I planted fruit trees 3 different times last year and had the best luck with very early Spring. I think Stark Brothers has a good website for information. You can put in you zip code and it will tell you if the tree is likely to work in your area and the best time to plant. The narrative on the individual tree will tell you if it needs a pollinator and which one is best.

Here is a link that might be useful: Stark Brothers

Thank you Soonergrandmom! I am looking at the website now. Did you use any fertilizer or any potting soil around the roots when planting, or just placed the trees into the original soil?

Ive been looking into growing pomegranates and I think we could grow them without too much protection or maybe a good micro climate.Late frost like we usually have could be problem with blooming and fruit set but that is pretty common in Oklahoma. A few nurseries around Tulsa and even home depot were selling them in the spring. i think mostly the 'Wonderful' variety is what they had. I read that it is ok to 10-15F

Mike

Our Brown Turkey fig bears here in z6b so should do well for you there. Some years the top dies back in a very hard winter, but then it regrows from the roots. This year a very young BT froze, regrew and bore a few figs. Our 20 year old plant did not freeze back to the ground, but it did lose the first crop, then recovered to give us our best ever crop with a fertilization in May.

Thank you for the advice, I will try the Brown Turkey fig and Wonderful pomegranate! I hope that we will have smooth weather this winter and spring for the new trees to set roots. This year was my first season gardening in Oklahoma (we just moved here last year) and the spring temperature rollercoaster and the storms and ice took me by surprise. I admire Oklahoma gardeners!

PerennialK,

I grow peach, plums, and figs here.

If you are in an area where there's lots of eastern red cedar trees, be aware that there is a disease called Cedar Apple Rust that thrives in the presence of both apples and cedars, though you'll never see it if your area has only apple trees and no cedars, or only cedar trees and no apples trees. You'll have to treat your trees annually to prevent Cedar Apple Rust from becoming a problem on both the apples and crabapples. I've chosen to avoid the whole issue by just not planting apples or crabapples because I don't want to deal with spraying them. I raise the peaches, plums and figs organically with no spraying whatsoever and I don't think that would be possible with apple trees because our property is surrounded by thousands of acres of grassland infiltrated heavily by cedar trees. In some of that acreage, there's more square footage in cedar trees than in native grasses and forbs,. On our own land we cut back the cedar trees. We've removed a lot over the years, but new ones are planted constantly, especially by the birds, and it is a battle we'll never really win. So, if you are surrounded by cedars, be prepared to do battle to prevent Cedar Apple Rust.

I haven't planted a pomegranate tree here, but if I was going to plant one, I'd plant "Wonderful". We do have native persimmons and native plums here in addition to the improved cultivars of fruit trees that we've planted.

Peaches and plums both produce well for me some years, but the frost gets all the blooms and fruit in other years. I'd say that 1 out of every 3 years there is no crop from the peaches and plums, 1 out of every 3 years there is a huge crop and 1 out of 3 years there is a moderate crop. I just preserve tons of them via canning and freezing in the good years, so we have some to eat even in the bad years when the crop fails. My friend who grows cherries gets a good crop from them slightly less often then we all get peaches and plums, and his apricots produce a crop maybe 1 year out of 3. I'm in southcentral OK and apples and crabapples are tricky to grow here, and the friends that I have who have the best luck with apples here do follow the standard spray program recommended by OSU.

I've linked the OSU Fact Sheet on growing fruit trees in the home garden. It is full of helpful information. Choose your fruit tree varieties carefully so that you are choosing trees with a high number of chilling hours. This will help keep the trees from blooming too early and having the blooms and young fruit freeze every single year. Still, in our erratic climate where springtime temperatures may be in the 70s or 80s even in February or March, there's always an issue with stone fruit blooming too early---even those with the recommended number of chilling hours for our climate.

In addition to growing tree fruit, you also can grow blackberries, dewberries, and (if you have sandy, well-draining soil with an acidic pH), blueberries. You also can ammend somewhat unsuitable soil in order to get it to the right pH to keep blueberries happy. Strawberries do well in some parts of Oklahoma where the soil and moisture levels are to their liking. So, it is possible that if you plant several fruit trees and several kinds of berries, you'll be harvesting some kind of fruit every year.

Fig trees produce more consistently for me than anything else here does because they will produce a second crop even if the first round of fruit freezes in spring's weather. I usually get both an early summer and fall harvest from the fig trees.

Some of us grow citrus trees in pots and overwinter them in greenhouses or indoors. I never get more than a handful of lemons or oranges off my trees, but I enjoy growing them anyhow. They're worth growing just for the delicious aroma of their blossoms alone, even if you never get a single fruit from them.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: OSU: Home Fruit Trees

Thank you so much for all the helpful advice!!
I had to search online for an image of red cedar... now I know what all these wild trees in out area are called. There is plenty of them here. I think I will hold off on planting any apples, I really do not want to spray anything if at all possible in our garden. Thanks for the warning!
Peaches and figs are my husband's favorites, I am so glad to hear that they may do well here, I will start with those this year!
I have strawberries now in a 4x4 raised bed, I planted them this spring. I had some of the berries eaten by ants (or the rolly-pollies? we had both) but my kids and I really like them. I hope that they will survive the winter! I also planted raspberries, but now that I am reading the OSU website, I should have planted blackberries instead.
I will try citrus too! We have an enclosed patio where I could overwinter plants.

Can pears be grown here organically?

Thanks for all the advice, I am headed to the nursery to look around in their tree section!

I was just listening to a Margaret Roach podcast this morning. Her guest was Lee Reich. He says apples are one of the hardest fruits to grow in many parts of the country. He is interesting although not from this area. He has written several books and one is one little known fruits.

edit -- My next post is about the fruit this one is mostly about compost. I think the man makes some good points.

Here is a link that might be useful: podcast choices

This post was edited by helenh on Mon, Oct 21, 13 at 14:56

I don't know if this site has political views or not. I found it looking for the speaker - only interested in the info on fruit.

Here is a link that might be useful: another podcast

Just curious for those who grow figs. Is it necessary to remove some of the fruit in order to help the overall production? We have a huge Celeste tree full of fruit but they're small in size and have taken
a long time to ripen. Most are still green this late in the year. Does removing a certain amount of the fruit help the overall production? Thanks gang!

This post was edited by carsons_mimi on Mon, Oct 21, 13 at 21:39

PerennialK,

I am not going to say that pears cannot be grown organically here because I haven't grown any here, whether organically or otherwise. The trouble with pears in our climate is fire blight often gets them about the time they get large enough to bear fruit.That often happens in Texas, and I do know people who successfully grow them there, but they don't do it organically and they don't think it would be possible to successfully grow their pears organically.

I do know that there is a large pear tree in our neighborhood that looks like it must be about 50 years old and some years it bears fruit. I have never, ever seen anyone give that tree one single bit of care.

I have several neighbors who have grown fruit trees right here here in our rural neighborhood far longer than I've lived here, and they grow some combination of these types of fruits: peaches, plums, apricots, cherries and apples. (Only 2 of our neighbors have apples, most have peaches and plums, and a couple also have apricots and cherries.) No one I know personally in my county grows pears, and that big tree I mentioned likely wasn't planted by the people who now live in that house because they do not appear to be gardeners. I am willing to bet someone grows pears here, but I just don't know anyone who does. Some people that I know have planted pear trees, but they've lost the trees to disease before the trees even got old enough to bear fruit.

Some people in Oklahoma have had some success with raspberries. This is particularly true if they live in northeastern OK where there's generally better soil than in many other parts of the state and also more consistent rainfall. Blackberries will produce more consistently, but you may find that raspberries produce okay if you have the right soil and the right microclimate. Our weather fluctuates so much here, and it is the extreme heat that seems to have an adverse effect on raspberries.

Carson's Mimi, Hi! I don't know that I would say it is necessary to thin fruit on fig trees, but I'd say that if you have a large fig tree that sets oodles of fruit, you could indeed improve the size of individual fruit by thinning the fruit while they are very small. I know people often do thin their figs, but I've never seen a description of how many of the figs should be pruned.

With my peaches and plums, I usually remove 90-95% of the fruit in the years when it seems like every single flower formed a fruit. That means I remove thousands of tiny fruit, but the few hundred I leave on each tree reach a really nice size by the time they are ripening. If I leave all the peaches and plums on the trees, I get lots of mature fruit that's roughly nickle to quarter size, and are all pit and skin and no flesh. I don't know if you would want to remove that high of a percentage of the figs, but you might want to remove some of them.

Figs can take a long time to ripen. The ones from the breba crop that I harvest in early to mid summer seem to ripen more quickly than the main crop in the fall/winter. That is just the nature of figs. The main crop takes a really long time to mature and sometimes the trees get hit by frost or freezing temperatures before the figs can ripen.

Commercial growers in California often use a combination of chemicals and wind machines to force their fruit to mature earlier than it otherwise would ripen naturally, but even with those methods, they can only force fruit to ripen maybe 7-10 days earlier. I don't know of anything a home gardener can do to push the fruit to ripen sooner.

Dawn

I went to the nursery to look at fruit trees and I ended up falling in love with a southern magnolia tree... I also got a "Redhaven" peach, it is supposed to have a high chill hour requirement. Thanks for the heads up about this!
I will spend the rest of the fall/winter season with my salads and pansies and listening to the gardening podcasts and dreaming about next year's tree planting and other big projects. I will plant my fig in the spring, I hope it would need less winter protection if it had a full season to estabilish roots before winter.
Thank you so much for all the advice!!