“The air here is delicious.”
— E. M. Forster, Howards End
My fruit tree initiation began at Scenic Nursery in Modesto, California. Owner Jim Rogers insisted that no bareroot fruit tree sapling leave the nursery without a pruning cut that took off the top two-thirds of the little tree. Jim wanted happy customers. He taught us that a person who went home with an unpruned fruit tree would soon be the caretaker of a disappointment: a substandard tree, ungainly and erratically fruitful, that would grow beyond a customer’s capacity to manage it. The tree would develop into an emphatic reminder of both a personal garden failure and the failure of the nursery to help that customer with what he or she needed to know. Jim was as right about his theories of customer service as he was about the hard pruning cut, but the severity of such a hard prune alarmed me. For the first few seasons, I left fruit trees and this disconcerting task to other workers in the nursery.
Then one day Ed Laivo, the sales representative and backyard fruit specialist from our wholesaler, Dave Wilson Nursery, arrived at Scenic with some samples of tree-ripe Arctic Glo nectarines. The staff adjourned to the parking lot and surrounded a flat cardboard box on the tailgate of Ed’s truck. He passed around slices of a rosy, midsize nectarine from the edge of his knife, its white flesh streaked red and dripping with juice.
When I sampled the tart-sweetness of that astonishing nectarine, I had what I can only call an “in-body” experience. Did time stand still? I think so. The flavor of that nectarine welled in me like, what? How to explain it? Maybe only perfect fruitness, but that was enough. That was plenty.
Human beings were put on earth to eat fruit like this. Fruit that, miraculously and without even too much trouble, could grow in one’s own backyard. By that time, I’d learned from my work at the nursery that this fruit, and indeed most fruit, would grow on a tree easily maintained at just my height. I didn’t have a lot of space where I lived, but I had to try it. The following January, I bought a bareroot Arctic Glo and beheaded a sapling for myself. Early on, my little tree generated fluffy pink blossoms and, after only three years, it produced five nectarines as memorable as the fruit I’d sampled in the Scenic Nursery parking lot. Ed’s sliver of nectarine began my career as a fruit tree enthusiast and emphatic pruner. I’ve promoted the idea of pruning to create small-scale trees with an evangelical zeal ever since.
This book offers a revolutionary vision for backyard fruit trees: a simple and ingenious technique that uses timed pruning to keep fruit trees as short as six feet tall. Anyone who has tried to manage a large fruit tree in a backyard situation instantly appreciates the value of the small fruit tree. Little fruit trees require less garden space. They are easy to care for and produce fruit in quantities we’re likely to be able to use. Small trees create the opportunity to have more trees in the backyard and to plant different varieties of fruit to ripen all summer, through fall, and even into winter.
Yet, the idea that fruit trees can and should be kept small meets with more resistance than one might expect. People often think there’s something wrong, insistently overbearing, and unnatural about controlling a fruit tree’s biological vigor. But the very scale of a small tree increases the probability you’ll engage with the tree and meet your seasonal obligations in a timely way. As a result, trees pruned to be small are sturdier and healthier than large ones. Pruning small trees takes very little effort. Thinning overabundant fruit is no trouble at all when you stand on the ground to do it. Obviously, you take better advantage of a harvest you can reach.
Fruit trees are healthier and more abundant, not in spite of what we do to them, but because of it. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan contends that fruit trees have used us to advance the fruit tree cause as much as we’ve used them to satisfy our enthusiasm for fruit. Our relationship with fruit trees is mutually beneficial. When we take better care of fruit trees, when our experience with fruit is a rewarding one, we benefit, and the trees benefit, too, not just as individual trees, but collectively; our interest, attention, and garden space create havens for more fruit trees and for varieties that might otherwise disappear from cultivation.
Fruit tree pruning, and any pruning, really, is less of a science than it is a conversation. You prune, the tree answers, you prune again. Pruning is one of the most necessary, neglected, misunderstood, forgiving, and rewarding aspects of fruit tree care. In a very real sense, the hand of the pruner creates a fruit tree, especially one that is trained to be small from the start.
The information contained in this book applies to many plants, but this is, first and foremost, a book about growing backyard fruit trees, specifically deciduous trees — apples, apricots, cherries, figs, peaches, pears, persimmons, and plums — and especially about the training and pruning of trees deliberately kept to a small and manageable size.
Most fruit tree pruning books emphasize differences. Here, I point to similarities. True, deciduous fruit trees are different from one another, and these differences have consequences. Some grow faster; some grow more slowly. Fruit sets on the tree in slightly different ways. Growth habits vary. But for backyard fruit growers, fruit tree commonalities far outweigh these differences. If you learn to prune one fruit tree, if you learn the concepts that drive pruning and how trees react to your actions, in most instances, you can apply the same tactics to all.
Fruit trees need not intimidate gardeners who, too often, guiltily neglect their trees because they don’t know what to do. Grow a Little Fruit Tree concerns itself with basics, simplification, rules of thumb, and confidence. I hope it will be a first step for people who want to create a small tree for their personal enjoyment or to do right by a tree that already grows in the yard.
This book is not a technical manual — fruit tree management is far less complicated than we have been led to believe. Instead, I intend it as a handbook and encouraging companion — clear, concise, sometimes insistent, practical, and friendly. It proposes a method that will cause most novices (and many professionals) to breathe a sigh of relief.
Grow a Little Fruit Tree represents the culmination of my experience creating small fruit trees for myself and helping hundreds of people to do the same. Twenty years of over-the-counter conversations with nursery customers inform these chapters. I worked for ten years at Scenic Nursery. I managed the fruit tree department at Berkeley Horticultural Nursery for nearly twelve years where I taught fruit tree pruning classes with manager Paul Doty, who gave me the latitude, uncharacteristic in the industry, to buck conventional fruit tree pruning wisdom.
Much of the information presented in this book draws on local examples from the San Francisco Bay Area and the San Joaquin Valley in Central California. With some adjustment in terms of timing, variety choices, and good advice from your farm advisor or local independent nursery, the basic rules apply in whatever region you call home.
Produce has become a commodity, divorced from region and season, more like detergent and toilet paper than anything timely, vital, and alive. Even at the nearest natural foods co-op, forty miles away from where I live, much of the produce comes from the same wholesaler my local market uses. The nearby farmers’ market, while the best thing going, is more of a scene than it is a reliable food resource. It closes down in October and doesn’t reopen until June. The unbearable irony is this: people who live remotely from food havens in urban centers and college towns, even if they live in areas where food is grown, have a nearly impossible time getting decent fresh produce unless they grow it themselves.
When appearance and shipability become the most important qualities of the fruits and vegetables we eat, what have we lost? Flavor, nutrition, and variety, to name a few things. These losses have consequences. When food isn’t satisfying, we treat it like fuel. We have abundance, but not enthusiasm. We cook less. We eat standing up over a sink or sitting in front of a television or computer screen. We don’t share meals with one another. We omit fruits and vegetables from our diets entirely. And why not? If food isn’t tasty, why bother to prepare it?
This chain of mostly unconscious conclusions affects our health and our social interactions. Sadder, I think, is the flattening effect of a world with bland strawberries year-round, rather than delicious, seasonal strawberries to look forward to. Much of the specialness of fruit derives from its seasonal nature. Gone is the thrill of waiting for those peaks when the flavor-of-the-week gluts the market — cheap, plentiful, and at the top of its form.
The good news is that, thanks to the grocery store, we no longer have to depend on our varying abilities to provide food for ourselves. We can grow food for pleasure. Homegrown fruits and vegetables taste good. They’re packed with nutrition, abundant, and right at hand. Homegrown food returns the seasons to the dinner table — seasons that can be stored in the freezer or turned into jam. Homegrown food exemplifies attention and care.
