I often get asked about my fruit trees and what I do to get my trees to produce so abundantly. Rather than answering all the questions individually, I'm just going to make this post and point people towards it in future!
Quickie (if you want the fast and nasty!)
- Yes, these fruit rees are grown on my tree in Sydney suburbia.
- The trees shown here are mostly around four or five years old; some are older, some are younger. However, I didn't get a crop from any of them until I put them in the ground and started tending them.
- I get my trees from Fruit Salad Trees, Daleys, or Diggers Club.
- I don't know the varieties, only that they're low-chill stone fruits that they deliberately select and market for the Sydney and north NSW coastal areas.
- A lot of the trees shown here are on the north side of the property, right next to a concrete slab that absorbs a lot of sunlight during the day. As a result that section of the garden is warmer and tends to produce fruit earlier than other fruit trees of the same type and kind.
The longer, more in-depth FAQ
Whereabouts are you?
I'm in Sydney - northern Sydney, about 11m above sea level, in foothills. It's Mediterranean in summer, but temperate cool in winter. Specifically I live a little east of the Hills District, and this is important because microclimate matters. We're on a ridge that might get a touch of frost from the south at the height of winter (late July to late August), and which isn't at all insulated from the west winds. West is our primary wind direction all year, with the exception of spring which is when it comes from the northeast.
My property aspect is open to the west and the north, with a great slab of concrete on the north side of the property - the driveway - that absorbs a lot of sunlight during the day and means that side of the property is a number of degrees warmer for longer during the winter. As a result, several of the stone fruit trees on that side of the property start to flower earlier than most trees of the same type and variety and I'm harvesting in October and November while most Sydneysiders are still growing their fruit.
I have a very shaded/protected backyard; it's also quite small. As a result, it's an effort and a half keeping the fruit trees there under control. I have 7 of them growing in a space about 50sqm, with a crepe myrtle, and (unfortunately) a silky oak on the other side the boundary line. (I'm in negotiations with the neighbour to get rid of it.)
In the backyard, the fruiting seasons are variable. The nectarine and donut peach on the stone fruit tree are early - done fruiting by December, but the plum on the same tree is late - February or March, and the independent donut peach is also mid-to-late - Jan or Feb.
Where do you get your trees?
A lot of my trees come from Fruit Salad Trees on the mid-north coast of NSW. They offer low-chill varieties for Sydney, but also offer trees tailored to your area's climate. Those that don't come from Fruit Salad Trees would have come from Daleys, or from Diggers Club.
What type of fruit and nut trees do you have?
I have: peaches, nectarines, plums, apricots, a cherry, a lemon, a lime, a macadamia, avocados, a pomegranate, grapevines, a persimmon, a fig, an elderberry, a mango, a guava, a black sapote, bananas, a kiwiberry, raspberries, a mulberry, and apples.
That said, half the time I don't know what variety I have on the tree; it's just "white peach, white nectarine" or "white nectarine, yellow peach". I'm bad at varieties, which is something of a problem, because varieties are the spice of life the determining factor in which fruit will do best in your garden.
Most of the pics of peaches and nectarines that I show are from the Fruit Salad company, the exception is the donut peach tree in the backyard. That was a gift from my mother and which has grown significantly in the last five years.
It's worth noting that the land my house is built on was once a stone fruit orchard. Back 100 years, this bit of Sydney suburbia was farmland, and the area back then was good for growing stone fruit. It's still good for growing stone fruit, as evidenced by the proliferation of my stone fruit trees.
How do you fertilise your trees?
For most of my trees, I run the chickens under them. I'll have an entire post up about this at a later point, but the gist is that I use the chickens to not only scratch up any bugs and pest eggs in the ground, but also to provide manures and aeration for the topsoil. I throw in any grass clippings, leaf mulches, woodchips, and vegetable wastes that I have and they form a mulch over the roots of the trees, fertilising them. This can also be achieved by buying manures from garden centres if that's your option; I have household chickens and so I work with those.
Do you prune and manage your trees?
Yes. Every midwinter I prune the trees to keep them a reasonable size and to encourage them to grow in ways that suit my garden. There are some great pruning videos for all kinds of trees all over the internet, but I go by Margaret Siri's advice (ABC, circa 2010) which I've summarised here for the fruit trees that I have in my garden. I prune to shape the tree and make it neater, as well as allow it productivity.
I try to remember to spray for leaf curl and mildews - I don't always manage it! The trees are big and the work that needs to be done is correspondingly huge, and sometimes this work doesn't get done in the end. That's what happens when you have a large garden and a full time job.
For leaf curl, I use the 'traditional' ones - bordeaux spray, copper spray, lime sulphur. I do it in winter, before budswell so the pollinators have no reason to be out, and I try to make sure that the pollinators have plenty of other, more agreeable places to be - in the perennial basil, for instance!
How do you keep pests off?
I fully net the tree with fruit fly netting. My largest tree is about 4m high, and I need a very large netting to encompass it. I bought the fruit fly netting a few years back from Green Harvest; it was quite pricey, but worth it.
Other pests in the area include: rats, possums, and sulphur-crested cockatoos, all of whom stubbornly refuse to share once they find my crop! They are also kept out with the fruit fly netting, and because it's a really fine netting, then birds and small animals don't get caught in it the way they do with "bird netting" and other larger-gap pest netting.
Is there an easier way to keep pests off?
Before I did the whole tree, I tried
- hanging fruit fly traps
- netting individual fruit clusters and hanging fruit fly traps
- netting branches of the tree and hanging fruit fly traps
And every time, the fruit flies got through and spoiled the entire harvest. There was no "only 50%" unless it was "oh, you can have 50% of this fruit, but the rest of the peach is riddled with fruit fly larvae".
The first year I put a frame up and netted the whole tree? I got a bumper crop.
So, yeah.
People always want to "nickel-and-dime" pest control. Every time I talk about netting trees, people are like "Wow, what a pest nazi she is!" There are people in permaculture and retrosuburbia communities who get very upset about me 'denying nature its share' by netting the whole tree and excluding pests. However, I tried lesser measures for three years and it didn't work; I got next to nothing from the harvest. So now I fully net the trees and I actively advocate for netting the whole tree when people ask what to do.
'Nature' doesn't share. It produces abundance, but that abundance does not necessarily go to whoever tended it unless they take measures to claim it. Netting the tree is my measure to claim what I have worked towards.
One of the principles of permaculture is "Obtain a yield" - gain something from a season, don't work to no purpose. And so, yes, I go full-bore on netting the tree, and I get a harvest that's the envy of people online and offline. I have bounty that I can share with others - including the animals that I'm denying, if I wish - and it encourages others to work towards abundance, too.
Anything else?
You can drop me a comment or send me a mail and I'll try to answer your questions. But these are the things that I do within my parameters, and they work for me. You'll have to work out what you're willing to do in order to gain a yield from your fruit trees.
The thing is, growing fruit in suburbia can be done - and there's no comparing the taste of shop-bought with the taste of homegrown. I promise, once you grow your own, you'll never look back.
Good luck!
