The internet was in need of orchard harvest time schedules, calendars, guides, or charts for USDA growing zone 4. So I made one. This shows the approximate harvest date / ripen time for your home orchard or backyard orchard produce grown in USDA Zone 4.
Tree and Shrub Orchard Harvest Window guide for Zone 4 Minnesota & Wisconsin:
- May: Ramps. Rhubarb (thru Sep). Foraging… Dames Rocket. Garlic Mustard 2nd year (1st white flowers in the woods). Black Locust flowers (other parts toxic). Ostrich Fern fiddleheads. Wintercress aka Yellow Rocket (distinguish from native look-alikes).
- June: Serviceberries (termed “Juneberry” in Minnesota) – subtypes include Allegheny, Downy, Apple, Saskatoon, Shadblow, Roundleaf. Strawberry. Nanking Cherry. Goumi Berry. Honeyberry. Sweet cherry.
- July: Summer-bearing Raspberry (“floricane”). Mulberry (everbearing Jul thru Sep). Sour Cherry. Bush Cherry. Gooseberry (into Aug). Early Blueberry. Currants. Lingonberry 1st crop. Bilberry. Black Walnuts if picked green without shell.
- July - August: Mid Blueberry. Earliest Plums and Cherry plum. Early Seaberry. Forage… Stinging Nettle.
- August: Peach. Apricot. Most hybrid & Japanese Plums. Early pear. Michigan Huckleberry. Buffaloberry. Silverberry. Forage… Amaranth.
- August - September: Fall Raspberry (“primocane”). European Plum. Early season apple. Hardy kiwi. Elderberry. Late Seaberry. Cornelian Dogwood. Wintergreen (berries hang into winter). Thimbleberry.
- September: Late Pear. Aronia (early Sep). Hazelnut. Hawthorn. Siberian C (specialty) Peach. Grapes (e.g. “prairie star”). Shipova. Butternut. Pine Nuts (thru Nov).
- September - October: Mid apple. Crabapple. Quince. Shagbark Hickory nuts. Butterheart aka Buartnuts (in WI not MN). Lingonberry 2nd crop (hangs thru Christmas).
- October: Late apple. Pawpaw. Apios americana (throughout summer). Nannyberry (fruit soft at leaf drop, persists hanging dry into snowfalls). Black Walnut (can collect to process later). Early and mid Chestnuts. Experimentally a limited set of early Persimmons if near zone 5. Hardy English Walnut (Carpathian/Manregion/Russian types).
- October - November: Northern Pecan.
- November: Late-season Chestnuts produce some years. Medlar. Highbush Cranberry (fruit persists hanging thru Feb). Forage… Garlic mustard 1st year rosettes (green until Thanksgiving like motherwort). Note: invasive Buckthorn seedlings hold green leaves Nov 01 thru Nov 10 after natives drop leaves, easiest time to pull.
- December: Eat the Medlar.
- January: Highbush Cranberry.
Additional things grown in Zone 5: Blackberry cultivated varieties (Aug-Sept). Goji Berry (Sept). Pawpaw (Sept). Che aka Mandarin Melon Berry (Oct, zone 5b). Almond varieties. Heartnut (not in MN). Service Tree. Cumberland Rosemary. Brasenia schreberi (Water-shield).
Notes:
Foraging above begins a list of edible “weeds” that weren’t intentionally planted.
Links to forum discussion threads covering specific cultivars appear below.
Annuals calendars:
The internet really needs this kind of document for each USDA growing zone. It’s not something found in a general-purpose book on Amazon because the publisher wouldn’t dedicate 10 pages to lists where 9 of 10 pages don’t apply to each consumer. A nursery wouldn’t have this because the varieties wouldn’t be coming from just one nursery – invasive weeds, the perennial rhubarb, and natives are in there with cultivated trees.
— ADVICE FOR THOSE NEWLY PLANTING IN ZONE 4 —
Before Planning:
Before planning your orchard or garden, learn what type of septic you have and where it is. Upper Midwest septic tanks often have septic “drain fields” aka “septic leach fields” that occupy 1200 (30 * 40) square feet of yard; only lawn grass (not even prairie plants) can be planted over it per design.
You could spend a whole 1-2 years preparing, maybe growing some early-producing fruit shrubs in containers set into the ground while you prepare.
In the year before planting:
- Buy an orcharding book and read it. The book will give general concepts on how to plan. Once you have the plants, each variety of plant has specific pruning needs that you will need to reference. Each has diseases and disease interactions with other plants. The book “The Fruit Gardener’s Bible” by Hill and Perry was written by someone who has lived in northern snowy climates where the ground freezes, unlike many other books.
- Examine sunlight patterns across the months (more below).
- Call 811 to have underground utilities marked. If not in busy spring season, ask them to take extra time to be more precise and estimate utility line depth. Photograph the paths. Digging with foot shovel or adze can pierce a gas home service line. So can fenceposts being pounded down.
- Take lots of measurements of your yard from fixed objects visible both in summer and in snow, including to the utility lines.
- Draw a scale layout of your yard and orchard on graph paper or diagramming software. Also draw underground utilities and any septic systems on your map.
- Fell or trim trees that block sunlight.
- Fell trees nearing end of life that would be harder, costlier to drop after new fruit trees are growing in the direction they need to fall.
- Examine your soil composition and learn how to augment it following instructions from orcharding books or local experienced gardeners.
- Examine your soil nutritional characteristics using test kits and instructions from orcharding books.
- Cottontail rabbits on snow can slip through the spacing of many deer fences up to 4’ above ground, so you will still need chickenwire or “hardware cloth” sometimes sold as “rabbit wire” to stop them if you use tree cages or a fence.
- Tree cages for a few trees or scattered trees can be nice. Tree sleeves 5’ or 6’ can be nice out in a wild setting for trees growing tall. Plan to seal tree cages in a way that can be re-opened for pruning, e.g. by 2-3 ties of wire on top, middle, bottom around a fencepost. You could build tree cages on the floor of your garage as early as Jan-Feb.
- For a home orchard with a dozen trees pruned to stay low at a height within reach of a stepstool or small ladder, the orchard tends to need a fence to 8’ to stop white tailed deer. Though their shoulders are only 4’ high, for fruit white tailed deer raise their neck and go on their hind legs or jump. Example building instructions: pound steel 8’ (or better 10’) T-posts 2 to 2.5 feet into ground (about 25% their length is standard depth for posts). Lash additional non-biodegradable garden posts or treated 2x4’s to the T-posts as an extension to complete posts standing a finished height >= 8’ above ground. Run fencing around the lower ~6’. Run wire at 8" to 12" intervals around above the fencing. To dissuade rabbits from burrowing underneath the fence, consider an extra 1-2’ of chickenwire laid as a carpet around the outside of the fence (they tend to give up if they cannot dig just in front of the fence), which can be staked down. Or alternatively bury 8-12" deep along the fence.
- You can make stakes for staking down your tree cages or chickenwire from 12 gauge galvanized steel wire, available on amazon. Or you make stakes from old wire coat hangers, particularly to get a feel for how deep you need a stake to go to hold into your soil.
- Visualizations of the sun position across the months is available at the website SunCalc.org. A table is at the US Navy Sun Altitude and Azimuth calculator, available via google. It will ask for your location and day of the year. Altitude is the angle of the sun measured above ground. Azimuth is the compass heading of the sun. In midsummer in the northern hemisphere on the longest days, the sun rises in the northeast, gets pretty high before it crosses a due east compass heading, and eventually clocks around to set in the northwest. But past September 21, the sun will generally only be in the south. The most intense light is still midday from the south. A full moon (only on the day of the full moon) imitates the sun’s path 6 months later. The length of a shadow on the ground cast by a tree is given by the formula: (tree height) / tan(sun altitude in degrees). The percent of tree’s height that its shadow casts in Minneapolis (45 degrees north latitude) at solar noon, on a day is: June 01 43%, July 01 42%, Aug 01 51%, Sep 01 75%, Oct 01 115%; so for example, a 65 ft tall maple tree on Sep 01 casts a shadow 65 ft * 75% = 48.75 ft horizontally. A smartphone App called Sun Position (paid version) uses your phone’s camera to show you a live estimate of the sun and moon position on a selected day. In my testing it was accurate to within a few degrees.
- The website weatherspark.com gives general climate info for major cities, including predominant wind directions and daylight hours across the seasons.
Other Notes:
- Tree sizes are written in this order: height x spread. So a Summercrisp pear allowed to grow out to 20x15’ looks a little taller and narrower than a ball.
- In the 2020’s it’s common for new home orchards to use a battery operated pole saw to maintain the height of fruit-trees within reach of a step stool or small ladder or just arm’s reach.
- What orcharding books from California call “Winter Pruning” or (worse) “January Pruning” is done in Zone 4 after sub-zero weather has completely passed, typically starting when ice starts softening on lakes and lows are in the 20’s Fahrenheit, around March 15-31. Pruning before then has a high risk of causing winter dieback.
- Winter dieback is when some parts of branches die back (often the very ends of new shoots), but sometimes entire branches or (worse) even the whole tree above ground (which would kill the graft on top of rootstock).
- Semi-dwarfing rootstock combined with late March pruning (see a reference book for pruning times) tends to work better than dwarfing rootstock in a Zone 4 home orchard setting for controlling height, if higher fruit yield and tree vigor is desired. (Dwarfing rootstock is acceptable if low maintenance is a primary concern.)
- Orchards will tell you the Dave Wilson backyard orchard techniques developed for zone 10 Southern California are not recommended for zone 4. However keeping trees short to within arm’s reach of pruners is becoming common for ease of harvesting, pruning, spraying. In that case, starting a open vase shorter than traditional (cutting new whips at knee high or 18-24” to force next year’s branches to start below) is becoming more common. For an open vase, ideally ~4 low branches are trained by gently tying to wire or stakes with soft cloth or yarn to grow out at 60 degrees from vertical in the very early years; competing branches are pruned to maintain the tree’s energy going primarily to the selected scaffold branches. During late winter pruning, the ends of branches are pruned back to a point 1 cm distal from outward/downward facing buds to encourage new branch growth to start there; not all trees will grow in an open vase shape, so check your reference book and re-read the pruning instructions.
- Some fruit (like Quince, certain Apple) are tip-bearing, so heading (pruning back) branch tips prevents fruiting during bearing years. Check a reference for each variety before pruning.
- In orchard catalogs, “Full Sun” usually means 6+ hours direct sunlight per day. Full-to-Part sun means 4-6 hours including afternoon sun. Part shade means 4-6 hours, mostly before midday. In Zone 4, some fruit that particularly needs 8+ hours direct sun a day: Apple, Pear, Cherry, Persimmon, Seaberry, Shipova, probably Peach (because so far north).
- A list of few plants that can produce light yield in broken dappled sunlight – usually native understory plants: Black Cap Raspberry, native Gooseberry, Michigan Huckleberry, wild lowbush Blueberry, Alpine Strawberry (Fragaria vesca), Rhubarb, Downy Serviceberry (A. arborea) for drier spots, Allegheny Serviceberry (A. laevis) for better fruit, Saskatoon Serviceberry (A. alnifolia) but highly susceptible to Cedar-Apple Rust, Canadian Serviceberry (A. canadensis).
- Nuts in zone 4’s cold are susceptible to delayed graft failure, so the U of MN recommends cuttings or layered clones.
- For those following a practice of planting nitrogen fixers, some lists. Edible Nitrogen Fixers: Buffaloberry, Silverberry, Goumi, Seaberry. Or use Bush Beans. Non-edible Nitrogen Fixers: Sundial Lupine (please only buy the midwest native type), some types of native prairie Indigos. Note Lead Plant puts tough roots in the ground.
- For each of your plants, check if it needs acidified soil. For Blueberries it’s well-known, but others do too such as: Lingonberries, Huckleberry, and (surprise!) Chestnut trees, and likely more.
As the orchardist, you are allowed to choose what shape you want your trees:
How to Grow Fruit Trees in Small Spaces
— SOME GREAT THREADS FOR PLANNING —
— GOOD VIDEOS —
Spacing and Sizing for Easy Maintenance in a Home Orchard, with Yield Exhibit; says 6’ high yields all the fruit a single home needs:
Making labels;
— VIDEOS AND TRAINING ON PLANTING, PRUNING, SOIL NUTRITION, AND MORE FROM MASTER GARDENER PROGRAMS —
I recommend reading a general orcharding book first to get a understanding of all the concepts before watching these videos specific to northern USA growing.
Wisconsin Master Gardeners (many orchard and gardening videos):
Minnesota Master Gardeners section on Fruit:
Minnesota Master Gardeners on all Gardening Topics:
Oregon Community Colleges:
Maintaining Multigrafted Trees:
— LINKS TO OTHER FORUM THREADS REGARDING ZONE 4 HOME ORCHARD CHOICES —
Apples:
Plums:
Also just this paragraph on rootstock hardiness:
Pears:
Apricots:
Cherries:
Haskap / Honeyberry:
Nuts:
Pine Nuts:
Pine Nut Trees that can grow in Minnesota and Wisconsin include: Korean Stone Pine (Pinus koraiensis), Swiss Stone Pine (Pinus cembra), Siberian Stone Pine (Pinus cembra ssp. Siberica), Siberian Cedar (Pinus siberica). A few Ponderosa pine are found in urban plantings in Minneapolis. Online sources say the native upper-Midwest trees have nuts so small they are not considered worth the effort of harvesting. Pinyon pine (Piñon pine, Pinus monophylla) does not grow in Minnesota nor in Wisconsin; Pinyon pine (Piñon pine) only grows natively in the American southwest.
Persimmons:
American Persimmons are at best an experimental trial in zone 4b such that you should expect a high rate of failure until proven otherwise. Persimmons have a native range south of zone 4b and would require winter protection to survive during their first 4-5 years, such as: burying under snow or wood chip mulch or straw; starting in a large pot on casters and wheeling into an attached garage for winter; starting in a greenhouse for a few years. Having a persimmon complete edible fruit in years with longer summers is still questionable due to the number of appropriate growing degree days, which is species specific and usually unknown. Seedlings are more likely to survive than grafted. Asian Persimmons do survive in the cold winters of zone 4 and 5 where winter temperatures can fall to -30 F and -20 F, respectively.
