Fruit Trees: The Original Multi-Taskers
By SUZY FISCHER, Urban Harvest
For the most part, when Houstonians
think about trees, they think about
the haven they provide from summer's
relentless heat. Others consider the
dramatic floral display they offer
in spring or their ability to dazzle
with fall color.
What is often forgotten is that
fruit trees can do all of the above
and more, providing fresh,
nutritious food from your garden in
every season of the year and serving
as an honoree for an upcoming green
holiday.
For a population with a growing
environmental conscience, there
couldn't be a better way to go green
than to celebrate Arbor Day. In the
United States, Arbor Day
celebrations began when pioneer
Sterling Morton moved to the
treeless planes of Nebraska. His
love of nature led him to champion
the planting of trees for their
beauty, their shade, to serve as
windbreaks, to prevent soil loss
from erosion and to provide a source
of fuel and building material.
Though Texans and most of the
country celebrate Arbor Day on the
last Friday in April, Houstonians
observe Arbor Day on the third
Friday of January. For Arbor Day
2011, consider how one of the more
than 8,000 fruit trees and berries
at the 11th Annual Urban Harvest
Fruit Tree Sale could play a part in
your observance of the day. This
year's sale will be Jan. 15, just in
time to celebrate Arbor Day. It will
be on campus at Robertson Stadium.
Houston gardens are able to grow
many fruits with little maintenance.
Some require more training than
others. Other types of fruit may
require some pest management, and,
depending on where you live, there
are different varieties that are
best suited to the chilly hours.
At the sale you'll find fruit tree
experts on each type of fruit we
sell who can answer questions and
offer well-seasoned advice. Whether
you live on Galveston Island or
north of Brenham, the sale offers
hundreds of fruit trees perfectly
suited to your area of Southeast
Texas.
If space allows, you can have fresh
homegrown fruit from May through
January. Peaches, nectarines and
mulberries are first to ripen in
May.
The summer months of June, July,
August and September bring apples,
blackberries, blueberries, figs,
grapes, jujubes, muscadines,
papayas, pears, plums and
pomegranates.
Fall months of October and November
find persimmons and star fruit
hanging for harvest.
A well-planned selection of citrus
will provide fruit from the end of
summer through the start of the New
Year, with satsumas beginning in
August and ending with grapefruits,
kumquats, lemons, limequats,
mandarins, oranges and pummelos in
January. Mexican limes never become
quiescent (dormant) so they produce
fruit all year long, which is also
why they are the least cold-tolerant
of the citrus.
Fruit trees can fulfill a garden's
need as well as any ornamental
needs. If privacy is what your
garden lacks, there are evergreen
fruit trees such as citrus, avocado
and pineapple guava that fill that
need. Should you require shade,
towering pecans will shield you from
the sun.
And if you think fruit trees don't
have ornamental value, you need to
talk to someone from Washington D.C.
about cherries, someone from
Washington state about apples or
someone from Georgia about peaches,
all places where these trees are
celebrated.
As long as your garden has an area
that receives at least six to eight
hours of sun (citrus will produce
with less sun), you can produce
fresh fruit that will have you
disappointed with the taste of
almost anything you buy in local
stores.
Compared to most trees, fruit trees
are relatively small-growing. Still,
given the shrinking size of an
average urban lot, space may be an
issue for some. Employing one of
three horticultural training
methods, espalier, pollard or pleach
may be the answer to a space
problem.
An espalier is any tree or shrub
trained on a single plane, flat
against a wall or trellis, in a
formal pattern or a random freeform.
Pollarded trees have been trained
through systematic pruning in order
to make tree crowns smaller and to
keep them small. Pollarded trees are
compact and manageable, especially
for harvesting fruit.
Pleaching is the art of training
trees into what looks like an aerial
hedge. Trees are planted in lines
and then pruned in a hedge like
fashion above the ground level.
Branches between trees are woven
together by wounding them where they
should join and then binding them
together.
No matter how big your space is,
there's always a place for a fruit
tree in a sunny garden. If you're
one who wants more from a tree than
leaves to fuel the compost pile,
fruit trees, from traditional to
tropical, are the solution to your
garden's arboreal quest.
In short order, your Arbor Day
planting will reward you with
bushels of fresh fruit that haven't
been imported from across the
country or below the equator. Now,
how green is that?
Suzy Fischer is a registered
Landscape Architect and principal of
Fischer Schalles, a landscape
design/build firm. Contact her at
suzyinthegarden@urbanharvest.org.
This column is produced by Urban
Harvest. Learn about gardening
classes, community gardens and
orchards, farmers' markets and more
at
www.urbanharvest.org.