Right-sizing the fruit garden

General Fruit Growing
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OK, I’m about a month away from my 75th birthday. I moved to my current location 14 years ago, and I’ve spent much of the time here creating a big fruit garden. Not surprisingly, I produce much more fruit than I can eat. Or my wife, my family, and my friends. Sometimes I even overwhelm the local food pantry. Yesterday I brought them ~200 pounds of apples and pears.

So far the journey has been largely about experimenting to see what works – what grows well here, what tastes good. As a result, there’s a lot of redundancy – 77 potted fig trees, 15 semi-dwarf apples, 8 American persimmons, 5 red raspberries. . . . There’s also a lot of work. Too much work. My body is rebelling. And my brain is asking, “Maybe today you should just take a walk or go fishing?”

So, the time has come to right-size. This will be an extended enterprise – the right size at 75 is not the right size at 85, assuming I get there. I’m writing focused on now, partly as an exercise in thinking out loud about my decisions, partly to solicit thoughts from other growers in similar conditions.

Here are the planned steps in the next year or so:

  1. Reduce the collection of 77 potted figs by 1/3. To accomplish this, I am donating 25 fig trees to Blithewold, an arboretum here in Bristol RI, now building a beautiful (and big) greenhouse. It is a happy coincidence – they want the all trees now that they have the greenhouse; and I want to find them a home. And I can live with only ~50 trees. :slight_smile:

  2. Reduce the collection of American persimmons, 5 varieties on 9 trees. This decision comes after reaching a variety of relevant conclusions. First, American persimmons taste good – but not as good as hybrids. Actually, not even as good as apples, which ripen at the same time. Second, American persimmons are difficult to harvest in optimal condition. Most of mine are cracked under the calyx with invasion of spoilage organisms. The skin is frail, so damage is common. The fruit detaches at the calyx when ripe, so it plops to the ground. Finally and most importantly, it doesn’t store well. I can keep apples for months, pears and Asian persimmons for weeks, American persimmons only for days.

I get that if I were more inventive or industrious then I might find a use for hundred of American persimmon fruits. But I’m not. So I’ve decided to top-work 6 youngish American persimmon trees to hybrids. Hopefully KSDS doesn’t kill them. I will probably remove entirely my American persimmon franken-tree, making room for somethin else. It was a pruning accident waiting to happen anyway.

At minimum, I will keep one tree. FWIW, the variety that seems best to me growing here is H63A.

  1. Reduce the space devoted to cane berries. I love red raspberries especially, and also blackberries and black raspberries. But I probably grow 3x what I can use. I’m going to cut the cane berries by 1/3, then move the tomatoes and peppers into that space. Maybe also add some cut flowers.

What I’m not touching so far: Apples, pears, pawpaws, Chinese chestnuts, mulberries.

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A bit of a tangent, but you might consider working with a local pig rancher to paddock-shift a pig through your fruit garden in the fall to eat all the fallen fruit and fertilize the soil, then you could have fruit-flavored pork for Thanksgiving or Christmas.

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I went through a similar phase of evaluation a few years back. Much of my crop is for sale though. What I did is start looking at how much work they were and how hard it was to get good fruit from that variety. In the end my goal was to get maximum quality output for the least amount of work and money. Here is what’s played out so far, but is ongoing. Maybe something will be useful to you.

Stone fruit- Here they are a massive effort and require a lot of expensive sprays. I cut their population down and started creating franken trees. Just enough for friends and family.

Persimmon- So many of them just don’t have much if any at all variation in taste. Mainly the non-astringent asians and many of the Americans. So if they all taste the same do you really need them? Used a couple as franken trees to test new varieties. They are a for sale crop so only a few astringents may be removed later.

Apples (Main crop for sale, so unable to reduce the population.)-Really hard to control rots and insects here. Started to graft over to more bullet proof varieties as needed. What use is it if you have to fight to get good fruit out of it. Made a few franken trees to test new varieties.

Pears (Main crop for sale, so unable to reduce the population.)-Not really to many problems with those. Grafted most everything over to varieties that did not need any fridge to ripen. Just don’t have a commercial fridge.

Jujube, figs, pawpaw, ect.-Don’t need anything and left alone.

Nut trees also were left alone. I have a preference for them because the fruit do not need to be dealt with for a while.

If I were just in it as a hobby I would have a bunch of franken trees that provided enough for family and friends.

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Wow, I thought you were younger than me.

I so far have cut all bush cherries (nobody cares about the fruit and too much trouble to process), cut all Chinese hawthorns (disease and insect magnets), cut one multigrafted cherry (cankers), and finally cut all my pawpaws, including the last one grafted with about 20 varieties (nobody likes them, can’t eat, can’t give, can’t store).

I have also reduced fig in pots to only 5 trees. The rest were planted in the field.

I also agree with you that American persimmons are not worth the effort if one can grow the Asians.

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Nobody likes the pawpaws?!

Why not?

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I don’t know, something to do with the taste of pawpaw fruits?

My impression is that people tend to like it as a novelty but not fruit.

Unfortunately I figured it out after planting 20+ trees and years of collecting, grafting and harvesting many varieties.

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I like pawpaws. I harvested my 1st decent crop this year. Delicious.

Nevertheless I’m hoping for some varied flavors. Like if one of them actually tastes like mango I’ll be in heaven.

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The real difference in pawpaw flavors is between the white and orange varieties. Very noticeable difference. Things like mango flavor are very slight hints. The more noticeable thing between the varieties is the intensity of pawpaw flavor.

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See, if people were rebelling against the texture, that would make more sense.

The flavor aspect surprises me.

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