Besides Providing Shade And Beauty, Some Trees Will Reward Diligence With Table Delicacies

For new home owners, some of their happiest dreams and saddest disillusionments have to do with food trees. On the land they have bought will stand some specimens which, as a rule, are alleged to bear bounteously. Or in the warm glow that comes with planning and planting their first home grounds, the newcomers will set out young stock, usually fruit trees, and sit back with every expectation of luscious harvests to come. When blossoms appear, hope soars. When fruits fail to follow, or they come off scabby and rotted, Nature's broken promise seems rank betrayal.

The purposes of this chapter are to assure the inexperienced: 1) that the growing of palatable fruits of any kind, on trees young or old, is a chancy business; 2) that it is, however, quite possible to weight the chances in your favor, provided that you are prepared to cultivate, prune, spray, and otherwise pamper your trees with unremitting diligence.

Since trees already grown present the new owners' most immediate problem, these will be discussed first. Exceptional are fruit trees which, when inhabited land changes hands, have been properly cared for over the past year or two. In most cases their pruning will have been neglected, their spraying and feeding omitted entirely.

Improving the structure and vigor of such mature trees will be your first concern. If they are badly overgrown, this must be gone about in easy stages or, instead of fruiting wood, your pruning will produce chiefly sucker growths. Besides repairing wounds and cavities as best you can, your first efforts should focus on removing deadwood, stubs, and obviously extraneous whole branches. Leave your thinning and shaping of sound branches until you have seen the trees through one summer and autumn. Meantime break up the ground around them, feed them, mulch them for the winter, and get ready to spray in earnest the following spring.

Fruit trees tired and neglected beyond a point can never be brought back into full bearing, but that point can be surprisingly far along in their lives. And even if you fail to revive its yield after a couple of years of trying, an old fruit tree will reward you with blossoms and shade until you decide to replace it.

Two factors have basic bearing on fruit production. One is chemical. All tree fruits grow best in soil just slightly acid, from pH 5.5 to 6.5. (Some bush fruits, such as blueberries, require pH 4.8 to 5.0.) Testing your soil's acidity and adjusting it with lime or aluminum sulfate is thus a must for fruit culture.

The other basic factor is germinal. Some trees are self-fruitful; that is, their own pollen can fertilize their own pistils. Nearly all the citrus fruits, most peaches, nectarines, and figs, and all the sour cherries, quinces, apricots, and European plums are self-fruitful. All they need is bees to help them bear.

Most apples and all the pears, sweet cherries, and Japanese and American plums are self-unfruitful. They require the proximity of another variety from their family, and not just any variety will do. For example, Bartlett and Seckel pears cannot pollinate each other. Winesap, Baldwin, and Northern Spy apples are poor pollinators of other varieties as well as impotent among themselves.

These intimate relationships oblige new home owners to have an orchardist identify their mature fruit trees at the outset. In most communities, a county agriculture agent is at your service, free. He may find that an old Macintosh or Jonathan that used to pollinate your other apple trees has died or been cut down, and you need a new one. Your Bartlett and Seckel pears may be fruitless because they never did have a Gorham, Bosc, or other good pollinator to help them out.

Two other causes of fruit trees failing to bear are effects of temperature and timing. If the thermometer drops to the lower twenties after blossoms open, expect no fruit. Contrariwise, without passing through at least 700 hours of weather colder than 450 F. in the course of a winter, hardy fruit trees will lack the stimulus to break out of dormancy. Their spring growth, blossoms, and fruit will be delayed and irregular. This accounts for northern fruits doing poorly below Mason and Dixon's line except at high elevations. Fine apples are grown around Winchester, Virginia, elev. 725 ft., but not around Annapolis, Maryland, at sea level.

Once they are brought into or restored to bearing, the pruning, feeding, and spraying of fruit trees vary little with their age. Hence our further discussion of fruit production will apply to all ages. So let us begin with the selection, planting, and rearing of young stock, which is what determined owners will come to eventually. And, since this book seeks to serve primarily those new owners whose land is limited, let a distinction be drawn between standard-size and dwarf trees, in favor of the latter.

Standard-size apple and pear trees must be spaced 30 to 40 feet apart. Dwarf apples and pears can be grown at half those intervals or even less, as close as 6 or 8 feet in rows spaced 15 feet. Standard trees take from four to seven years to start bearing. Dwarfs take only two or three years. The standards are hard to keep less than twenty feet high, with consequent difficulties in pruning, spraying, thinning the fruit and harvesting it. Dwarfs are easily kept within arm's reach.

Apples and pears are the fruits chiefly grown as dwarfs in America. Peach, plum, cherry, apricot, and nectarine are less available in dwarfed sizes, but standard trees of these stone fruits (except sweet cherries) can be kept semidwarf by watchful pruning. Apart from its handiness and economy of space, a strong attraction of dwarf culture is the decorative function to which dwarfs can be put. They can be grown "cordon" (single stem with spurs but no branches) in a close line to form a hedge; or formed in "espalier" patterns, flat against a trellis or wall.

The only drawbacks to dwarfs are that they cost about twice as much as standards and bear about half as long.

Creating tiny fruit trees by grafting or budding desired species onto dwarfing rootstock is a fascinating and not difficult hobby for people with the patience to undertake it. Instruction on how it is done is contained in some of the textbooks on fruit culture listed at the end of this chapter. But beginners would do well to familiarize themselves first with dwarfs bought from nurseries. For such purchases a few guidelines will be useful.

Dwarf apple trees used to be created in America (and still can be) by grafting thrifty scions (segments of one-year wood, with buds) to rootstock found stunted naturally in the wild. The Paradise and Doucin, grown to type in England and France, were considered the best wild stocks for dwarfing. Nowadays a strain called East Mailing, perfected in England, is preferred. The EM types are numbered to distinguish their characters. EM II grows a semi-dwarf about three-fourths standard size. EM VII is two-thirds standard, little larger than a standard peach tree. EM VIII is widely used as an interstem piece (grafted between a root and scion of the desired species) to produce a full dwarf, sometimes called Clark. EM IX, a rootstock, is considered the best EM dwarfer of all. It produces a tree that will not, with proper pruning, exceed six or eight feet in height after twenty years and will bear a bushel a year.

Since 1952, American nurseries have sold dwarf apple trees called Mailing Mertons—obtained by crossing EM strains with the Northern Spy. MM strains are pest-resistant, well anchored. They yield early and heavily. They are numbered from 101 to 115, with Nos. 104, 106, 109, and 111 so far the most promising.

All dwarf pears are grown on quince roots, preferably the Angers quince, but the popular Bartlett pear needs a Beurre Hardy interstem below its scion for best results.

Dwarf peaches and nectarines are grown on roots of the smaller plums. Americana and myrobalan are the usual plum rootstocks. St. Julien or mazzard are even better if you can find a nursery that uses them.

Dwarf plums are worked on myrobalan stocks. Americana dwarfs plums smaller than myrobalan and transplants better, but since the scion tends to overgrow the rootstock it becomes top-heavy and blows over more easily. Sand cherry, a wild plum, produces the smallest dwarfs of all.

Planting fruit trees, standard or dwarf, begins with the careful selection and preparation of their ground. Full sunlight and adequate space are the prime requisites. Next come proper soil acidity, reasonable fertility, good drainage. Organic material (manure or sod) should be worked into the ground a year before planting. Weeds or cover crops should be turned under in subsequent spring cultivations.

Do not put manure or fertilizer into the holes at planting time, which comes in October-November or before growing time in spring. All fruit stock is planted bare-root as whips one or two years old. Dig a hole overlarge for the root system and plant to the same depth as the tree grew in the nursery, making sure that the graft union is above ground. Put topsoil in the bottom of the hole, sift more in over the roots, and fill with a mixture of topsoil and manure or compost. Gently soak the soil over the roots (don't sprinkle the tree) and keep it moist through the first growing season. A saucer depression around the trunk will help keep moisture in place through the summer, but mound the soil for winter, adding mulch, to guard against deep frost and heaving.

To help young fruit trees reach maturity, in March-April broadcast a "complete" fertilizer (5-10-5 or 8-8-8) two feet away from the trunk and well out beyond the branch spread. On poorer soils, repeat this in June-July. One pound of fertilizer per year of tree age, up to five pounds, is your rule of thumb. A supplementary ration of high-nitrogen may be given if the tree's new growth is much less than twelve inches by August. But too much nitrogen will make fruit trees grow more wood than fruit, and it causes dwarfs to overgrow. Good mulching materials (to be turned under or raked away in spring) are straw, sweet or salt hay, lawn clippings, leaf mold.
Pruning of apples and pears begins on the branchless whips you buy at planting time. Cut these back to about 36 inches and remove any injured roots. If your whips are two-year-olds they may have started branching. Retain and shorten the best sideshoots. Leave a single top leader untouched. After the first growing season, in late autumn or just before spring, take off all spurs and branches below 24 inches. Remove also any branches angling upward from the trunk at less than sixty degrees. At the top, retain only one central leader, removing any that form Y's.

After the second growing season, prune only for structural correction. Upon your moderation will depend the arrival of fruit. When it does arrive, its weight will open and spread the tree's top, especially in apples. Pears are more upright in habit, so don't try too hard to make them expand. After bearing has begun, annual growth will lessen and with it the necessity to prune. Taking off whole branches to prevent too-dense heads is better than fussy twig-whittling. A trick to hasten bearing in woody branches is to girdle them with a knife-cut about one-eighth inch wide, made full-circle or spiral around the branch. This impedes the downward flow of enriched sap, forcing it back into outer fruit wood instead of deeper xylem.

Yearling peach, nectarine, and apricot whips will already have small branches. Cut all these to spurs^ leaving only two or three buds on each. After this an open-center "wine glass" habit will develop naturally, which you can encourage by removing any suckers or branches that grow inward. These stone fruits produce on wood that grew the previous season. They therefore can and should be cut back, after their third year, more severely than apples or pears. Standard trees should be kept below fifteen feet in height. Dwarf peaches can be kept below six feet.

Sour cherries are pruned like peach trees except that some side branches are left on yearlings to become permanent, and the lowest tier, of three or four limbs, should be eighteen inches or less above the ground. They grow slower than peaches, taller and more twiggy. These characteristics call for corrective pruning, but, on the whole, far less work than peaches require. A main object is to keep sour cherries' heads open so that fruit will ripen.

More than any other fruit, cherries are stolen by birds. The lower you keep your trees, the more easily you can protect them with netting.

Sweet cherries tend to grow big and upright. Prune them as you would apples or pears, but let the lowest branches start at eighteen inches from the ground, the highest at not more than four feet. Remove all central verticals except the main one, which you can keep heading back to fifteen feet or less.
Plums grow upright or spreading, according to variety, and can be pruned like peaches in general.

The stone fruits need more careful cultivation around them than the pomes do, but never use weed killers near them (or near any valued tree).

All young fruit trees are prey to mice, rabbits, and other rodents. Screen them around with hardware cloth reaching four inches underground and up to the lowest branches, two inches away from the trunk.

Thinning their fruit is necessary on all hardy (northern) fruit trees except the cherries to obtain the best size and texture. This should be done after the trees have made their own natural drop of excess immature fruit. Thin plums to four inches apart, peaches and nectarines to six inches, apples and pears to eight inches.

Spraying fruit trees is the most arduous, exacting part of their care. The list of insects, fungi, and bacteria that beset them is interminable. In some years, commercial growers have to spray fifteen or twenty times to save their crops. Home owners can "get by" with an all-purpose fruit spray from the hardware store, but cannot expect presentable yields without putting on, at the right times, a minimum of eight applications for pomes and nine for some stone fruits, using ingredients designed for definite purposes. Fortunately, the chief damage to different fruits is wrought by the same or similar pests, and at about the same times. Thus the moments and types of mandatory sprays can be condensed for thorough-working amateurs, in tabulations as follows:

APPLES, PEARS                

Times                              Materials                               Targets
Dormant                          Dinitro cresol                         Aphids
(buds not yet green)                                                     
Delayed Dormant            Miscible oil                            Scales, mites, red
(buds green)                                                                 bugs
Delayed Dormant            Captan                                  Scab
plus one week                                                             
Petal-Fall                         Lead arsenate plus                 Codling moth, circu-
                                       captan                                   lio, leaf roller, scab
Petal-Fall plus one           Lead arsenate plus                 Codling moth, circu-
week (first cover              captan                                   lio, leaf roller, scab,
spray)                                                                           caterpillars
Seventeen, 31, and          Lead arsenate plus                 Codling moth, circu-
41 days after Petal-         captan                                   lio, leaf roller, scab,
Fall                                                                               caterpillars, sooty
                                                                                    blotch, fruit spot

Dormant                          Ferbam                                 Leaf curl
(before buds swell)
Pink-bud                         Sulfur                                    Brown rot
Blossom                          Sulfur                                    Brown rot
Fruit-husk split                 Sulfur plus malathion              Brown rot, circulio 
Ten days after Fruit-        Sulfur plus malathion              Brown rot, circulio,
husk split (first cover                                                     scab
spray)
Fifteen days later Sulfur    Brown rot, scab
(second cover spray)
 
Times                           Materials                      Targets
Ten days later               Sulfur                           Brown rot, scab
(third cover spray)
A week or so later,       Sulfur plus DDT            Brown rot, scab, Jap-
or just after a heavy                                          anese beetle, Ori-
rain (two final cover                                          ental fruit moth
sprays)

CHEBRTES AND PLUMS (also Nut Trees)

Dormant                          Ferbam                                 Black knot
(before buds swell)
Fruit-husk split                 Ferbam or lead arse-             Circulio, brown rot,
                                       nate and captan                     leaf spot
Ten days after Fruit-        Ferbam or lead arse-             Circulio, brown rot,
husk split                         nate and captan                     leaf spot
When fruit colors             Ferbam or captan                  Brown rot, leaf spot
Quickly after harvest        Ferbam or captan                  Leaf spot
Harvest plus 18 days       Ferbam or captan                  Leaf spot

Note: The last two sprays are not essential for plums or for nut trees.

All the citrus fruits came from the Orient by way of Asia Minor, the Mediterranean, and Spain-Portugal. Columbus took them to the West Indies whence munching Indians spread them wild, and sweating settlers cultivated them, clear across the warm zones of the Americas. Crossbreeding has evolved many hybrids with exotic names and characteristics, some of them hardy enough to be grown as far north as Wilmington, Delaware; Memphis, Tennessee; and Riverside, California. Home owners south of these points and in Hawaii have a wide range of species to experiment with, and vast stores of local lore to draw on for advice.

Growing one's own oranges, limes, lemons, and grapefruit (so called because they grow in clusters) is a pastime throughout the sunshine belt almost as popular as golf, shuffleboard, and girl-watching. Embraced in the modern citrus spectrum are such surprise fruits as the "tangelo," a cross combining the tangerine's loose skin with much of the grapefruit's size, and the tastes of both. The "lime-quat" is a lime-kumquat mongrel that is delicious raw or in marmalade.

As a group, the citrus fruits are easy to plant and cultivate under average conditions of soil moisture and fertility. Once shaped as youngsters, they require little pruning throughout their lives which can outrun their owners'. The bacteria, fungi, and insects which attack the citrus families are more easily controlled by spraying than is the case with pomes and stones. Fumigation with hydrocyanic gas (under tents, at night) can give protection for up to three years, but this had best be done by professional operators, and supplemented by sprays to combat certain insects ordinarily controlled by beneficent agents which the fumigant wipes out.

Almost what coconuts are to the tropics, Chestnuts used to be to the United States east of the Mississippi—an abundant, never-failing sweetmeat growing wild throughout the land. Their verdant, prickly burrs in clusters of three would ripen to gold in autumn, and the first frosts would split them open to spill out plump brown kernels, two and four to a burr. Chestnut timber, close-grained and durable, was valued highly in building and for fenceposts.

About fifty years ago a virulent, fungoid bark disease called Endothia parasitica swept through the chestnut stands. Remaining today of this once great species are only isolated survivors and, here and there, stubborn offshoots of the old rootstocks which struggle into bearing and then die off again, blighted by endothia, for which no control has been found.

Preserving the American chestnut by nursing along its few blight-resistant remnants and creating hardy hybrids on exotic rootstocks is a continuing crusade among U.S. arborists. The introduction of European and Oriental substitutes has also been undertaken, with more success. New home owners hankering for a nut crop in their grounds will not go wrong in planting young Chinese chestnuts, of which most varieties will yield in their sixth or seventh year. The nuts are slightly larger and less flavorful than our old Americans were, but they improve on the huge, mealy, somewhat cloying Italian and Spanish types that people use for turkey stuffing.

The second most satisfying American nut was and remains the black walnut, but not every one has the fortitude to crush off its juicy rind, which stains indelibly, and then crack and pick the convoluted meat out of the rough, iron-hard shell. Walnut fanciers are better off buying young English (actually Persian) walnut stock and cultivating it to fruition in eight or ten years. The rinds are less troublesome, the shells papery in comparison with wild walnuts, and the fat meats easier to extricate.

A close and prolific wild cousin of the black walnut is the butternut, but finding this species in your new grounds is no cause for excitement. The nuts are inferior, the trees short-lived softies and slow to bear.

The hickories are a third walnut relative, deliciously flavorful. Their rinds split off handily in sections, but the meat in their dense, tight shells is almost impossible to pick out whole. The shagbark fruit is bigger than the smoothbark, which is deprecated as pignut. As shade trees, native hickories deserve ground-space for their rugged symmetry, but they are not worth buying or cultivating. Only squirrels, and epicures of utmost patience, truly enjoy hickory nuts.

Pecans are one more member of the walnut family, indigenous from lower Indiana to Mexico. In Texas they grow as forests. Pecans have been extensively refined and cultivated throughout the South, where they are an important money crop. Long-lived and vigorous, pecans want rich soil and lots of growing room—sixty feet between trees.

Hazelnuts (Filberts) grow on a bush or small tree, akin to the birches. Unsuccessful commercially except on the northern Pacific Coast, hazel is hardy and fruitful enough to be a desirable addition to private collections anywhere. The nuts, which have a faintly aromatic taste like no other, crack neatly and store well.

Almonds are of two kinds, flowering and nut-bearing. They belong to the plum tribe, and the flowering types are hardy as far north as Massachusetts. Nut-bearing almonds do well in California but scarcely anywhere else in the United States.

Coconut palms are limited on the north by the latitudes of Charleston, Dallas, and Los Angeles, parallels 330 and 340. They need rainfall or irrigation of more than three feet per annum to round out and fill with "milk" their familiar fibered fruits, big as the head of a chimpanzee after you chop off the three-sided husk.
Coconuts are a unique species and hence, necessarily, entirely self-fruitful. No other nut is dependably so, and two or more varieties of each should be planted together to ensure pollination.

Nut trees are subject to the same types of parasites as cherries and plums and should be similarly sprayed. (See table, p. 114.) Chewing insects do not attack the nuts proper, but by defoliating the trees they rob the nuts of nourishment and stunt the meats. Walnuts are susceptible to several leaf spots but to none that cannot be controlled easily with fungicides. The pruning of nut trees is about the same as for cherries and, similarly, you need not thin off their crops.

Dependable texts on fruit and nut culture include:

Fruits for the Home Garden, U. P. Hedrick (Oxford University Press); Modern Fruit Science, Norman Franklin Childers (J. B. Lippincott Co.); Dwarf Fruit Trees, Lawrence Southwick (The Macmillan Co.); Cultivation of Citrus Fruits, H. Harold Hume (The Macmillan Co.); Evergreen Orchards, William Henry Chandler (Lea & Febiger); Nut Grower's Handbook, Carroll D. Bush (Orange Judd Publishing Co.); Subtropical Fruit Pests, Walter Ebeling (University of California Press).

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