Growing your own fruit trees in your backyard organic garden has many benefits and a rewarding experience. It’s a great addition to your edible landscape, while also providing a shady area to relax and enjoy the natural beauty of nature in your own garden. Fruit trees and shrubs are not only enjoyed for their beauty among the landscape and their fruit, but can also provide a refuge for wildlife such as birds.
To a home gardener, fruit is the succulent part of a plant and can generally be eaten raw and to a botanist it is defined as the mature ovary of the plant’s flower.
Fruits are commonly divided into two categories, tree fruits and small fruits. For some examples, small fruits are strawberries and blueberries and tree fruits are apples, peaches, and pears.
There are some good reasons to grow your own fruit in your home garden or as part of your edible landscape. You can harvest the fruit at its peak and you can grow the ones you enjoy the most. There is no better tasting fruit than one grown fresh and harvested to your liking. Another benefit is having the ability to grow a variety of different fruits that can produce a crop from spring through fall, such as starting with strawberries in the spring and ending with apples in the fall.
When growing fruits, most plants need pollinated flowers. There are two types of pollination, self-pollination and cross-pollination. Self-pollination is when a plant’s flowers dust themselves with their own pollen and cross-pollination is when a plant’s flower needs to be pollinated by another cultivar, apples like McIntosh for example need another cultivar like Golden Delicious to be planted. nearby to supply the pollen needed to produce fruit.
Tree fruits like apples and peaches, for example, can be challenging to grow in the home garden because they are susceptible to pests that need to be controlled. With a little care you can control these problems with organic methods that won’t require the use of a toxic chemical that can harm you and the environment.
Fruits grown in the home garden are a crop that can be grown using natural organic methods, and can be grown without the use of toxic chemicals sprayed on them like commercial growers. This allows you to grow healthier fruit for both you and the environment.