You CAN grow your own fruit trees

Do you dream about having a fruit tree on your property? Would you like to pick your own apples, plums, and peaches? If so, you can learn to have great success planting fruit trees. It's not that hard to do.

In reality, almost any kind of fruit tree can be grown in a regular yard or garden. All you need to do is make sure to take care of it properly, and have patience. Most fruit trees will not bear edible fruit for at least two years. Some take longer than that. And some fruit trees need to have a mate in order to produce fruits too.

Now, most full sized fruit trees can grow quite tall, so you do need to be careful about where you choose to plant them. Putting them too close to an electricity line for instance, will only cause you problems as the tree becomes fully grown.

If you select a fruit tree which needs a mate in order to produce fruits, you'll also need to make sure you plant the two trees close enough together. Putting them at opposite ends of your large yard may cause you to never have any fruits produced.

In a very broad and general sense, there are two types of fruit trees. One type is citrus, and this includes lemon trees, lime trees, oranges, tangerines, grapefruit and so on. The other common type of fruit tree is known as deciduous, and these include fruits such as apple trees and pear trees. These types of trees become dormant in the winter time, so they're not as at risk of being damaged by frost and bitter cold temperatures. Citrus trees normally grow in milder, tropical types of climates, so these can die from colder seasons.

Many fruit trees - even citrus - can be grown in miniature form these days now too though. And this is quite convenient for growing citrus trees, because they can be grown in containers which stay indoors during the coldest months of the year. Miniature fruit trees grow much smaller than full sized ones do, but they still produce fruits of standard size. 

Growing fruit trees in your yard and garden will attract additional wildlife and pests though, particularly once the fruit starts coming on. You may find yourself battling birds for instance, that want to eat all your fruit before you can. There are also beetles and various other bugs that ruin the fruit if they're not kept at bay.

There's a lot to learn about growing fruit trees though, and we can't begin to cover it all in just one article. So we'll add more articles on this topic in future issues.