Homesteading

All right, so I've planted, I don't know, maybe 60 or 70 fruit trees in the last, you know, decade or so, and some things I've learned about them. One is that it's probably worth it to spray them once a year, you know, before the buds break, to prevent a host of disease, you know, maybe with an all-purpose spray, or you could use some organic sprays, maybe do that as needed. But, you know, it usually takes a good year where you have to kind of baby the tree if it's dry. If you live in a place where the ground is wet, often like Missouri, I find that you don't really have to baby the trees after the first year or two in the ground. And then it usually takes like three to seven years before the trees really produce a lot of fruit. But yeah, I've planted, you know, apples, pears, peaches, cherries, plums, we have mulberry trees, nectarine, apricot, you know, at least here in Missouri, in this climate where it gets quite cold, it also gets quite hot and humid, I'd say, you know, apple and pear trees grow very, very easily out here and are pretty resilient usually. Peach trees can also work, they just take a little bit more effort. And plum trees as well, it seems like those trees are a little bit more prone to disease or bugs. And some other trees, like I have yet to be determined whether or not we'll see apricots, because I think, you know, we have late frosts in the spring after these plants have budded or blossomed. And so we might not actually get fruit from the apricot trees, we'll have to see. But it really depends on the year, you know, your fruit trees can have really productive years, they can have years where the frost kills the blossoms, and you lose what you would have had in fruit.

We've purchased most of our fruit trees, you know, just at big box stores or nurseries. I haven't really noticed a big difference between the two, honestly. And I kind of like starting from a bigger tree. It just seems like a little bit easier to get a little head start where there's more leaves and more roots to kind of start from. But either way works fine. I mean, I planted just like a 12 inch little stick. It was like a nectarine tree stick that you could buy for like 10 or 15 dollars in the checkout aisle. Planted it and now it's a big tree, you know, it's quite a bit bigger than me and starting to produce nectarine. So that's pretty awesome. I would say one thing to keep your eye out for are diseases, especially fire blight. If ever you see, you know, blossoms and the tips of the trees look like they're singed from the fire, like getting black, look up fire blight. See if you have that because you got to address it soon else it can spread to your other trees and it can be very fatal to them. One spring it was wet and we lost about 10 trees.