Planning Brand New Mini-Orchard in Zone 7

I took a look at your revised list and I have some recommendations.

First I think if I give you a general overview of diseases, insects and spraying my advice will make more sense. Some things I have left out and others I have simplified but when you’re learning all this stuff it can be confusing and a bit overwhelming. I will try to minimize that as much as I can.

Diseases- usually you spray a fungicide but you may spray something else

Insects- you can bag the fruit, spray Surround (a clay), or spray an insecticide

Spray schedule

When the trees leaf out in the Spring- spray a fungicide

At petal fall- spray a mixture of fungicide and insecticide

Two weeks after petal fall- spray a mixture of fungicide and insecticide

Above is a basic spray schedule. For stone fruits it is common to add the two sprays below.

One month before harvest- spray a fungicide

Two weeks before harvest- spray a fungicide

These two later sprays will help control brown rot which is probably your most important enemy for stone fruit.

Okay right away you see you will be spraying the trees 3-5 times a year depending on the weather. In some years rain and high winds will reduce the number of sprays you can do. Other years, when drought is present you may be able to reduce the number of sprays because brown rot is less of a threat in drought years.

For apples you may be able reduce the number of sprays to zero if you bag the fruit and you pick apples that are highly resistant to the local diseases. Or reduce the number of sprays to 1 or 2 with just highly resistant apples trees.

Here is the tricky part. Most apples with some exceptions don’t have wide range disease resistance so you need to know in advance what are the strongest disease threats before you plant anything. This creates a catch 22 problem. In the beginning when you first plant trees you don’t know what the local diseases are. You have to make educated guesses and hope for the best. You can increase your chances of success by planting at least some apples trees that have wide range disease resistance.

For stone fruits there is very little resistance to brown rot. In cherries not only is there very little resistance to brown rot, cherries crack badly in heavy rainfall which makes the brown rot problem worse. So brown rot resistance and cracking resistance are very useful traits to have if you can get them.

So now for some recommendations-

Apples

Enterprise and Goldrush are very good. Arkansas Black and Winesap are good. Red Gravenstein is a poor choice. The others I am not familiar with. Others that would be good choices- William’s Pride, Pristine, Ashmead’s Kernel, Pitmaston Pineapple, and Winecrisp.

Scott’s bullet proof list is worth looking at too. It’s filled with apples resistant to Summer rots and fireblight. Scott is in Maryland and his experiences should be readily translatable to your local conditions.

Peaches

I would suggest trying to add Glohaven and Elberta. Both have some resistance to brown rot. Glohaven is also resistant to bacterial spot, produces big peaches, and in years that a late frost wipes out your crop you will usually still get some peaches.

Sweet cherries

Black Pearl and Black Tartarian are good choices. The rest are poor choices. I would strongly recommend Black Gold and White Gold. All of pearl series (Black Pearl, Burgundy Pearl), etc. are good. Emperor Francis is good and so is Black York. I would get trees on Krymsk 5,6,7 or Gisela 5, 12 if you can. Gisela 6 or mazzard if you can’t.

For more sweet cherry info look at the Eastern cherry thread.

Also consider planting a tart cherry or two. They are resistant to brown rot and if fully ripe they are sweet/tart and can be eaten fresh.

I have no experience with Pears and Apricots.

Also like most forum members I am pretty frugal. So I commend your goal of buying all your trees from one vendor and saving money. But I have been too frugal (too cheap) sometimes and it’s back fired on me. It’s important to get the right trees on the right rootstocks and sometimes that means buying from more vendors or paying more or both.

I would look at Mehrabyan Nursery, Grandpa’s Orchard, Cummin’s Nursery and Heritage Farm and Fruit Trees. Yes, you can always replant or graft trees over but it usually takes years to figure out the tree isn’t suitable for your conditions. You never get that time back and you don’t save money. The initial tree purchase price is a very small part of the cost of an orchard and it is a one time cost if you pick good trees. If you want to experiment plant a mix of trees. A good mix of sure things, moderate risk and high risk trees. Many of us on the forum learned thru hard experiences and a bit of heart breaking failures. You don’t have to.

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