Costco sold the small ones for $14, and now they’re selling large ones and the apricots have fruit on them! Burchell Nursery
3 Likes
OK, I’m convinced to check out Costco. I normally let my wife do the shopping there, while I go to grocery stores more frequently.
3 Likes
too bad costco doesn’t sell avocado trees; if they carried the desired variety, i’d definitely make a purchase.
they sell ginormous planters (about 40 gallons at least) at a decent price, but the aesthetics of these planters are a bit lacking.
awf tawpick: costco is full of the walking dead. the shoppers tend to have poor spatial awareness, and without remorse they’d mow down my children to reach an edible sample. and I notice a great many sample snarfers don’t even bother to say “thank you” to the servers, a sure sign of undeath.
5 Likes
I hope they identify the variety and not just the species. Moorpark cots are what bigboxes are likely to sell here and they are virtually worthless.
I haven’t seen any fruit trees at Costco here yet. I was just there last week, mostly herbs at this point.
Castelbrite and Tomcot
Tomcot should work relatively well for you. Haven’t seen Castlebrite. Seems they may be actually choosing regionally appropriate varieties. That is rare even at nurseries around here.
Actually, trying to search up info about Castlebrite, I can’t find anything to assure you it will perform well in your climate- nothing saying it is an especially cold-hardy apricot.
1 Like
Bob,
Please let me know what fruit trees you find at Costco in CT.
In MA, the one we often go to is in Dedham. Most years, it does not offer fruit trees. It offers blueberries in some years.
Our local homedepot sells potted passionfruit, guava, oranges, kumquat, lemons, limes, figs, etc right now if you want to look. I was just there today.
We have two Lowe’s and two HDs within 15 min drive. They don’t carry anything exciting. Last few years, the labels on apples and plums are Red Apple, Yellow Apple, Red Plum, Yellow plum, etc…
This year Lowe’s offers Rainer cherry!!! For the most part, varieties offered around my area is boring. Different locations have different things @Johnthecook has Lowe’s, HD that offer far more interesting apple varieties than yellow and red ones.
The Lowes near me is pretty boring, but it sounds like it is still better than yours. At least it has variety names. Frost and Contender peaches, Mac, Red Delicious, etc apples.
Home Depot on the other hand had a few trees that were genuinely interesting. I even bought one. It is a columnar apple called Tasty Red ‘UEB 3449-1’ from the Urban apples series (Eastern Europe scab resistant cultivar). Supposedly (at least from the label) it should grow to 10’ tall and stay 2’ wide and bear in the first year. I’m not sure about the last part, but it is pretty big and reasonably spurred, so I would bet on the 2nd year having a decent crop. Definitely pricey though. I’m a bit embarrassed to say that I paid $60 for it. But, I got to look through several and choose the one that I liked the shape/size of, so I figured that it was better than waiting 3-4 weeks and hoping they still had any left for the half price sale.
They (HD) had a few other nice trees that I liked, but didn’t get. Multi-graft plums, multi-graft apples, huge Asian plums, very nice Asian pears (I almost got a Chojuro, but held back). They also had some bare root trees, including apricots, peaches, etc.
1 Like
Your stores have interesting offers. This year our weather has been so cold. We were at Lowe’s last week. They did not put out fruit trees yet (or wecould not find where they displayed them!!)!
This weekend, we are supposed to have 3-4 days of good weather. They probably will bring out fruit trees then. But I will be busy grafting after having delayed it for almost 3 weeks because of weather.
Our HD had the columnar varieties, also multi grafted apples iwhich always look pretty poorly done. I’m sure H pad gets the bottom of the barrels. They also had some espalier. My biggest surprise was they had some Gravensteins and Arkansas Black apples.
I bought pink variegated lemon and Mexican guava. The pink variegated lemon looks so pretty!
Yeah, I did 2 apple grafts a couple of weeks ago, and have been waiting for the right day since. This is the latest spring in memory. I wonder if Goldrush will be able to ripen. Hopefully we will make up for it on the other end.
Do they have these sitting indoors? The problem with that (and the big box stores do this too), is that then you have stuff pushing growth way ahead of time, because instead of sitting out in the chilly early spring air, it’s sitting in the 70° warehouse.
Yes they are indoors, but it’s no problem now that the weather is warm.
I finally made it out to Costco on Friday evening (I like to go right before closing, as it is the only time it isn’t busy). They had a lot of plants, but only a few fruit trees. The semi-dwarf Golden Delicious were very large (like 8+ foot tall and 1+" caliper for $45) and the 4 variety cherries looked pretty nice too. Not a good fit for me, but if someone had a big open lawn and wanted to get a lot of tree for the $$, it looked good. The pot on the GD said 77L, which translates to 20 gallons.
Stew Leonards (a local grocery store) has a large garden section with quite a few trees as well, including Contender & Elberta peaches. Here’s a 3 tier espallier apple (Honeycrisp, Akane, and one other which I forgot) that looked pretty good.
5 Likes
That’s great that they started the espalier trees. I would buy those if I had the ideal place to put them.
My husband is at Costco now. He texted me pics of fruit trees there. It is the first time it carries anything interesting.
Apricot- Harcot and Moonpark,
Nectarine- Freckle Face;
Peach- Cresthaven and Summer Lady ( never heard of it)
Cherry- Skeena, Bing
Apple - Crispin, Cripps’ Pink.
Plum - Elephant Heart
I asked him to buy me the Freckle Face nect. It’s a Burchell tree that I want to try. Only $15 @tree. Home Depot trees are 39.99a per tree.
4 Likes