R. Wayne Mezitt is a third-generation nurseryman, Massachusetts Certified Horticulturist, and Owner of Weston Nurseries, Inc.
Wayne served as president of Massachusetts Nursery and Landscape Association (MNLA), New England Nursery Association (NENA), and American Nursery and Landscape Association (ANLA) which is based in Washington, DC.
Wayne is the horticultural consultant for GrowingWisdom.com with Dave Epstein.
It was summer 1969 when Beth and I with our two babies moved into the home built by my grandparents where we now live. I recall being so pleased to now have a home of our own, and in such a magnificent setting. One of my clearest memories is our experience that fall – harvesting fresh fruit from our own backyard orchard! What a pleasure – purple and yellow plums, nectarines, several kinds of peaches, pears and apples – such abundance and so much more than our young family could consume. Grandpa and grandma had planted these trees about 10 years earlier, and they were now producing a huge bounty of fruit. We ended up giving away to family, nursery staff and friends much of our crops. We also began developing new skills to put-up and preserve some of it for use during winter.
Over the years we’ve added various trees and shrubs to our landscape that also offer the extra feature of edible fruit - blueberries, Cornus mas, grape vines, Aronia, crabapples, Amelanchier and others. We’ve also tried integrating some larger fruiting tees that are traditionally grouped together as orchard trees. We learned that even though some fruiting trees can theoretically be suitable as part of our landscape, setting up an orchard apart from other plants works better for most types of larger fruit trees.
What can compare to picking your own home-grown fruit from trees you’ve nurtured yourself? But of course, along with these rewards come responsibilities. In order to optimize fruit production, orchard trees generally require more maintenance than most landscape plants. Every March I set aside a weekend to cut back overlapping limbs, reshape branches and remove “water shoots” on my apple and pear trees. Peach and plum trees need specific care as well.
By reading, talking with others, and making numerous “trial-and-error” mistakes, we’ve learned a lot about how to correctly prune and protect our trees, not only for best fruiting, but also to manage how they grow in their allotted space. Fortunately, improvements in breeding and selection have resulted in a wider choice of smaller stature (“dwarf”) trees that are easier to care for than similar crops only a generation ago.
Our experience has also helped us develop a better understanding of orchard pest and disease management. Environmental awareness has prompted breeders to develop cultivars that produce good results using far fewer insecticide and disease prevention applications. And even for the older traditional types of trees, a wide range of less toxic cultural methods are now readily available to manage pests. For example, we’ve used spherical red traps that resemble ripe apples as insect attracters - they greatly reduce the need for insecticide applications. These days we rarely spray our trees.
Because these are such long term crops, thoughtful planning and proper soil preparation is essential for establishing a productive home orchard. It is important to understand the exposure, wind conditions, soil types, and drainage and access elements of your site before planting any trees. Cultural conditions for producing a reliable peach crop can be very different from those that apples and pears can tolerate. To avoid disappointments (which may take years to show up) it is prudent to have good advice on which types of trees are suited for the climate and conditions where they will be growing in your yard. We were fortunate to have an orchard that was planted by our grandparents with an understanding of these constraints.
Once the site is chosen, it is critical to space your trees properly by knowing and planning for how large they will eventually grow. And understanding pollination needs for the specific types of trees you’re growing will help assure best results. All the information you’ll need is readily available online, in reference books, or by talking with locals who grow fruit trees.
All this “homework” may seem a bit overwhelming. But people who have a home orchard usually attest to the rewards being well worth the effort. Some of our friends consider a home orchard to be a family generational tradition – what better way for children to develop a clear understanding where their fruit actually comes from? And today it’s become increasingly difficult to know how the fruit we buy in the supermarket was grown. With home-grown fruit you can be secure in the knowledge of how it was grown because you’ve had control of the entire process.
