I’ll admit I’m more skilled at mooching fruit than growing it.
If you live in Chico, you can find a nearby lemon tree when it’s time to make lemon squares. Persimmon cookies? Just stroll your neighborhood on a winter’s day. My Totally Cool Neighbor had so little need of apricots that he cut down his apricot tree.
LaDona has a peach tree, which bears so much fruit in the summer the branches bend. I could pilfer from her tree without her detection, but I always ask for permission.
Up until now, I had no real need for fruit trees of my own. However, my landlord cut down all of the trees in my yard a few years ago, leaving more sunshine than my plants knew what to do with. I had an Indian peach tree sitting in a pot so I decided to put the tree to better use.
My experience with fruit trees stops mostly with admiration.
Once upon a time, the Handsome Woodsman had a small “orchard” in his backyard in Paradise. When we started dating we spent endless hours by the brook that ran through his 1.25 acres year-round. He’d play guitar and I gathered blackberries. That first year we dehydrated plums and later peaches. We had so much dried fruit we gave away plastic baggies of fruit to strangers.
Fruit trees aren’t all fun and games. One morning we discovered the raccoons had been busy all night devouring the Asian pears. The first sign of the heist were the mounds of black turds at the base of the tree. Not only had they gorged themselves, the bandits had let the fruit run straight through them and onto the ground.
The trees were his and he did all the work. He pruned and watered, built a fence to try to keep the deer away. He sprayed for things like leaf curl.
I came to the conclusion that fruit trees are best kept in other people’s yards.
However, I had this peach tree in a pot and one day I put it in the ground. The tree was a gift from a man I met while writing a story about the Nord School garden. It’s an Indian peach, which can grow from a peach pit and turn out exactly like the mother plant. The skin of the fruit is soft and blemishes easily. This is why you won’t see these peaches at the grocery store.
The trees must also be hardy, because it survived two drought years in a black plastic one-gallon pot.
I dug a hole twice as deep as my pot, dumped a bag of compost in the hole, popped the plant in the ground and covered the area with mulch.
By last year at this time the tree had grown to about eye-level. The spring blooms were dazzling light pink and I was filled with hope.
Not surprisingly, no fruit appeared. If I was a peach, I would have chosen not to spend the energy to grow when June, July and August of 2021 had very few days below 100 degrees.
In early March the tree was now taller and sprung blooms as stunning as my neighbor’s flowering quince. I know better than to be hopeful for fruit, but the flowers were a nice surprise.
When I visited Betty Ann’s house recently, I remembered that growing trees is more complicated than digging a hole in the ground. Betty Ann is a Master Gardener. Her trees are pruned somewhat like roses, resulting in a vase-like shape to allow air circulation. She paints her trees with medium-to-light colored latex paint, to prevent bark sunburn. Her trees are maintained at a reasonable height, so she doesn’t break her own limbs when choosing fruit.
I wasn’t asking for advice, but Betty Ann works in education; she can tell when she has an eager pupil. She quickly demonstrated how to thin the emerging fruit after bloom. Right now the tiny hairy protrusions are about the size of the nail on my pinky. Ideally, the fruit should be evenly spaced about 6-inches apart. It seems blasphemous to destroy fruit that could grow into luscious summer goodness. However, too much weight will break the tree’s limbs, Betty Ann explained. Her hands flew up and down the branches as she destroyed any “doubles,” which is when two small fruits are growing in the same place.
My tree is so small, I went home and completed my homework in no time at all.
Of course, I should have studied tree pruning long ago. The backyard orchard section of the University of California Master Gardener website, recommends pruning all but three or four limbs the first year. In the winter of the second year, only one or two branches should remain on each of these three or four branches. I’ll have to go back for a re-do when the tree is dormant.
In the meantime, feel free to call me when you have too much fruit in your trees. I’ll share some peaches of my own in five or six years.
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April 08, 2022 at 05:31PM
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Go out on a limb, that’s where the fruit is | Sow There! - Chico Enterprise-Record
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