The Home Orchard Handbook

A Complete Guide to Growing Your Own Fruit Trees Anywhere

Cem Akin, Leah Rottke

• Publisher: Quarry Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781592537129
• eBook ISBN: 9781610602235
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Horticulture
• Index: Biological Sciences

Crisp apples, tart lemons, lush figs, tender peaches—imagine the bounty of a late-summer farmer’s market, right in your backyard! Learning how to plant and care for fruit trees is a desirable, accessible activity for a wide range of people. It’s a natural extension of many gardeners’ repertoires, and the investment yields generations of results. Growing your own fruit ensures a fresh, delicious, abundant harvest for your family and friends for years to come. Fruit trees diversify a region’s agricultural landscape and ecosystems, attracting pollinating bees, songbirds, and other desirable visitors. And cultivating orchards on your own decreases your reliance on grocery store distribution channels and boosts sustainability.

Inside The Home Orchard Handbook, you'll find:

—Strategies for choosing your orchard's site, taking into consideration soil quality, sun exposure, microclimates, drainage, and more

—Information on plant selection, including what types of fruit trees do well in certain areas and how to decipher critical concepts such as "chill hours," "cultivars," "bareroot," and "cross-pollination"

—Guidance on aftercare, including in-depth watering, composting, and preventative care schedules to keep your backyard orchard fruitful for years

—Advice on troubleshooting diseases, conditions, and non-beneficial insects using only humane, organic remedies

—General tips on jamming, dehydrating, storing, and otherwise making the most of your orchard’s harvest with delicious recipes from chefs Tal Ronnen and Diana Stobo

Start growing your own fruit trees wherever you are with The Home Orchard Handbook!

—chapter one—

FRUIT TREE 101

Imagine providing essential nutrition and oxygen by the tons to humans and animals; cleansing the air, water, and soil; creating vibrant ecosystems for birds and bees; empowering individuals to become healthy stewards of their environment; and inspiring them to spread that message—addressing world hunger, global warming, and deforestation, all at once.

ONE MIGHT SPECULATE THE NEED FOR entire armies of environmentalists, health crusaders, and animal welfare activists to accomplish this. Yet, there is a singular strategy that can kick-start the heart of this process all on its own—a global catalyst for a healthy planet, if we all act together, perfectly utilizing physics, chemistry, and the symbiotic means offered by Mother Nature to nourish the world and all its inhabitants. Best of all, it is a simple, grounding, long-lasting, Earth-connecting strategy that is part of a most enjoyable journey and rewarding destination: Plant a fruit tree, care for it, encourage everyone you know to do the same, and pass on the legacy.

Simply put, trees heal the planet, from filtering air pollutants to recharging groundwater to creating healthy microcosms in the soil. And it doesn’t stop there. If that tree is a fruit tree, harvest abounds for decades, sometimes centuries, improving health for generations. Excess harvests may be donated to local food banks or given to neighbors, promoting sustainability by displacing many environmental hazards associated with the mass commercial production, transportation, and packaging of most food sold in today’s markets.

“The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The next best time is now.”

–CHINESE PROVERB

Plums ready for harvest

At the table, science shows that eating more fruits cuts the risk of major diseases.¹ In the backyard, home orchards serve as a place to forge deep connections with family, friends, and nature. In the community, planting and maintaining fruit trees can be a truly holistic, tangible solution to many of the world’s critical problems.

Fruit trees play an important role in the history of Earth. Many wild varieties have been around for millions of years in various forms. Fossilized remnants from the olive’s ancestor date back 20 million years.² Early incarnations of the plant that has become the modern-day Rosaceae family, which includes apples, pears, quinces, almonds, cherries, plums, and apricots, were present 40 to 50 million years ago.³

And perhaps the most fruitful symbiotic relationship ever between plant and animal goes back 80 million years, when fig wasps became the exclusive pollinators of fig trees—a relationship that exists to this day.⁴ Experts estimate that the earliest human domestication of fruit trees, especially olives, dates, and figs, occurred in the late Stone Age through the early Bronze Age (as early as about 9000 B.C.E. for figs).⁵

¹ Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. 2001. “Human Vitamin and Mineral Requirements.” Report of a joint FAO/WHO expert consultation (Bangkok, Thailand).

² Therios, I. 2009. Olives.(Biddles Ltd.: UK).

³ Juniper, B. E. and D. J. Mabberley. 2006. The Story of the Apple. (Timber Press, Inc.: Portland, Ore.).

⁴ Machado, C., et al. 2005 May 3. “Critical review of host specificity and its coevolutionary implications in the fig/fig-wasp mutualism.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

⁵ Kislev, M., et al. 2006 Jun 2. “Early domesticated fig in the Jordan Valley.” Science. 312:57–78.

Fruit trees originated in the wild, ages ago.

Ancient Orchard Poetry

In one of the earliest recorded descriptions of a home orchard, thousands of years ago, Greek poet Homer wrote:

“Close to the gates a spacious garden lies,

From storms defended and inclement skies.

Four acres was the allotted space of ground,

Fenced with a green enclosure all around.

Tall thriving trees confess’d the fruitful mould:

The reddening apple ripens here to gold.

Here the blue fig with luscious juice o’erflows,

With deeper red the full pomegranate glows;

The branch here bends beneath the weighty pear,

And verdant olives flourish round the year,

The balmy spirit of the western gale

Eternal breathes on fruits, unthought to fail:

Each dropping pear a following pear supplies,

On apples apples, figs on figs arise:

The same mild season gives the blooms to blow,

The buds to harden, and the fruits to grow.”⁶

⁶ Homer. The Odyssey of Homer(Book VII), translated by Alexander Pope. 2010 (eBooks@Adelaide).

Home orchards have existed since ancient times, on fertile grounds such as these in the Mediterranean region.

Some trees, such as olives, can survive for more than a thousand years, making them living artifacts. Others, like apples and pears, can produce fruit for centuries. It has even been suggested that the longevity of domesticated fruit trees provides such a strong connection to the land that this bond contributed to the development of modern city-states and nations.⁷ Imagine, humankind being inspired to develop sophisticated social structures based partly on a desire to be close to their beloved orchards!

⁷ Janick, J. 2005. “The origin of fruits, fruit growing, and fruit breeding.” Plant Breeding Rev. 25:255–320.

Indeed, a certain indescribable magic surrounds fruit trees, as flowers metamorphose into nature’s perfect foods, enchanting children and adults alike. The tree combines all the most amazing botanical processes to create a fruit so tasty that it can entice an animal to eat it and distribute the seed. What a concept!

To help share that magic and wonder, the basics of growing fruit trees in a home orchard are covered in the following chapters, including site and plant selection, planting techniques, and aftercare. These principles are applicable to nut trees as well. All instructions promote organic, humane methods, resulting in the most sustainable Earth- and animal-friendly orchards possible that set the highest standard for others to emulate.

The tranquility of a sunrise above fruit trees in the tropics

Imagine a place where you can have a summer picnic under the shade of a fruit tree, breathe the clean air it generates, watch the beautiful birds and other wildlife foraging in its canopy, and bring only an appetite for the healthy fruits growing overhead. Now imagine that place being in your own yard.

“To exist as a nation, to prosper as a state, and to live as a people, we must have trees.”

–THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Peach blossoms waiting to be transformed into fruit.

Home orchard sustainability, with bushels of organic harvest

ENVIRONMENTAL BENEFITS

To review the research showing just how beneficial trees are for the environment and the home orchard, let’s start with the air. Each year, a mature tree can produce up to 260 pounds (118 kg) of oxygen,⁸ remove harmful ozone pollutants from the lower atmosphere that contribute to smog, and sequester between 35 and 800 pounds (16 and 363 kg) of carbon dioxide from the air.⁹ Dwarf fruit trees are typically smaller in stature than shade trees, thus fall on the lower end of this range, while standard-size fruit trees much higher. Accordi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chapter 1: Fruit Tree 101
• Chapter 2: Site Selection
• Chapter 3: Plant Selection
• Chapter 4: Planting
• Chapter 5: Irrigation and Fertilization
• Chapter 6: Pruning and Weeding
• Chapter 7: Prevention, Troubleshooting, and Controls
• Chapter 8: Enjoying the Harvest
• Chapter 9: Beyond the Home Orchard
• Glossary
• Recommended Reading
• Index
• Image Credits
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Copyright Page