“. . . one of the latest improvements has been to blend the useful with the agreeable.”
— Thomas Whately, Observations on Modern Gardening, 1770
Everything possible in a backyard fruit garden grows from a short and manageable tree. When fruit trees are kept small with summer pruning, you can have one small tree or many. You can work fruit trees into sunny places in an existing garden. You can plant any variety you choose and keep it small. You can plant isolated trees. Or, you can plant trees in close proximity, as near as eighteen inches apart. Doing so provides you opportunities for more variety, lengthens your fruiting season, and enhances pollination.
Ed Laivo demonstrates the little fruit tree technique at the Dave Wilson Nursery experimental orchard.
Small fruit trees keep your feet on the ground. You rarely need tools beyond shears, a handsaw, and maybe loppers. Regular pruning creates fruitful and healthy fruit trees. Their small size simplifies pruning and care. Fruit trees pruned consistently winter and summer from their youth are never the headache their larger counterparts can be.
The central feature of the short fruit tree method is simply this: summer pruning near the time of the solstice in June best controls the size of a fruit tree. The method abandons the erroneous notion that semidwarf rootstocks offer much value in terms of size control. Semidwarfing rootstock is a misnomer at best. No matter how you name them, semidwarf fruit trees aren’t small the way we tend to think of small — a tree roughly equivalent to our own height.
Fruit trees grafted on semidwarfing rootstock aren’t carefree, either, a common and regrettable misconception. Like standard-size fruit trees, semidwarf trees require routine pruning. If left unpruned, these trees quickly grow beyond our capacity to manage them. In addition, remember that if a rootstock has the capacity to keep a tree smaller than six feet, the root system, by its nature, is less than adequate for the task of keeping a tree upright and healthy. The value of rootstock resides in its vigor, disease resistance, water or drought tolerance, and ability to encourage a fruit tree to bear at a young age, a trait called “precocity.”
If you want a small fruit tree, pruning is the best way to make one. The resulting tree will be shapely, healthy, fruitful, and easy to care for. The essence of the short fruit tree system couldn’t be more straightforward: solstice prune your fruit tree to keep its size in check. There are nuances, of course, detailed in the pages to follow, but the method is simple. Nothing this book contains is beyond the aptitude of an ordinary, attentive home gardener.
In the late 1970s Ed Laivo worked as a manager at the Urban Tree Farm Nursery in Santa Rosa, California. He began to develop the short fruit tree system as part of his own all-edible garden. Like the rest of us, he planted semidwarf fruit trees because he lacked the space for big trees. He didn’t want to manage them, either. He found himself in an ongoing battle with trees of all varieties, some growing faster, some more slowly, but all the same, trees that emphatically refused to stay small.
He chose his fruit trees for the semidwarfing properties of their rootstocks. Yet, these rootstocks consistently and abysmally failed to reduce the size of his trees. When he responded with aggressive pruning the traditional way, in winter, this fact became undeniable: winter prune a fruit tree on semidwarf rootstock, and that tree will only grow larger. Ed’s frustration with these so-called semidwarfs was extreme. The size problem revealed itself again and again as he worked as a nursery buyer at Yardbirds Home Center in Vallejo, California, and Oki Nursery in Sacramento, California. The trees didn’t perform as advertised.
When he was growing up, Ed watched his grandfather prune orchard trees. His grandfather was an aggressive pruner who kept his trees at about ten feet tall, several feet shorter than the standard orchards of the time. But that wasn’t really it, Ed said. Stan Bradberry, the owner of Urban Tree Farm, instilled in Ed a questioning attitude. He nurtured Ed’s regard for the value of an open mind when considering established horticultural practices. Like many good ideas, Ed’s technique developed intuitively as he worked with his trees. If winter pruning didn’t control the size of fruit trees, maybe summer pruning would help.
As a rule, we tend to think of vigor as desirable. Ed knew that summer pruning decreased vigor. In the case of fruit trees, though, it’s advantageous to curb aggressive growth habits and create sturdier trees. In addition, fruit trees are so overgrown and ungainly in summer, they seem to want pruning. As it turns out, a summer reduction of this excessive vigor is also a great way to keep fruit trees small.
Ed’s inclinations “just seemed right,” he says. They “made sense.” Friends dropped by to monitor his pruning progress, and they gave him a hard time. He became known as the “butcher pruner.” He worked with friends and colleagues to test and evaluate his developing theories. Impressed with the results, many thought his idea was too good to stay confined to his backyard. They encouraged him to write a book.
By the time Dave Wilson Nursery hired Ed as a sales rep in 1992, he hated selling trees on semidwarf rootstock. These trees were bound to confuse and frustrate nursery customers. The rootstocks came with other problems, too — shallow rooting, suckering, poor anchoring, and limited disease resistance. Ed wanted his customers and, by extension, their customers, to have satisfactory fruit tree experiences. The behavior of semidwarf rootstocks made this nearly impossible.
With Dave Wilson Nursery’s backing, Ed began what he calls “my little campaign” to make life easier on backyard fruit growers. His crusade was based on realistic expectations and two basic principles: first, don’t count on rootstock for size control; and, second, summer pruning keeps fruit trees small. He began to promote the Backyard Orchard Culture program to the retail nurseries he supplied.
When Ed handed me the Arctic Glo nectarine in the Scenic Nursery parking lot twenty years ago, he’d been perfecting his backyard methodology for fifteen years. He maintained his closely planted trees at about his height, five foot nine, with a hand held up as high as he could reach. He harvested fresh fruit from his right-size trees spring into winter.
You might think that such a simple, elegant, and workable idea would have widespread practical applications that would interest both the nursery industry and the agricultural establishment. In this you would be mistaken. The methods of managing fruit trees and orchards were long established and immutable. Ed caught flack from many quarters, including California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) at San Luis Obispo and the University of California, Davis.
True believers keep talking, though, and this is what Ed did. He knew better. He had years of his own backyard experience to back him up. He had witnesses. He devised more fruit tree experiments for the research and development efforts at Dave Wilson Nursery. He sponsored orchards that included high density plantings all over the state under the auspices of the University of California Master Gardener Program. He talked to nurseries. He orchestrated fruit tastings and talked to the tasters. He talked to people like me.
Maybe because we didn’t know better, or maybe because what he said “seemed right” to us, too, or maybe because we tasted a remarkable tree-ripe Arctic Glo nectarine in a nursery parking lot and the only tree we could have was a small one, we tried it. It worked. It was easy. We converted. We became practitioners and grew our own little fruit trees. We taught our customers how to do this. It worked for them, too.
After fifteen years of backyard practice and twenty years of talking, the traditional landscape of fruit tree growing has altered, thanks in good part to Ed. True, these ideas often exist in the ether, and no one person is ever completely responsible. But Ed operated in a big fruit tree arena. He refused to let his practical and timely idea sink into obscurity.
Today, you see the difference in the orchards in the Central Valley. It turns out that small trees are easier to manage in commercial operations, too. They reduce the cost of insurance, labor, and machinery. In addition, the universities came around. When you take a fruit class from a Master Gardener now, you get a lesson in using summer pruning to keep fruit trees small.
If you plant a peach pit from an O’Henry peach, the workings of genetics deliver a peach of some sort, maybe tasty, maybe not, but it won’t be O’Henry. If you want an O’Henry peach (and if you’ve tasted O’Henry, you do), you or somebody has to graft an O’Henry scion — a budded shoot of a parent O’Henry — to rootstock or to an existing peach tree. All O’Henry scions are genetically identical; your grandmother’s O’Henry is exactly the same as the one you’re considering in the bareroot bin at the nursery. If you want an O’Henry that tastes as good as your grandmother’s, you don’t need to take a cutting from her tree to get one; you can buy a new O’Henry at the store.
Fruit trees are rarely grown on their own roots. They are grafted to rootstocks. Fruit trees are grafted to rootstocks because rootstocks make for healthier and more adaptable plants. Various rootstocks improve hardiness, soil adaptability, water or drought tolerance, and disease resistance. Some rootstocks also adjust the size of the tree downward, though it’s hard to give exact heights because so many factors are in play. Consequently, the ultimate size of the tree is of minor importance when considering fruit trees and rootstock. Unfortunately, when you try to choose your fruit tree, tree size is the only information you’re likely to get from a grower or seller. You need to dig deeper.
One grower lists, online, an M-111 apple rootstock as semidwarf. Technically, this is correct, but the size of the tree depends on the vigor of the apple variety you choose. Apple trees grafted to M-111 rootstock are dwarfed to only eighty or ninety percent of a standard-size tree. Standard trees can grow to be as tall as thirty feet, so, once again, even though the tree is called “semidwarf,” we’re talking about a large tree, one that probably grows to at least three times your size.
Yet, when I needed bareroot apples for the nursery, I ordered all the apple varieties grafted on M-111. Why? M-111 is still one of the best all-around rootstocks for apples in most of California and elsewhere. And it’s easy to keep fruit trees small with pruning. The rootstocks that keep apples smaller either sucker, need staking, are not as resistant to diseases and pests, or are sensitive to drought. Gardeners in the water-scarce West keep drought and water use in mind, or ought to. At my nursery, we had an active education program regarding fruit tree size and pruning. We started trees out with the initial hard pruning they so desperately require. Our customers were prepared. As a result, they got the benefit of the better rootstock. They didn’t even have to ask.
But you should.
A different grower lists, online, rootstock choices for peaches only as “standard.” This rootstock is probably Lovell, a dependable, long-lived, and disease-resistant choice for most situations. A third offers peaches on semidwarf Citation. This choice of rootstock makes a difference. Lovell is somewhat tolerant of wet soil but prefers better drainage. In garden situations with regular water or in heavy soil, Citation is probably the better choice.
Citation’s dwarfing properties are beside the point. A peach tree on either rootstock can be kept to six feet with pruning. A tree on semidwarf Citation still requires pruning and can grow to be twice your height. My fruit trees grow in great soil, but in a very low water situation. For me, Citation would be a regrettable choice. Citation is a good rootstock for lots of reasons, especially for apricots and plums, but it needs water, like the water you provide to an irrigated lawn or garden. When considering rootstock, the specifics of the garden situation matter far more than tree size.
These online fruit tree sellers are reputable and conscientious. They care about what they’re selling, and they care about your success. If you ask about rootstock, you’ll get good advice. Like other fruit tree topics, opinions differ on the subject of rootstock. But if a retailer can’t answer your basic questions and speak with some intelligence on the subject, buy your trees elsewhere. Check with your farm advisor. Ask your local nursery which rootstock is best for your region, soil, and circumstance. Do research, but listen, too, to what suppliers say. They should have good experience with trees in the ground.
One final tip: don’t drive yourself crazy. Fruit tree information can be overwhelming to the degree you can’t move forward. Analyze your situation, talk to people, do a little research, and make your best judgment. A list of the advantages and disadvantages of commonly available rootstock appears in the appendix of this book. There is no perfect rootstock. Sometimes the answer is clear, sometimes it won’t make much difference, and sometimes you can only get what you can get. Just remember, while some rootstocks may reduce tree size to a certain degree, their other qualities take priority. As you will come to understand in the chapters that follow, pruning is the best way to scale your tree to a size you can manage.
Unless you have a compelling interest in grafting — you have some ancient, remarkable, unidentifiable fruit, for instance; or you want a slip of Grandpa’s Wickson plum in your garden for sentimental reasons; or the best reason of all, for grafting’s own sake, because the very idea of grafting sounds so thrilling you have to try it — do this instead: identify the fruit in question and buy a new tree at the nursery or through the mail.
I don’t recommend grafting as a means to turn around an old tree, to create lower branching, or to save a portion of a tree you’ve grown fond of, merely because you like the fruit. When trees get old or uselessly overgrown, keep them healthy and pruned, preserve them as best you can, and begin work on a replacement.
Provided you match the conditions in Grandpa’s garden, the fruit on that new Wickson plum will be just as good as the fruit you know. Fruit trees are a bargain. They grow fast. A new young tree bears fruit as soon as a graft will. If you start fresh, you can turn a new tree into a far better specimen than the tree you have now, a tree better suited to your needs in terms of maintenance and fruit quantity, and a tree that is a better fit in the garden.
With grafted multiples, you settle for fruit based on qualities secondary to what the fruit tastes like.
A successful graft is a wonder, as people who attend scion exchanges will tell you, and grafting is an avocation worth pursuing for certain do-it-yourselfers. Then again, new grafts often fail. As a result, few fruit professionals offer grafting as part of their services; it’s unprofitable as a business endeavor. If you want to graft only because you want fruit diversity and are short on space, keep reading. Other approaches may be a better bet. Novel ways to address issues of space follow in the next section — methods that might speak more appropriately to your time, options, and real inclinations.
In the interest of producing different types of fruit in a small space, many nurseries sell three or four varieties grafted together in a single tree, an appealing idea for obvious reasons. Three fruits in one tree? What’s not to like?
The limited available varieties, for one thing.
These multivariety trees limit your options to those the fruit tree wholesaler chooses for you, based on what sells. When companies combine popular varieties, those that perform well in your region might mix with others that are unsuitable or with varieties you don’t especially like. Commercial tree grafters rarely include unusual or heirloom fruits. Trees with varieties grafted together to address special circumstances like disease resistance or climate considerations sometimes include varieties of dubious quality because they meet a low chill requirement or have resistance to something like peach leaf curl or fire blight. In other words, you settle for fruit based on qualities secondary to what the fruit tastes like.
As they get older, grafted combination trees tend to lose grafts to become two-in-ones, or even lopsided one-in-ones. In many cases, one excessively vigorous variety takes over. In my experience, almost spitefully it seems, the least desirable fruit of the group grows amazingly well, and the fruit you wanted most, the favorite, dies off. In my backyard, I have a two-in-one plum that started out as a four-in-one.
If you find a three-in-one that appeals to you, though, by all means, try it. Prune it, winter and summer, the way you would prune an ordinary fruit tree. Encourage equality among partnered varieties by utilizing the consequences of timing. Curb the enthusiasm of vigorous sections with summer-only pruning. Prune wimpier sections in winter to take advantage of the increased vigor that allows them to catch up.
Instead of buying a three-in-one tree, plant two or three trees close together and train them apart from each other.
Give consideration to ripening times when choosing fruit for the backyard. Otherwise, you end up bombarded with fruit during the last two weeks of August. Good planning stretches harvest from spring to winter: apricots in June, three varieties of apples, cherries, or pears planted together to extend the season, plums and pluots summer to fall, and pomegranates and persimmons from autumn to the winter solstice.
Most fruit on a single tree tends to ripen all at once, but you can stretch your garden fruit production from late spring into early winter by staggering early-, mid-, and late-ripening varieties. Some varieties, like Red Haven peaches, Emerald Beaut plums, Flavor Queen pluots, and Grimes Golden and Golden Delicious apples will note in their descriptions a long fruiting season — a great feature in a garden tree.
Close planting is a great alternative to grafted multiples. Plant two, three, or even four trees of your choice eighteen inches apart, control their height, and train them to grow away from each other. When treated this way, multiple trees take the same space in the garden as one tree does. Prune for an open center as if the configuration were a single tree. Thin middle branches when they get in each other’s way. Root competition helps closely planted trees stay smaller. Summer pruning keeps vigor under control. This method gives you the option of choosing your favorites, more unusual varieties, and varieties that work well in your particular climate. Using this tactic, you can plant trees that ripen in succession or trees that need pollenizers — even if you’re short on space.
Trees with similar growth habits and matching rootstocks make natural partners: three apple trees on M-111 rootstock, an early, midseason, and late variety, for instance, or a pluot and a cross-pollinating plum. I prefer the look of three for a free-standing group. You may want to plant groups of two as a border along a sunny fence. You can co-plant almost any fruit trees with similar water requirements if you don’t care what they look like, and you might not if space is tight. Trees like apricots and apples that have wildly different growth habits and growth rates require more attention to pruning, especially in summer. Prune any of these configurations as you would a single tree, so that the trees grow apart from each other and limbs don’t overlap. You also can plant trees in a hedgerow three to four feet apart and prune branches in summer so they stay out of each other’s way.
When Marion Brenner first learned about the garden possibilities of little fruit trees ten years ago, she planted fourteen bareroot whips on four-foot centers along a low, western fence, apples closest to the house and plums and pluots along the fence as it continued up the hill. The following year she added “a mix of stuff,” eight more trees to that same row, making twenty-two trees in all. The year after that, she planted four fruit trees near the path on the other side of the yard. She then added seven more trees in the center of the garden. She installed a Fuyu persimmon next to an existing Hachiya. She began to prune her established figs, a Brown Turkey and a White Genoa, and pruned them harder than she had before, which resulted in a lot more fruit.
“The white fig is fantastic,” Marion says.
Then she took out an elderly and ailing Gravenstein apple tree. By that time, she had planted so many apple trees that logic suggested she buy her Gravensteins at the market, and that’s what she meant to do. Gravensteins make the best sauce, famously so, but keep poorly. Once the tree was down, though, the open sunny space brought her to the nursery for two new Gravenstein saplings.
“How could you not?” she said, “Apples are so easy in Berkeley.”
“It’s just the greatest way,” Marion said of the short tree method. “The trees look great. It’s fun. It’s easy. There’s never too much of one kind of fruit.”
Marion’s path is not one I recommend for zealous beginners. Try a couple of trees first. Don’t put in the whole orchard right away. See how you like it. But Marion is blessed with garden experience and an enormous yard, mostly sunny with a few established trees. She gardens on a big slope that faces southwest on the Berkeley-Oakland border, one of the best places, climate-wise, to grow fruit trees in the East Bay.
She and her husband, Robert Shimshak, are collectors by nature. They kept adding fruit trees of all kinds in many varieties: apricots, plums, pluots, an aprium, apples — Pink Pearl, Cox’s Orange Pippin (a favorite), Yellow Bellflower, Golden Delicious, Fuji, Ashmead’s Kernel — pears, persimmons, and even a nectarine and a peach. They wanted one of everything.
“I think it’s just the greatest way,” Marion said of the short tree method. “The trees look great. It’s fun. It’s easy. There’s never too much of one kind of fruit.”
Three years ago, inspired by an old quince hedge she encountered in Sonoma, she crowned her collection with a Smyrna quince hedge of her own, twelve trees long, which is just now producing its first flowers and fruit.
“It was so pretty,” Marion said. “I had to do it. The fruit smells so good. You don’t need a lot of quince, of course.” She installed her hedge at the rear of the garden near the chicken coop. When she was done she had sixty-seven fruit trees in all.
This quantity might be a burden if the trees weren’t so easy to maintain. The stone fruits grow so fast that Marion summer prunes in early June, and again in August. For the first time, the aprium is full of fruit. The pluots crop is better or worse depending on spring weather. As one familiar with local climate would expect, the apricots are not so reliable, but she gets a few.
“Berkeley,” she shrugs.
Her initial impulse to organization faltered as she added more trees. I told her about a Scenic Nursery colleague who pruned his trees with tall trunks up a six-foot fence. Each trunk grew a tuft of fruit tree at the top of the fence where the sun was. The trees ripened in succession throughout the growing season. She wishes she, too, had positioned the trees more logically and had taken more care with labeling. If she’d planted the long row of mixed trees a little farther from the fence, she could more easily get around the back to prune them.
Squirrels got every Seckel pear last winter — squirrels love pears — but short of armed warfare, there’s not much to do about squirrels. The Arctic Star nectarines are delicious, if the squirrels don’t get them first. But squirrels are a minor annoyance overshadowed by how much Marion enjoys keeping her trees in good form as she reaps a nearly continual harvest of fresh, ripe fruit from her garden.
Marion has planted twenty-two fruit trees along a low, western fence in her backyard.
Since the Middle Ages, espaliers have provided living proof of the sculptural adaptability of fruit trees. An espalier is a tree supported by a structure or trellis, usually kept fence high, and trained to grow flat against a wall. The popularity of the espalier derives from its capacity to produce lots of fruit in narrow, sunny spaces. Espaliers take maximum advantage of the fruit-producing capacities of horizontal branching. As a result, they require support for their fruit-laden limbs. Depending on variety and pruning style, an espalier can be a fruit machine, a work of art, or both. Apples and pears are most commonly used for formal espalier because of their malleability and strength. Any of the slower growing and sturdier fruit trees like persimmons, cherries, and prune plums adapt to this treatment equally well. Train the inherently weaker stone fruits into an informal flattened fan.
A traditional espalier begins with a low pruning cut where you want the first tier to branch. Encourage the top bud to grow vertically. This bud will form the center trunk, or leader. Train the two buds below to grow horizontally along the first support. As side limbs extend, attach them to the wire or trellis with tie tape. Repeat this procedure the first and second seasons. Prune the vertical branch to the point of the desired second tier; allow the leader to grow vertically and two buds below to form the second tier. Provide at least a ten-inch space between the tiers. Repeat the third season. Grafted espaliers in a similar format are often available at nurseries with multiple grafts of six different varieties in a single plant.
The informal espalier form works with any fruit tree. Simply support a flattened fan shape against wires, a trellis, or the fence. Encourage a two-dimensional form with pruning. Consider the direction of buds and how they will grow as you orient the plant in the ground for the initial pruning cut. They should align with the fence. Choose a couple of likely branches from response to the first prune, remove what’s extraneous, and train your favorites flat.
The issue of timed pruning is important with espaliers. Winter prune lightly for shape using thinning cuts. The tree’s vigorous response to winter pruning works against your plans. Espaliers require summer pruning to keep the tiers and close branches from bumping into one another. Remove branches that grow toward the fence or into the garden path. Don’t make it complicated. An espalier is defined by its flatness. It can be as freewheeling or formal as you like. As Scenic Nursery’s Jim Rogers liked to say, “Picture an espalier in your mind and cut off anything that doesn’t fit into the picture.”
The informal espalier is simply a flattened fan supported against a wall or fence and pruned to encourage a two-dimensional form.
