I cannot comment on apples and pears because I don't grow them, but I know people who grow them here in our state and who get good harvests some years though not necessarily every year.

Stone fruit grow well enough that I devote some space to them. However, our frequent late frosts often hit them long after they've bloomed and set fruit. Some years the big wind storms rip tiny fruit right off the trees and some years hailstones knock the fruit off the trees. Last year we harvested a little over 300 lbs. of peaches and plums from our trees. This year the late frosts, winds around 65 mph and several hail storms took out all the fruit so we got nothing. That's about par for the course. I expect a great harvest one year out of three, a modest harvest one year out of three and no fruit one year out of three.

How successful you'll be with any fruit tree in OK depends largely on your soil and your weather.

I'll link one of the OSU fact sheets on fruit trees in the home garden. Strawberries and blackberries produce more consistently in my part of the state than the fruit trees do.

I have serious reservations about next year being more normal. My limited experience with drought in Oklahoma is that it rarely ends at a convenient time....like before the next planting season arrives!

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Fruit Trees For The Home Garden

Dawn, I know what you mean about the spring storms. It seems that the year there is a real flush of heavy bloom is the same year that freezing rain will wipe it all out before it's had a chance to set. I shouldn't even mention our luck with the big hail storms so far, in case I jinx it. Wind is another story. If it can pick up the full-grown chickens and send them sailing away, what chance does a little fruit have against it? We've been on this place for 6 years and picked a few nice peaches one year out of the six. All the rest have fallen prey to nature in one form or another.

It's always been my experience that apples and pears need a few nights of a really good chill in early October to bring up the sugar in the fruit. Cold nights in our area would be at least a month late, if not more.

Maybe I'll rethink that. I'll see what happens with the trees I'm keeping alive, if anything, and look up local farmers who might have ripe fruit for sale. A half-lug would be more than we'd ever need anyway. Just count my blessings and treasure the years when we do have some of our own to pick.

Pat

My son and DIL live just a few miles south of the Kansas/Oklahoma state line and had a great apple harvest last year. The gave me less than one third of the apples and I did 49 jars of apple things, from half pints of jam to quarts of apple pie filling. The fruit was great and I don't think they have any on the tree this year. It's great when you get fruit in Oklahoma, but you can't depend on it.

I would love to have fruit trees, but I know the squirrels would get it all here. Earlier today I heard two corn farmers talking about their corn crops. Both said their sweet corn was a total loss this year. One said the squirrels had gotten all of his. The other said he was cutting his sweet corn tomorrow and baling it because there weren't enough ears in the patch to bother with. He had several acres. He also indicated that on his field corn, this was his worst year for 15 years.

There seems to be a lot of baled hay in the fields though. All of the rain in the spring helped with that and they got several cuttings before it got so hot and dry.

I also have dreams of a small orchard...some day. I have devoted the back half of my garden to my orchard space, and have apple trees, asian pears, plums, nectarines, etc etc. The trees are still very small at 1-4 years old (I've been adding a few each year), so it will likely be years before I know how well they do.

With apples, I know my trees got hit hard with cedar apple rust last year, so this year I had to spray with immunox when I saw the galls forming on the nearby cedar, and that seems to have done the trick. The trees are healthy, and I have one apple growing this year, lol.

Mulberries do great here. We have a huge tree in the front yard, and one that self-seeded (likely carried by birds?) into the back yard.

I think a cold hardy fig would do well here if properly protected during the winter. I have three CHicago cold hary figs that I insulated with hay and blankets and garbage bags last winter, and they still died back to the ground (but re-grew from the roots).

I have two Nanking Bush cherries that are healthy and very vigorous. Each one produces just a handful of small cherries each year, and by the time they are sweet enough to eat, the birds usually get them.

I have recently added a native plum which I hear does great in this climate and actually spreads...wonderful! I love plums.

I plan on adding to my orchard until I run out of space. I have dreams of my kids running around and eating different fruit all summer long.

Jo

Thanks, everyone, for the input. It seems that the trees that are comfortable here usually do well, and the 'imports' like the commercial ones do not. All of them run in cycles of a good year and then nothing, depending on the weather. Even the wild persimmons and pecans do that. Other than cutting down the myriad of little seedling persimmons, I leave the big trees alone. I finally learned how to use the fruit for a wonderful persimmon cookie recipe, and I don't mind having them for that, even though they keep sprouting babies everywhere.

We had a few of the native plums, but I never saw them produce anything in the couple of years that I watched them. I think the guy that bought that property has cut them down now.

My daughter had a fig tree up against her house in Maud and she couldn't kill it. It had been planted too close to the house, and cutting it right down to the ground didn't even faze it. The thing would come right back up again and be 8' tall the following season. It might be worth trying it, although it might also be a major attractant for wasps.

Other than that, I think I'll just keep working with the old apple, peach and pear trees we have on this place, mostly because I can't stand to see them all beaten up and abused. If they produce fruit that's edible, fine. If not, oh well. At least they'll look nice.

I miss having the fruit to put up, but I need to be realistic about it. At my age, by the time any new trees get up to production size, I probably won't be around to see them or do anything about it. The kids and grandkids are all grown up, and some of the great-grands are getting close to being teens. I think it's probably time I began to pick my garden battles more carefully and take on new projects that are more workable, even though I do like the idea of leaving trees behind for the next generations.

Pat

On our farm we've had two pear trees for about three generations now. It really all does depend on the weather when it comes to how well they produce and how they taste. Most years we aren't so lucky and the blooms end up freezing off and we have barely any crops, but those that we do taste wonderful. This year, since the heat came so fast, the trees were loaded with blooms and they actually set, and now the branches are already bending under the amount of strain from the hundreds of baby fruits developing. However, I fear they will be rather sour because it's either going to get too cold to quick, or the heat will last too long. One way they don't get to fully ripen and the other way they don't get the proper sugars.

We did used to have an apple tree out there, but it didn't produce well without another to pollinate, plus it got some weird disease a few years ago and slowly died.

Last year we found two wild persimmon trees that I had never seen produce fruit until then. They looked like they could have been about 5 years old, so I would assume the conditions just weren't right until then. Unfortunately the tornado that went through El Reno destroyed them. Thankfully we saved some seeds.

This year I bought several new fruit trees. Two plums, peach, cherry, fig, and crabapple. All but the cherry have done extremely well for being so young in this extreme heat, and might even produce some fruit next year.

It seems to me that, with the combination of spring storms and warm weather that continues until late in the year, the only fruit trees that might make a decent crop would have to be the stone fruit ones. Apricot, cherry, peach, plum and so on. A fig would produce, but a real cold snap could finish it.
Even at that, I would guess that the producing years might be 1-in-3 or 1-in-5. How many years have I seen a magnificent blossom set, and then had the weather wipe out the entire crop a few weeks later. Sigh.

On the other hand, I see that the OK Agritourism site lists quite a few farms where folks can go to buy tree-ripe or vine-ripe fruit, as well as veggies and other types of produce (milk, eggs, and so on). Maybe I'll leave the orchard growing to the folks who've been doing it here in OK for a while, and give them my business when I'm looking for fresh fruit to eat or put up for winter.

Pat

I lived in Hominy four years and had one apple tree with two types of apples grafted on it, a golden delicious and something that seemed like a Macintosh. Also had a peach tree. These were old trees, planted long before I moved there.
In Lawton for six years, I planted two dwarf peaches. At both places, I was able to fill my freezer with fruit every summer, plus fill our tummies while they were ripe.

Tracy, that's encouraging. I'm surprised the trees produced in Lawton, since you're so far south of us. I can understand it a bit better north of Tulsa.

I think I have sort of a triple-whammy to deal with here; the climate, and my livestock. I can either pen up (or get rid of) my chickens and sheep, or have producing fruit trees (maybe) but not both. The chickens climb up into the tops of the full-sized trees and harvest everything in sight, and the sheep stand on their back legs and prune as high as they can reach. You'd think they were all starving, and believe me, they are not. I don't think a dwarf tree would stand a chance, although they'd be my own personal preference.

Goldens are my all-time favorite apples, and I really miss having them. We used to have enough apple varieties that I could make applesauce from 5 or 6 different kinds. It is SO good when it's done that way.

Pat

I had chickens, gunieas and peafowl at both places, free ranging. Quite a lot of them, actually. In Hominy, the trees were in my backyard, where the dogs kept the birds out, but in Lawton, the trees were in the front. Come to think of it, I ended up making a horse paddock where those dwarf peach trees were because we were so short on pasture and even the horses didn't keep us from having fruit!
when I planted those trees in Lawton, I mounded the dirt that was dug out for our house stem-wall and then mounded tons of horse manure on top of that. Let it settle for about six months before planting. The trees I planted in those mounds did amazingly well, growing much faster than the trees I planted on the flat soil.
Unfortunately, I went to get my stuff a year after I left my ex-husband and he hadn't thinned the peach trees. They had gotten so heavy with fruit that the trunks had split down the middle and they broke in half, destroying the trees. I was there in June and it was really sad to see two trees, loaded with fruit, with half the of them laying on the ground, knowing they were going to die.

Oh, that's sad about the trees splitting. However, when we bought this property, one of the old peach trees had done just that. Half of the trunk is lying down on the ground and luckily the previous owner was so lazy about (and totally ignorant about how to care for fruit trees) that he just left it alone. It has sent up all new growth and seems perfectly healthy after more than 5 years, even if half of the tree is now horizontal.

I've worked pretty hard to salvage these trees. With the peaches, the fellow went out with a chain saw and just whacked stuff off any which-way. Neither the apple nor the pear had been pruned at all and the poor little pear was more of a small thicket than it was a pear tree. I managed to take out a lot of the dead stuff last year and it looks better, but still needs a lot more work this winter. The apple was in nearly the same condition and I've gotten it to look more like a healthy tree now, although all of them need a deep soak once in a while when the weather is as hot and dry as it has been. All the trees have a small crop of fruit this year, so I'll have to wait and see how well it does. Last year I had to thin them, but not this time. Only a couple of dozen fruit are on each tree.

I have to wonder if what got the chickens going on the peaches was the infestation of June bugs we had one year. The birds went after the bugs and then discovered that they like the peaches also. I seem to be getting the bug situation under control, but I wonder if the birds will remember that they do love the peaches. Probably so, since everything else is so incredibly dry.

All the little trees I've put out in the pasture have been eaten by the sheep, no matter how hard I try to put up protective cages for them. They don't seem to be interested in the pear or the persimmon, and they don't eat honeysuckle or the grapes, but with everything else it's easy to see just how high they can reach if they stand on their back legs because it's totally defoliated up to that point. Anything new that we might try to put in, such as pecans, will have to be planted in the garden area that is fenced off from the pasture.

Pat

Pat, I would love some of your persimmon seedlings!

My grandmother sent me a Brown Turkey Fig this spring. I don't think she could have picked a worse year! But it is alive and I think it'll do well eventually. Brown Turkey figs are hardy here and you can cut them almost to the ground each year. Because the figs are on the new growth you won't need a ladder to harvest. Also, the cut branches will root and make new trees.

Our lot has a pear tree, an apple tree and a cherry tree (yea, right?). The pears and the apples are horrible. The cherry tree is only a male. I still wonder how the cherry tree survives. Maybe I don't have it identified correctly. The apple tree rarely produces and the pears .. well .. there's just something wrong with them. I might try fertilizing them. Who knows..

Chickencoupe,
in order for pears and apples to properly produce, they need to be cross-pollinated. Meaning you need two apples and two pears, preferably different varieties of each. That is probably why they haven't done well.

Cherry trees are self pollinating. You shouldn't have a problem with it aside from it being far too hot here for them.