by Lisa Stapleton

Making the right selection in the nursery can ensure a larger harvest and save you time and money.

Disease-resistant pears

Ten years ago, when I moved into my suburban tract home, I fulfilled the fantasy I'd had for years: I went to my local nursery and indulged in a fruit-buying binge, picking tree varieties based on the label pictures and the information in the Ortho series of books on gardening. Soon, I was back at the nursery looking for sprays to combat peach-leaf curl, fire blight, and vicious fruit-tree borers.

Indeed, I almost gave up on my home orchard in the year that followed. The worst moment was when I realized that my glove had ripped, I was drenched in pesticide, and I had to call poison control. Later, I almost cried at how little fruit some of the trees bore.

I eventually realized that the choices that I'd made that first year had predestined me to wrestle with some of these problems. I learned from my mistakes, and now I've had more than five years of great, spray-free fruit harvests. Here's what I wish someone had told me when I was being seduced ­ there's no better way to put it ­ by the gorgeous pictures and alluring words on the packages of the bare-root fruit trees.

Diversity rules

Plant different kinds of fruit. In any given year, some fruit will do well, and others will disappoint you. You'll feel better and will have more food overall if you can balance out a lousy year for apples with a great year for figs.

Planting several varieties of the same fruit also offers some insurance. Each variety may require slightly different conditions to bear a bumper crop, so you'll probably find that your star performer varies from year to year. Planting different varieties can also extend your harvest. For instance, the first of our apples are ready in June, and the last ones ripen in November. (The Seed Saver's Exchange is a good source of information on when different varieties bear fruit.)

Even if you don't have a lot of room, you can take advantage of this technique. You can often buy trees that have several varieties of the same fruit grafted onto them, so you get a different kind of fruit on each branch.

Pick varieties that do well in your climate. People who live in cold climates know they have to plant cold-hardy varieties, but some people in milder climates don't realize that many fruit trees require cold to bear well. The amount of cold a variety needs is called "chilling hours." Apples and, to a lesser extent, cherries, apricots, pears, plums, peaches and nectarines all need some cold time to bear. The nonprofit California Rare Fruit Growers lists the chilling hours of many varieties of fruit, compiled by stone fruit expert and grower Andy Mariani of Mariani Orchards in Morgan Hill, Calif.

Pick disease-resistant varieties. Fruit trees vary dramatically in their resistance to disease. (Sometimes, disease resistance means the tree is immune to the disease, but more often, it means that even if the tree gets the disease, it will continue to thrive and bear well.) Asking or researching the disease resistance of a variety can save you a lot of spraying or heartache later.

Pick fruit you'll enjoy. Plant a lot of what your family eats. And if there are varieties that have sentimental meaning to you, such as the delicious Granny Smith apples that symbolize summer to you or the figs you got at grandma's, plant those in your garden and pass the joy and the tradition on to your family.

© 2007 Green Home, Inc.