3d ago

What is your favourite fruit tree to grow?

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!)

23 comments

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!

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.

- How big do those trees get?

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.

Yuzu.
So good and versatile to use!

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.
- 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.

I used to have a Red Devil apple tree that had a mast year every year and the apples were delicious (and kinda spooky).

Rhubarb tree.
- Okay, that's enough out of you.
- That's a tree?
  
  Just a joke.

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.

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.

23 comments