Mulberry trees are as ornamental as they are fruitful. The mulberry was once considered the king of the tree crops. But its weedy invasiveness and soft fruit caused it to fall out of favor. Mulberry flowers are small and inconspicuous. The fruits are numerous and resemble slender blackberries. They do not ripen all at once, but when they are ready they drop from the tree. They can be gathered by covering the ground with a sheet or canvas and shaking the tree. The fruits are used for jelly,...
Pruning and Training Cherry and Plum Trees
Unlike apple and pear trees, the best time to prune cherry and plum trees is late spring, after the trees have flowered. At this point, you can see how pruning will affect your crop. You can train young cherry and plum trees as central leader trees, as described for apples and pears see the steps beginning on page 28 . Or you can train them as open-center vase-shaped trees see Pruning and Training Peaches, next page . Perhaps the best way is somewhere in between, as a modified central leader...
Rejuvenating Old Apple and Pear Trees
Many old, neglected apple trees can be rejuvenated by proper pruning during the dormant season. Many will have grown too tall to manage and harvest conveniently. Most will have too much old wood and not enough young, productive fruiting wood. Here are some suggestions for bringing them back into production, but keep in mind that it usually takes several years of corrective pruning. Don't try to make up for years of neglect in a single season. Remove dead branches, rotten and diseased wood, and...