Flavorful, Fresh Fruits

Seasonal Gardening Tips

Bare root fruit trees are now available. Choose one tree or a whole orchard and get them planted while the soil is good for digging. Blueberries are a delicious fruit that can be planted now from young plants. Give them a rich, acid bed prepared with lots of peat moss. Start seeds of broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, and other cool-season crops indoors for planting outside in March. Prune fruit trees, grapes, berries, and ornamental trees this month. Take in a pruning class and sharpen your shears before you start. Start off the new year with a new houseplant to brighten your indoor spaces—choose from many fine varieties now.

Heirloom and Unique Fruit Varieties

Each year, the list of mouth-watering summer fruits grows longer with new hybrids introduced and sometimes antique varieties making a comeback. Homegrown fruit is becoming increasingly popular as we learn the benefits of local food production. Discovering new flavors and even new fruits can be an exciting taste experience.

• Heirloom Apples: After nearly disappearing from the marketplace, apple varieties popular decades or even centuries ago are making a comeback. These antique or heirloom apples number in the thousands and include names like Sheepnose, American Mother, Lady Sweet, and Nickajack. Two locally available heirloom varieties are:
  • Spitzenburg: Regarded by some connoisseurs as the very best dessert apple. It has red over yellow skin, yellowish flesh, and is firm, juicy, and moderately sweet with renowned flavor. It ripens in late October and is a good keeper.
  • York Imperial: One of the very best apples for keeping—it holds its flavor until April or May in a cool location. It has a fine quality for dessert use and is excellent for baking and cider. The apple may have a light red blush or be nearly fully red, with crisp, juicy, semi-sweet yellow flesh.
• Espalier Apple Trees: A fun and productive way to grow apple trees, espalier trains branches to grow flat against a wall or fence supported by a framework or trellis. They are excellent space savers, perfect for small gardens, and produce more fruit in less space than conventional trees. You can buy an apple tree already started as an espalier with four different varieties grafted onto it.
• Columnar Apple Trees: With a compact, upright, narrow growth habit (7-8′ tall and 2-3′ wide), these are perfect for small yards, gardens, or containers on balconies and patios. Two pollinating varieties:
  • Northpole: Large, red-skinned McIntosh-type fruit that is crisp and juicy.
  • Scarlet Sentinel: Dense clusters of white blossoms followed by large, delicious, red-blushed, greenish-yellow fruit.
• Interspecific Hybrids: Complex hybrids of plums, apricots, peaches, cherries, and nectarines in varying combinations and proportions (not genetically modified).
  • Pluots and Plumcots: More plum than apricot parentage.
  • Apriums: More apricot than plum.
  • Tri-Lite: A white-fleshed peach crossed with a plum, offering a mild, classic white peach flavor with a plum aftertaste.
  • Sweet Treat Pluerry: A cross between a plum and a sweet cherry, with the size of a plum. Extremely sweet when fully ripe and hangs on the tree for over a month, getting sweeter. Burgundy plum is recommended as a pollenizer.
  • Burgundy Plum: Medium-sized fruit with deep red, mellow, sweet flesh and reddish-purple skin. Self-fertile and great for fresh eating, cooking, drying, and jams.

Planting Recommendations

Now is the time to plant fruit trees of all kinds from bare-root trees available at local nurseries. Be sure to add some of these tasty varieties to your orchard.