How to Plant Fruit Trees: The Complete Guide

Last year here at the homestead, I put in about 15 or 16 different types of fruit trees. Citrus over here, some stone fruits and apples here. And I'm putting in more today. So in this video I'm going to show you, no matter if you're putting it in the ground or in containers, or if you're in a cold or warm climate, exactly how to plant a fruit tree. The first thing you want to consider is where you live in two different ways. First of all, are you in a warm climate or a cool climate? I've got some warm climate tips for you here. If you're in a warm climate, especially one as warm as us here in San Diego, California, the time to plant your trees you have a lot more freedom on. For example, it's about late April, early May here. It's probably a little bit later than I'd want to plant these trees, but I just got my hands on them. So you want to think late winter, early spring, get it in the ground, get it established and let that growth rip for that first season. Or if you get your hands on some fruit trees late summer, probably early fall-ish, that's also fine in a warm climate. But if you're in a cold climate, and I know many of you are, Chris up in Vancouver, BC has some very specialized tips for you to consider. If you're in an area that gets frost and a decently long period of winter conditions, it may seem like the types of trees that are suitable for growing outdoors is quite limited, but actually that's not the case. As long as you understand your climate, your garden's growing conditions, and also you start researching different plants that may be suitable for your hardiness zone because trees and shrubs are generally more expensive than herbaceous materials. That's why when I shop for trees, I look for things that are at least two zones lower than where I live. So I'm an 8B and I like to look for plants that are in zones six and lower. So this persimmon, and I also have jujubes. Those are well-suited for my areas. And I don't have to worry about them dying during the coldest parts of my winters. Now that doesn't mean that I don't have plants that are outside of my growing zone or that are a little bit more borderline hardy, like my hardy citrus, which is good for zones eight. The only thing that I have to do when it gets colder is protect the upper portions and the lower portions because you don't want them to freeze. For the upper parts, I like using thick horticultural fleece blankets. And for the base, lots of mulch, or even layers of burlap bag is great as insulation. But if you want a lower maintenance approach to making sure that your plants live through the coldest weather, going with cold hardy staples like pears, plums and beautiful apples are your best bet. And many of these plants have varieties that are cold hardy down to at least zone three. And of course, don't forget about native plants that are well-suited and adapted to your area. So those are some fantastic tips for cold climates, but there are a couple more things to remember before you start to plant a tree. Two things I want to talk about right now. One is variety selection specifically if it fits your particular climate, especially when you're growing things like stone fruit, like this Double Delight nectarine. Now there's a ton of different types of nectarines out there and not all of them would grow really well in my climate. So I have one, this is called Double Delight. It's a Zager tree. So this is a very, very prominent breeder. And this one requires 300 or more chill hours. So what a chill hour is, is basically an hour of exposure under a certain temperature and certain trees, apples, cherries, stone fruits like nectarine actually require temps to be low for a period of time. Now, obviously in a warm climate like mine, it's hard to get those temperatures. So what I need to do is search for what's called a low chill hour variety. 300 is actually pretty low, believe it or not. It's about 15 to 20 days under a certain temperature. So I'm comfortable with this one, but you really want to make sure if you're in a colder climate, you can bump those chill hours up and you maybe even want to bump those chill hours up. The second thing I want to talk about before you plant a tree, because remember, when you plant this thing, that's just where it's going to be and you're going to get the fruits of your harvest no matter what you decided to plant. So you better plant the right thing. You want to make sure that you're choosing plants and trees that space out your harvest. So let's say I'm just obsessed with nectarines, which quite honestly, I am. I love that fruit. I could plant a couple of different varieties of nectarines that have a ripening window that does not overlap or just barely overlap. So I could have two weeks, two weeks and two weeks. And then I'd have six weeks worth of ripe nectarines on three different trees. So this is just sort of spreading out the harvest and we've done it with some of the peaches. We've done it with the pomegranates. And we'll probably do a full video on that, but really select your varieties carefully. So I just planted a peach over there. What I want to do now is take this Meyer lemon, which I've been hunting for for quite some time and put it down in the citrus hedge. I'm out here at the hedge and I made a choice a while ago that I'm going to stick to. And it's an aggressively tight spacing, but I will talk about it. So I've measured out about four feet from this Washington navel, which is extremely tight, but I'm going to be pruning all the citrus sort of as a hedge. So kind of an oddball decision. We'll see if it works out for me. But what I'm going to do is just move away my mulch. So I'm pulling my mulch away. Give yourself enough area that you can actually shovel out and not mix it up with your wood chips. Cause you really don't want to be burying something like your wood chips next to your trees. I'm going to clear a decent amount out here and then we'll start digging and talking about how to actually place and plant this tree. My mulch is out of the way. It's time to just dig the hole. You know, I think there's a lot of sort of wisdom that gets passed down about all these different crazy concoctions you have to add to the hole, what you have to prep it with and all this stuff. And you know, if you look behind you, you'll see a beautiful row of citrus that we did a very minimal planting style. So we dug a hole, we planted a little high. I'll discuss that in a second. And we didn't really amend too much in this planting hole. In fact, I actually don't believe we amended anything at all. So this native clay soil here has seemed to be perfectly fine and you would think it wouldn't be for citrus and many other types of fruit trees in fact. So it worked really, really well. The thesis being, let the tree find what it needs from the native soil and maybe you can apply some top level fertilizers later on. I'm actually going to plant this citrus somewhat high. I'm not going to sink it down and match the soil level. I'll plant it a couple inches above, make sure we get adequate drainage. Okay. I think I've dug out just about enough. I'm going to do a quick test fit with the pot, see where I'm sitting. Looks like I'm sitting pretty good. The only thing I'm going to do, especially when you're digging a hole and you've got relatively heavy clay soil, is I kind of have created these sheer faces of native clay. And I'm just going to rough those up slightly here so that when the roots do eventually hit them, they don't hit what they think is sort of a brick wall because that can sometimes be a little bit tough. So we're just going to rough this edge up just slightly, get it to be a little bit more of a natural planting. And what we're going to do, you got to be careful on these Meyer lemons because they have these massive, massive thorns. But these rules are applicable to pretty, pretty much any type of tree you want to plant. So you want to take your pot, give it a couple of pats on the side, loosen that soil that might be stuck to the edges here. Especially if you have a bigger pot, this can happen. Want to cup it right down at the base of the trunk and pop it out just like this. And there you have it. Now, before we put it in, we can take a look at the roots here and I see some pretty healthy roots. Citrus always tends to have a bit more of a yellow tinge to the roots. I see I think some worms in here or something. Something looks pretty healthy. And I don't see a lot of root bound roots here. So it's pretty healthy. I'm just going to kind of scratch this up a little bit, break its pot memory I suppose. You don't really have to do this, but I, I find I tend to do this just a little bit, especially if it's a little more root bound. And then we're going to test fit it here. And remember I said I wanted this to be a little bit higher. So I'm actually going to backfill just slightly with some of this native soil. We'll go about to there. That seems reasonable to me. At this point, if you are planting something that has a rootstock and then a graft on top, what you want to do is that grafting point, that little cut scar, you want to orient that towards the north side because you don't want the sun blasting down on that unprotected area. So if I look around, I see it. It's right about here. I'm going to force it to be this way. So especially with citrus, cause it really does want to be protected. That interior of the plant wants to be covered, not exposed. So I'm going to do that. Make sure I'm in line with the rest of my citrus over here. I'm pretty close. And at this point I just want to backfill around. This is where it's important to have moved that mulch away because you don't want to, especially if it's wood chips or something that has a lot of carbon in it, you really don't want to mix that in to your native soil. It's going to steal some nitrogen early on. When you're planting a tree and you are bumping it up a little bit, planting it on a mound, you really want to be careful to cover the area where these feeder roots, these surface roots can come out. So what we'll do is we'll kind of slope this mound out with all the soil we shoveled out. So at this point I'm more or less planted up. But what I want to do now is, remember we just dug a hole. It's a little bit loose down there. So I'm going to come through and just kind of give it, give it a good pat, make sure it's nice and in there and there's not these weird air pockets that will collapse and kind of mess with the soil structure down there. Now what I want to do is cover this back up with mulch and give it a very, very healthy water. We want to make sure that we get those pockets out. We want to make sure that the plant has enough water to make it through this weird transitionary period as it gets settled in, hopefully it's home for many years to come. As I water this in, something you can do is just move that mulch a little bit away from the base of the plant. It's not super, super urgent unless you're piling that mulch up next to the roots. You don't really want to put it right there cause it can just cause some weird rot issues. But I'm going to give this a very healthy water in. And for those of you who are growing in container gardens, we're going back up to Chris. She's going to show you how she's planting something really awesome. And if you're wondering what kind of tree grows well in containers, well, any sort of tree, but you have to consider the growth rate and the mature size of the plant. So I've got a persimmon here and at maturity, it could be over 50 feet tall, but I know it's a slow to moderate grower. So if I keep this in a container and just keep bumping it up in size every couple of years, it's going to be just fine until I have a spot for it outside. Now for figs and mulberries, which are fast, vigorous growers, those are probably best going directly in the ground unless you have a variety that says it's dwarf. So it will say dwarf in the name. There are also trees that grow in a columnar or tall and skinny fashion. So a lot of apple trees can do that now. So those are great and they save a lot of space. Um, so bottom line, if you have a large enough container, it can support all sorts of trees. And it's especially good for ones that are either dwarf or even semi dwarf. So today I'm planting this cherry tree into my half whiskey barrel, but first let's take a look at this tree. So this cherry variety is compact Stella and it is great for small gardens and containers because it only gets to be about eight to 12 feet in height. So it's nice and manageable. And actually the best feature of Stella is that it is self fertile, meaning that you don't need a pollinator buddy in order for this plant to set fruit. Um, if you can't find something that is self fertile, you can look for those really neat grafted combination trees with a different varieties on one plant. So that will help with the cross pollination and you don't need to get two or more trees when it comes to choosing a size larger is better because there is more space for the roots to extend out and anchor the tree. Not only that, all of this potting mix that we see here acts as a really good insulator against those extreme heat and moisture fluctuations that we see throughout the year. So in the summer when it's hot and dry, it helps hold onto more moisture. So your plant is less stressed and also in colder areas, it helps insulate those more tender roots from freezing. But with all of this material, you do have to think about the overall weight. So all of this is pretty heavy and it's something that you really have to consider if you grow on a balcony or even a patio. So today I'm growing in a wood container, but when it comes to containers, there are so many materials and designs. Now as much as I'd love to grow in terracotta, it is so beautiful in my climate where it's really wet, especially towards the cold periods. This porous material drinks in a lot of moisture and with the freezing, these things actually crack and they're just gone. So a better options for me at least are grow bags and glazed materials and lightweight metal containers. So those are generally lighter weight and it allows me to transport the plants throughout the garden, throughout the season. One of the most important things when it comes to container gardening, especially if you're growing trees and shrubs or anything longer lived is to allow for proper drainage. So before I filled the container with all of this mix, I went ahead and drilled about six to nine three quarter to an inch large holes at the bottom to allow for proper drainage of excess water. So what you don't want is this soupy mess for the plants to live in. Most plants don't like those conditions. And another thing you can do is to grab your potting mix and just fill the entire container from bottom to top with that same mix. So let's do away with that misconception that adding the coarse materials to the bottom of a container helps drainage. It actually doesn't and it does the opposite. So let's just not do that. What you want to do is just get your container. If it doesn't have holes, drill those holes and then fill it up with your potting mix of choice. And then we're almost ready to plant the tree. Now I say almost ready because it's always good to check the conditions of the plant, including the roots before you plant it into a container. So this tree is pretty young. I didn't even have to try to scrape this off. All the stuff fell off. So we get a good look at it. So it smells good. There are fresh roots coming out. So this is a generally healthy plant. So I'm going to get this into the container as soon as I can. But while we're here, what we want to do is find where the root flare is and it's quite noticeable. It's where it literally flares out and becomes the root. This part has to sit on top of the soil after we plant it. So now that we've identified the parts and we know that it smells and looks good, let's go plant it up in the container. Final steps to prep this area for the planting. I am digging this hole that is about two times the width of the root ball or the root area that I see. But I'm making sure not to dig too deep. You don't want to go deeper than the root ball or where the root flare is. So I have the hole and actually what I'm doing right now is taking some of the soil and making this little mound in the middle. So it's kind of like a little seat for the tree to sit on. So there's a little hollowed part here. It is going to sit on that little mound. And what I'm going to do now is just backfill with this material, making sure to squish out any of the air pockets. So I'm going to go ahead and do that. In many areas, planting fruit trees and shrubs in the spring is ideal, but if you're like me and you're seeing really unpredictable springtime conditions, planting in the fall may actually be the better option. Not only do you avoid late spring cold snaps and possibly even early heat waves, a fall planting usually means the plant can divert water and energy to establishing a nice healthy root system instead of trying to push out fresh new leaves and flowers. Now that the tree is in its new home, I'm going to give it a nice thorough water and also check for sinking just in case I missed any air pockets, because we do want to maintain this nice root flare above the soil level. But if everything looks good, I'm going to go ahead and apply a mulch on top and it should be good. But with any containerized plant, I do want to talk about nutrition really briefly. Depending on what you grow, you want to look into how you're going to provide nutrition to your plant, because unlike plants grown in ground, these plants in containers can't send their roots out anywhere to seek out their own nutrition. So make sure that you have some sort of schedule in place to keep them nice and healthy. So what I have here is basically an organic tree paint. It's from a company called Ivy Organic. I actually know Charles pretty well. He's got a YouTube channel. You should check it out. It's great for fruit trees. But what I'm going to do is effectively just paint on this protective coating. So it's called a three-in-one plant guard. But really what you're doing here, especially on something like an avocado or a citrus or even this peach here that we planted just a little bit ago, is we are protecting this naked trunk from being absolutely blasted by heat, potential diseases, as well as pests. And we're not doing it, which was traditional with some sort of latex paint that is maybe not the best for our plants. So this is our final little tip here. One last thing, you can also just make sure, move that mulch away from the base so that you don't pile some mulch up and have any sort of potential rot issues. But that's it guys. Tree Planting 101. Stay tuned. A lot more coming out of the Epic Orchard. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.