Home & Garden Highlight: Fruit Trees

Sweet apple tarts...icy cold lemonade...grilled peaches with ice cream...Is your mouth watering yet?

Think of all the gloriously delicious recipes that incorporate fruit. If you would like to experience the joy of growing fruit in your own backyard, check out the list of resources below. They cover topics such as selecting, planting, pruning, training, and other useful techniques that will ensure that your mini orchard is healthy and productive.

Recommended Reading

Grow Your Own Mini Fruit Garden by Christy Wilhelmi

Even beginners become successful fruit "farmers" with the techniques and advice offered by author Christy Wilhelmi, the force behind the popular gardening website, Gardenerd. Selecting the best small-scale fruit trees, bushes, vines, and plants for yourclimate, siting them properly, and pruning your compact trees for health and productivity are some of the many topics covered in the pages of this bible of small-space fruit growing.

Grow a Little Fruit Tree by Ann Ralph

Grow your own apples, plums, cherries, and peaches in even the smallest backyard! Expert pruner Ann Ralph reveals a simple yet revolutionary secret that keeps an ordinary fruit tree much smaller than normal. These great little trees take up less space, require less care, offer easy harvest, and make a fruitful addition to any home landscape.

Fruit Trees in Small Spaces by Colby Eierman

For gardeners yearning for the pleasures of home-grown fruit plucked straight from the tree, this deliciously encouraging guide cuts the subject down to size. Colby Eierman, garden designer and fruit expert, shows how trees can easily be tucked into the tiniest spots and still yield a bumper crop of gorgeous fruit.

Fruit Trees in Small Spaces covers everything a gardener needs to know about choosing and nurturing the most delicious small-space varieties, including selection, pruning, training, irrigation, and disease prevention. With inspiring ideas for spaces of all shapes and sizes and creative recipes for your incredible harvest, you'll want to plant a mini-orchard in every intimate corner.

Orchard by Jane McMorland Hunter

Whether you have a tiny balcony or a huge field, it's never been easier to grow and cook your own orchard fruits. Sharing essential cultivation advice from the common apple to sweet cherries, Orchard also explores more unusual orchard fruits, including medlars, quinces, and mulberries. Accompanied by a range of delicious recipes such as clafoutis, Adam and Eve's pudding and a classic apple pie, this book is a timely celebration of the tree fruit and its enjoyment.

Fruit Trees for Every Garden by Orin Martin

You haven't truly experienced flavor until you've eaten fruit fresh out of hand in your own garden. You want perfectly crisp apples? Sweet, juicy pears? Or how about varieties that can never be found in the store? For more than 40 years, Orin Martin has taught thousands of students, apprentices, and home gardeners the art and craft of growing fruit trees organically. In Fruit Trees for Every Garden, he shares--with homespun wisdom and humor--the keys to selecting, planting, growing, and tending healthy, productive trees, whether you're growing one fruit tree or one hundred. Even better, he explains the why behind the how, breaking down the science into bite-sized and digestible morsels that lead to happier, healthier trees. Orin covers ideal placement, soil, compost, cover crops, fertilizer, water, winter and summer pruning, pests and diseases, and much more in his uniquely down-to-earth, approachable style, all paired with clear illustrations, full-color photography, and evocative intaglio etchings by artist Stephanie Martin for a beautifully packaged yet practical guide that you will both treasure and turn to for years to come.

Additional Reading