These wild American Persimmons (Rich Tooie) are in my sisters side yard…
When she bought her home in the 80s.. they were there and she told me they were about the same size as they are today.
Her yard was previously a cow pasture… so These trees grew many years initally in a cow pasture. They built the subdivision homes around them.
They are both double trunk trees and they are quite close together.
They produce fruit like this.
TNHunter
The only trees where rootstock matter a lot on spacing is apples and also pears on quince vs not. All the others don’t make a big enough difference, there can be as much difference from the soil in that particular location or the variety itself as from the stock.
For apples on dwarf you can easily do 4’ spacing, and for pears on quince you can do 6’.
What about standard size apple and pear? What spacing have you been able to get away with?
Or instead of chainsaw, a shovel. I’ve had pretty good luck moving trees up to 5 years old. They often sulk for a season, but once roots get going again they seem fine. I have done this with apples and peaches. I have done this in early spring. It requires two people and at least a solid wheelbarrow.
I have found that for semi-dwarf apples and pears, 8 foot spacing works well. That’s been too tight for peaches. That being said, I have recently planted a few apple trees as close as 5 feet- I’m planning to keep them pruned quite small, and alternating open center and modified central leader shapes. I have also recently planted two plums in one hole. The “Small Fruit Tree” approach makes a lot of sense for our needs- in a good year we already have more fruit than we can eat at times. For me, I’m trying to get several edible fruits from each of the dozens of varieties I’ve grafted, after sharing (involuntarily) with the bugs, birds, bears and squirrels.
Yaya Orchard near Lyons CO has some small trees behind their barn that are 4-5’ tall, about 6’ spread and trunks 5”+. They are quite productive. That’s my goal!
I’ve gotten away with 6’ but would not really recommend that.. more like 12’ is best. The closer they are the more work it is to prune them to stay in line. I don’t let any tree get higher then about 14’, that’s how high my pole pruners can reach from the ground.
If you got space, moving a tree is an option. My goal is to have some space someday with land to spare. But lotto won’t cooperate! It is hard to imagine that I could buy trees and never have to worry about where I am going to put them.
More or less all my future planting is going to be 2 trees to a hill or 3 trees to a hill experiments. And even then, I can only do a few of them…no space! I’ve got about 2/3 an acre. On it will be 53 fruit trees and 26 potted figs in 15-gallon pots. There may be 3 in-ground figs as well. I will have to see how they did from the winter. 9 of those 53 trees will be multi-tree plantings in the style of Dave Wilson.
Multi-Planting Strategies | Dave Wilson Nursery
Recommendations for Multiple Planting | Dave Wilson Nursery
No garden, I gave it up about 5 years ago and planted trees there. Even if no trees, I would have given it up. Grass, weeds and insects took it over. You can’t wildcraft a garden in the Rustbelt. I do have a few containers on the deck for herbs.
I could fit a few more trees on the property except for underground utility lines and the neighbor’s huge trees shade a portion of the land. If there was no neighbor issues or utility lines, then maybe another 8 trees could be planted.
Here are peaches on side of the house. Cable company had to put in a new cable. It got hit from a T-Post. Even after flags were marked. That is the issue with space!
They don’t get great sun, but they still grow fine and produce fruit. Brick wall helps them with heat.
Sun at 2.30.
By 4.30 it is all shade. But as trees grow the tops get some sun. I was worried they would not grow from lack of sun. I let the trees tell me instead of quitting before I started. But I got a little money to throw at it. If you are broke, maybe you cannot experiment like this. I’m old, and the only thing to do with the $, if I don’t want to experiment, is to leave it behind for someone else to spend for me. If you got the $, don’t be afraid to experiment.
If you are short on space, talk to your neighbor and ask if you can plant fruit trees on their land and share the fruit. I had success with that with 1 neighbor. But I planted 7 untried trees and nothing produced for various reasons. Too shady, black knot, storm took one down, etc. There is only 1 Zestar apple left and it has never produced one apple to ripening in 13 years. Just a handful of apples that go nowhere. I did not have the nerve to ask neighbor again to replant years later after I made lots of holes in their grass with only stumps to show for it.
Moral of the story…
Don’t experiment on neighbor’s land. Only plant tried and true cultivars.
2/3 of an acre seems like quite a bit of land to me
Crater, it is all relative. Some fruit tree growers are happy with a handful of trees. I like a handful or two of each variety of fruit tree. Others want an orchard of the same cultivar. When I was growing up in L.A., we only had barely room for 2 fig trees.
I see some fig collectors that have hundreds of potted figs. I hope to get by with 26 potted figs to satisfy me. And a lot of that is experimentation. I will let the figs tell me which ones to keep. Maybe I will end up with only 15 - 20…dunno. Maybe I will like all 26.
I can attest that standard size apple and pear need more than 10 feet of space between. I bought a house where the previous owner planted standard apple and and pear on 8’x8’ and 10’x10 spacing. They grow straight up trying to outcompete the neighbor and they don’t have enough space to grow branches.
In the 8’x8’ block I had to remove 2 rows between to renovate the remaining ones. The trees are approx 25-35 years old and 16 feet between wasn’t actually enough.
In the 10’x10’ block I tried to keep most of them by selectively removing them in kind of a diagonal pattern but I have recently made the decision to get more brual.
There are several threads, if you search, where people tried to do dwarfing things with apples on semi-standard rootstock and they were unable to get them to produce till they let them grow out a bit. I think you could take something like EMLA111 and keep it to 10’-12’ feet but I don’t know why you would when you could get a more precocious rootstock that is happier at that size.
Im going to try this actually lol. Someone just bought my neighbors house so i feel like theyll be more open to receiving fruit trees because they are new. Lmao.
Have you been able to do anything like that 10-12’ spacing with pear on OHxF97, OHxF333, or OHxF87? I’d be concerned about quince root stock here just because of the fire blight pressure. If it got damaged somehow and infected… caput!
The 10-12’ is what I usually do for standard stocks.. nothing to “get away with” there, it’s easy to do with some experience. For 333 I am closer than 10’, it’s more like 8’. Just make sure nothing gets taller than 12-14’.
@scottfsmith, Just revisiting this conversation from last year. If you don’t mind my asking, what’s the closest you’ve had success with for apples/pears on a semi-dwarf rootstock such as M111 or OFxH87?
I’d probably make 8’ my minimum now for MM111. Success is a relative term, you can make almost any spacing work but it gets progressively more challenging to prune the closer things get. If I were planting new MM111 I would make them 10’ or 12’ apart.
They have to grow somewhere. In my experience 22’ is not too far apart for semi-dwarf trees. They will eventually grow against each other. Gives room for pruning, riding lawnmower travel, picking, etc. I dislike having the very ends of limbs from adjoining trees touching.
Don’t some growers advise against pruning the very ends of limbs when its unnecessary? The only time I do it is to keep the fruit off the ground.
I think a lot of it is going to depend on how much pruning you’re willing to do.
I just planted 6 apple seedlings at 2ft spacing in row which I’ll cut down to just a single tree in a couple of years. The spacing is 12ft between the row and 15ft in row. Since it’s currently like 6 inches tall, I figure it will be enough space for me to train it as necessary. The plan is to create a multi-grafted monstrosity haha and I wanted the size of a full apple. Will be very interested to see how it goes and they have already demonstrated surprising amounts of individuality already.
Thank you, @scottfsmith . That saved me from writing the nursery and cutting down my order. I don’t want fewer apples but I was worried I’d regret planting them all.
(Do you have a picture of m111 on 12’ or closer spacing in your orchard and if so do you mind sharing it?)
So you are growing them in place and then grafting them together?
