There are very few fruit trees that you can grow here that will have minimal damage from the cold because of the nature of our very erratic weather and wintertime temperatures that can have a surprising number of warm days even in January and February.. You'll be lucky to get a great harvest 1 year out of three, a modest harvest one year out of three, and no harvest 1 year out of three. This is especially true of stone fruit. That is how it was for me in our first 10 or 12 years here. In reality, based on the last 10 years or so, I probably should change that three to a four, and change it to no harvest two years out of 4. So, you have to choose the best varieties you can find with the highest chilling hours and then hope that Mother Nature isn't throwing lots of highs in the 70s and 80s into the temperature mix in January and February. When this happens, the trees usually already achieved most of the chilling hours in November through January, and too many early warm winter days cause them to bloom in February or earliest March, and then we lose the fruit to later freezes in March and April. That is what happened last April when we dropped to freezing several times after having had some very warm weather prior to April. I get a much better fruit crop when the winter stays consistently colder and the trees don't bloom until later in March or even early in April. Unfortunately, the consistently colder winters of the late 1990s and early 2000s seem to have given way to winters with more warm to hot days in more recent years. For example, each of the last 3 winters, we have had copperhead snakes out in January and February, sporadically, which is so peculiar. It used to be that we wouldn't see snakes out until mid- to late-April. You are further north and perhaps your winters stay more consistently cold than ours have been doing down here recently.

This document from OSU lists recommended varieties, though it does not include chilling data.

Home Fruit Orchard Info

For peaches, the varieties that have performed best here in southern OK, where we are zone 7b but often have wild temperature swings in winter from highs in the upper 70s or lower 80s to lows around zero, the varieties that have performed best over the long run at our house have been RedHaven (950 chilling hours), Reliance (1000), and Ranger (900). Other varieties that have performed moderately well here include Sentinel (850), Belle of Georgia (850), Elberta (850) and Harvester (750). Surecrop is another one. I think it is listed as 950-1000 chilling hours, but I don't see it sold much in stores here any more. I don't know why.

Plums are trickier as they have shorter chilling hours and are extremely prone to blooming too early here even when you choose the varieties with the highest chilling hours you can find. Plus, some of them need other varieties as pollinators, so research the varieties you choose carefully to make sure you have a pollinator tree if you need one. The ones that have done best for me are Ozark Premier (by far the last one to bloom too early), and I grow Methley as a pollinator for it. I've also been happy with Santa Rosa's performance. The most consistent plum? Our native sand plums, which are less prone to bloom early and subsequently freeze. The native plums are much too small for fresh eating but they do make a superb jelly. Last year the early warmth/late cold even got most of the native plums, but we got enough of a harvest from them for two batches of jelly.

I don't grow nectarine or apricots, but a friend who lives less than a mile from us, albeit at a much higher elevation than ours, has had success with Goldcot Apricot. He gets a great crop from it about once every 5 years. In the years when it doesn't bloom too early and freeze, he gets a huge fruit set that requires enormous amounts of thinning.

I don't grow apples because the cedar trees are as thick as grass all around us, even though we try to keep them off our property as much as possible. There's just far too many cedar trees on the ranches around us, so we have them on all 4 sides of us, literally just the other side of the fenceline. The people I know who have had success with apples in OK generally grow Arkansas Black, Gala, Honeycrisp, Jonathan or, sometimes, Granny Smith.

Sour cherries (aka pie cherries) perform much better in our climate than sweet cherries, so good luck with the sweet cherries. The varieties of sour cherry that produce best for us in southern OK are Montmorency and North Star. Stella is a sweet cherry that is newer but seems to be doing well in OK. Please note that you will have to fight the birds for every single cherry you get, and the birds will win most of the time.

I used to put a lot of time and effort into growing fruit trees organically here in southern OK. Well, I'm just about over all that. Our winter weather seems to have become much more erratic in nature, with too many warm to hot days, the last 6-10 years, and it is getting harder and harder to get a fruit crop even from trees that have the proper number of chilling hours recommended for our region. Once the trees have accumulated the right number of chilling hours, it doesn't take much warm weather to push them into blooming, and then the temperatures return more to normal colder temperatures, as they usually do, and the blooms and small fruit freeze and drop. This happens over and over again, year in and year out. What can you do? We cannot control the erratic nature of our weather here. I'm not going to plant fruit trees any more, unless or until we get around to building a high tunnel and growing them within the high tunnel (my dream, but not likely to happen because it is on a very long To Do list we'll never finish).

Ironically, the fruit tree that produces most consistently here, producing a crop 4 years out of 5, is figs. Some years we get two separate crops from the figs. The reason why figs are such good producers here? Well, they often freeze down to the ground, as ours have this year with our lowest low temp so far of 2 degrees, and they will grow back and form fruit--but not early enough for a freeze to get the young fruit. So far the weather hasn't found a way to throw a late freeze at us late enough to get the fig crop. Brown Turkey and Celeste grow really well down here and, if I ever plant another fig tree, I'll plant Chicago Hardy.

You know, if you are near Stroud, when you visit the peach orchards to buy peaches, if you do, maybe you could ask them the name of some of the varieties that do well there for them. Even those commercial orchards suffer losses to the late freezes though.

Dawn