Photo by Inma Ibáñez on Unsplash
Growing your own food is a Resilience Challenge category, and who doesn't love fruit? If you’d rather not eat fruit that was grown with toxic chemicals, picked before it was ripe, shipped hundreds or even thousands of miles from home and left to languish in boxes in a warehouse, then you may be a good candidate for growing your own fruit. Oh yeah, and it tastes amazing!
Fruit trees are both practical and beautiful additions to your landscape, and you can grow them in a small lot without waiting forever for a harvest. Today’s dwarf and semi-dwarf varieties only require a 4 x 4 foot space each, so you can grow them close together. Smaller trees also yield manageable crops. You can even grow fruit trees in wheeled containers on your sunny balcony, deck, or patio and then roll them indoors to a cold garage or basement for the winter. Check out “8 Fruit Trees You Can Grow On Your Balcony” from Rodale’s Organic Life HERE.
While orchard-sized apple and pear trees may not bear fruit for ten years, dwarf varieties may take only three years. Just remember to find out if you need two trees of the same genus species so that pollination is successful.
Although pruning in winter stimulates growth, pruning in spring, early summer and late summer keeps your fruit trees at the height you want for easy pickings later on. And don’t forget to choose a variety of trees with different ripening times so your harvests don’t come all at once.
What will you do if you get more fruit than you know what to do with? Can it, of course! And we have just the workshop for you. Jennifer Brennan, who has taught our home canning class for the past two years at Rodgers Ranch, will tell you what to do with the excess bounty of your harvest in this evening demonstration class on May 17, 6 – 8pm. Register HERE.
For more on canning from this forum, read “The Joy of Canning” HERE.
Replies