Whats the Best Time of Year to Plant a Fruit Tree in Northern Colorado?

Hi folks, this post is region specific to share some of the things what we've learned in the 7 years of living and gardening in Colorado'southward Front Range. Although we come up from a family of gardeners and have had lush gardens in our dwelling house country, gardening at this altitude (half-dozen,975 ft or 2126 meters) has given us a lot of challenges. But gradually we found what seem to do well and requite expert results with least effort. And while it does take work and often comes with many heartbreaks (those late Spring 2 human foot snowfalls) it is so worth it!

Whether or not you lot live in Colorado or at another high-altitude (and not very garden-friendly) identify on Earth I hope y'all find this mail service helpful to y'all likewise.

Plant some fruit trees

I highly recommend to plant your fruit trees the moment you decided to beginning a garden 🙂 . The thing is some copse may take a year, two or even three to establish before they are fix to give abundant fruit. About of our copse started giving fruit on the 2nd or tertiary twelvemonth.

And although information technology is an investment (peculiarly in Colorado) to buy a tree) the fruit trees are not bad in the sense that with littlest work on a proficient year you lot will have loads and loads of delicious fruit. And on a bad year (significant late spring frost that kills all the blooms) y'all'd just a have a beautiful tree to give you shade, greenery and cleaner air 🙂

Peaches, apples, plums, pears…
what should you plant?

Start I wanted to share with yous which of the fruit trees did well in our experience and successfully produced fruit, and which did zippo but struggled.

And after that I'thou sharing some specific notes on planting and caring for your tree.

Peach tree — success

I'm starting with the peach tree, because to our surprise both of our peach copse are the ones that never fail to fruit and requite astonishing peaches! Our current trees are nigh 5 years old and a 2 yr old. Every year we owned these copse, except the very kickoff year, we had peaches. Even on those years where we had bad late Spring frosts and snows and all the blooms on the other fruit trees were killed the peach trees somehow made information technology through and notwithstanding gave us peaches! Something nosotros would accept never expected.

Unfortunately nosotros no longer have the tags showing the tree variety, simply we got ours from Hardings Nursery and from the Phelan Gardens.

Plum tree — success

Another prolific fruiting tree is a plum. We also have 2, one is nigh 5-6 year one-time and is quite big past now, another is merely a couple years one-time. Both requite fruit and practice really well. Our 5 year quondam tree last year had probably more plums than leaves, and they were absolutely delicious, sweet every bit beloved!

Note on plum copse — plum trees give sucklings, similarly to aspens. They need to exist pulled and removed regularly, and then they don't take over your whole garden.

Pear tree — mostly skillful

The successful part about our pear tree is that information technology always gives good amount of fruit. The less successful aspect is that if the summer is a cold i, like this year, then the pears might never fully ripped. Nosotros are one-half way through July and our pears are nonetheless not even close. And if we get an early on frost and then it'd be the cease of them. However, in the worse case yous could selection them green and boil them. It might sound weird to you, but they are delicious when boiled. You can likewise make compote with them. My grandma had absolutely giant fruit trees and more fruit she knew what to practise with. I remember her cellar was always full with jar of delicious preserved fruit, including boiled pears.

Apple — l/fifty, but still worth it

Many apple trees require some other tree to pollinate, so plan appropriately your space. We take in total 4 apple trees. Just ane of them ever gave us apples, the one that is grafted with 4 varieties that nosotros got from Boulder. But it has given us proficient amounts of apples for boys to enjoy.

I highly recommend getting grafted trees with multiple varieties as that way they can cross-pollinate each other. Also if i multifariousness just doesn't like it in your area, you still have other varieties on the same tree. Another skillful thing is that each variety blooms and rippens at unlike time. So a late frost kills the blooms of one variety, your other varieties could still make it though. And it is besides squeamish to accept your harvest stretch through the summer into fall, as some of apples are gear up in August, while others at the terminate of September.

Blood-red tree — little success, but we plan to try again

Our offset cherry-red tree never bloomed. It just would never form any flowers, and after few years nosotros removed it. Our second tree had no flowers last year (which was its kickoff year), merely it did requite us few berries this year. So we are going to spotter how information technology does and post and update here next year.

Apricot tree — zero success

In my home country nosotros had several large apricot copse and I was really looking forward to having them in my garden. However, information technology turned out to be least suitable stone fruit for our area. The main reason is that it blooms very early. Long earlier whatsoever other trees. And so every year the blooms got killed past the frost.

May be we got an unsuitable variety, merely information technology was from a local nursery so we expected it to be something that could successfully grow here. And may exist ordering online a special late-blooming diverseness could work out. Definitely worth looking into, as apricots are just such delicious fruit!

Planting and caring for your trees

Lastly, I wanted to share planting and caring notes from our 7 years of experience of gardening here. Hope you'd discover them helpful and it will aid you with ensuring your trees do well. After all not only they are expensive, but having a tree struggle, neglect and die after all the difficult work put into information technology is eye-breaking and discouraging.

When should you found?

In general best times for planting of trees are early Fall (September and very early Oct) and early Springs (one time the soil is soft to dig). Some of our fruit trees were planted in Spring and others in early Fall. All are doing well. We have some trees which were planted during Summer when we start bought our house. They also made it, only it is more stressful for the trees (and any plants really) to exist transplanted in the summer due to all the heat and the fact that the tree is in a very active phase of its yearly bicycle.

So, if y'all are ready to get some fruit trees now information technology is a perfect time, plus constitute nurseries oft accept end of the year sale on many plants. Shop around a bit. Nosotros got 4 nice evergreen few years agone for a fraction of the price.

Bug and solutions

We own our firm for 7.5 years and in this time we have planted 25 trees in total (not counting aspens). We have lost 5 trees from that and almost lost 2 more than. This is what we have learned from our experience.

• Problem #1: roots do non want or simply unable to spread into the terrible soil we got in our region. In some places of our m it was composed of but solid as a stone compounds of clay. It was so hard nosotros couldn't even dig a hole deep enough with a shovel.

  Solution: If your soil is similarly pour and dumbo, consider over-excavation the hole for the tree as much as you lot can and fill up information technology with adept soil, compost and natural fertilizers. If you are hiring plant nursery employees to plant the tree for you lot — pay them extra and take them dig the hole twice as big equally they intended to. The employees almost probable tell you it is not necessary. Only our experience shows the contrary.

• Problem #2: trees are planted with roots bounded in a metallic cage and ofttimes a burlap around it. Root ball is very tightly woven, instead of being spread out. As a result the tree is having hard fourth dimension to establish and spread the roots. Upon removing some of our dead copse we discovered that they never spread their roots outside the cage root ball even after a year or fifty-fifty two.

  Solution: make sure the plant nursery employees cut the wire cage equally much equally possible. Some other thing, we started doing with all our newly planted plants (bushes and flowers included) is to loosen up the roots equally much as nosotros can. Sometimes the root ball is so tight it is not possible. But if yous are buying a smaller tree in a pot you might be able to really loosen that root ball. Don't worry most harming the tree. We do information technology with all the plants we constitute (flowers as well equally house plants) and they all do well later. Notation, nursery employees will most likely suggest against it or say information technology will abolish your tree warranty (because it is not their usual practice) — and then it is up to you whether or not to follow this flake of suggest.

• Problem #three: the dense dirt soil doesn't allow drainage. Trees not planted on the elevated areas got ruined or killed from root rot resulted from standing water inside the hole where tree was planted.

  Solution: Do not constitute a tree near areas of drainage or collecting water. We take lost 3 trees to root rotting from drowning. To solve this trouble we accept added a 2′-3′ berm all along the back side of our yard where a lot of water was coming from the neighbour's backyard. We also added a french drain to draw the water away to the edge of our yard. Lastly we planted some willow plants to aid and blot excessive water.

  One of the trees that was drowning, but yet live was replanted on the berm and did swell e'er since. The others died every bit they were too big to motion on our own.

• Trouble #iv: the dumbo clay soil also doesn't saturate with water, but instead the water merely runs off it. Trees and other plants planted on the tops of our berms are always under-watered and struggle.

  Solution: We noticed the couple trees and other plants planted on top of the little human being-made loma we have in our thousand e'er struggle and upon inspection nosotros noticed that they often were dry, even after I run irrigation. We noticed that the h2o was simply sliding off the sloped area and then pooling at the bottom drowning other plants. Deep root watering helps, likewise as making a bowl-shaped barrier few anxiety around the tree trunk, so you can fill information technology with water and permit it soak in instead of running off down the slope.

• Trouble #5: and so you get a winter impale when information technology is too common cold as well early before the tree is ready, and/or too common cold without snowfall.

  Not much could be done in those situation though.

Other general notes

In case you are new to owning fruit copse here are few things to know:

• Fruit trees need full sun all mean solar day long to give fruit!
• You tin can buy a regular-sized tree (meaning information technology will grow to a Large tree, or a dwarf or semi-dwarf diverseness which volition exist much smaller trees when fully grown. All of our trees are semi-dwarf equally we have limited infinite and didn't want to shade the rest of our garden with big trees.
• Some trees are self-pollinating, while others crave another tree to pollinate. This means that some trees will not produce fruit unless in that location is another tree of the aforementioned type (some other apple tree, for example) planted within sure proximity to it.
• Y'all can get grafted trees which volition offering multiple varieties on the same tree. 1 of our apple trees has 5 varieties on information technology. You lot can notice grafted apples, pears, plums and probably many others. Nosotros could non notice them in Colorado Springs, and got ours from Boulder.
• Watch for birds and squirrels when fruiting time starts. Although miraculously squirrels have been leaving our peaches lone.
• Watch for birds in spring at blooming time. This twelvemonth purple finches ripped about all of our plum tree blooms. Not for eating, just for fun as it seems, equally the basis was covered in flowers. No flowers = no fruit.
• Some years your tree might have SO MUCH fruit that branches volition need back up so they practice not break.

• When the fruit is abundant you lot might demand to rip some of the fruit off, as it could be too much for the tree to nurture. And you might stop up with a lot of small, underdeveloped and tasteless fruit.

  Last twelvemonth our peach tree had a tremendous amount of peaches. But at the end they were all small and non very sweet. This year we had a fraction of the aforementioned harvest on that tree and each peach was very large, juicy and sweet.

• We had epic aphid infestations on our plum tree. Ladybugs really work! I bout a couple of jars from Ace Hardware (you can besides social club online). Practice not shake them out though, considering they just terminate up falling on the basis. Instead crack-open the hat and hang or stick upwardly on the tree near the leaves with aphids. Ladybugs will crawl out on their own and find adept places on the tree to settle down.
• Here is a constructive and chemical-gratis pesticide control for crawling types of insects (some of them can ruin your harvest, like those worms that dig into apples and pears).
• Deer — if yous get deer (which we don't) do the best yous can to protect your tree as they will swallow fine branches and also tree's bark. And while the branches tin can abound out, but in one case the tree's bark has been damaged the tree will probable struggle and even can die. We usually placed articulate rigid plastic or meal mesh around our tree body for the winter, a that is the fourth dimension we occasionally get deer wonder in looking for food in our neighborhood.

What worked well for yous in your garden?

If you are also a gardener in a high altitude area — I'd love to hear whatever of your ain experience. Leave some comments well-nigh which fruits trees do good for you and whatever gardener's advise or tricks. 🙂

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Source: https://www.mariaarefieva.com/gardening-in-colorados-front-range-fruit-trees/#:~:text=In%20general%20best%20times%20for,All%20are%20doing%20well.

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