During workshops and events in my orchard, participants are always keen to get a closer look at what I’m doing. To stop people from trampling the garden beds in their enthusiasm to get close to the action, I decided to construct some low fences, consisting of posts and cabling. These gave me the opportunity to plant some stepover apples and train them along the cabling. Trained in this way, they make one of the simplest forms of espalier.

Stepover apples are great for defining garden edges. They can be productive pieces of art without dominating a space like full-sized espaliers can.

My backyard orchard is too big and I really didn’t need any extra fruit trees (more on that here). But back in 2023, I still hadn’t worked that out. I was in my “bigger is better” phase of gardening. The new fences gave me an opportunity to include a bonus 24 varieties of apples in my orchard, so I did. Fast forward to 2026 and I really don’t need those extra apples, but I don’t regret the decision, because they have developed into a stunning garden feature.

How do you create an apple stepover?

Do try this at home. But don’t bother nipping down to your local nursery and grabbing any old apple tree to create a stepover. It’s almost sure to be on the wrong rootstock for this job. In time it’s likely to create a giant mess, endless pruning sessions, and an abundance of leaves but few fruit.

Read more

Emails like this arrive in my inbox all too often:

My dad was a magician when it came to plants. His garden is a jungle and had almost every fruit, vegetable and herb in it. He would graft several citrus varieties onto the one rootstock. I have now lost both mum and dad and have had to sell the family home. I have transplanted some of his roses but would love to also keep his lemon and mandarins. If I can bring you some cuttings from his trees, is there any chance that you could graft them onto rootstock for me?

Many thanks,

Vas, Dandenong North

Every year I receive dozens of emails praising and remembering a father, grandfather, mum, nonna or other relative who had a penchant for planting.

“Nonna was a magical gardener.”

“Dad’s lemons were amazing.”

“Mum loved her garden.”

“I have such fond memories of Grandpa in his garden.”

The author then goes on to lament that they never bothered to engage and learn from Dad or whoever they are telling me about and that it’s too late.

“I’ve just had to move Dad into a care facility”.

“Dad passed away suddenly.”

“Dad’s gone.”

Sometimes the writer expresses regret (“I wish I’d taken the time to learn from him”). But often they simply want to retain a memento; to retain a part of Dad’s garden. “Can you graft a new tree so that I can have one of Dad’s lemon trees in my own backyard?”

So much of my generation and the one above me never bothered to learn how to garden. As teenagers and young adults, we thought it wasn’t cool to have your hands in the dirt. My generation were always in a rush to embrace new technology. We never wanted to learn how to save seeds and replant them next year. After all, we can just buy food from the supermarket. There was a whole world wide web to connect to – what did we need nature for?

But as always, what was old is new again. Folks are desperate to reconnect to nature and start growing a bit of food. They want to revive past traditions and somehow reclaim time wasted. We regret not listening to our elders. And now our elders are no longer with us.

Each of these emails reminds me not to take life for granted; to cherish my time with loved ones. They also prompt me to get writing. To document all the knowledge that I’ve accumulated in my food growing journey and to share it with all my readers. The more I can write, the more I can support you in growing your own food.

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We can’t have our time again. I can’t magically give you all of your Dad’s gardening secrets. He had his own special way of doing things. But I can help you to keep the tradition of Dad’s lemon tree thriving. I can help you to save a lemon tree you’re sentimental about from the developer’s bulldozer.

This method is not limited to Dad’s lemon tree – it’s also applicable to Mum’s mandarin, Granny’s grapefruit, and any other treasured citrus trees you’d like to salvage.

Don’t leave it until it’s too late

I’m not just talking about connecting with elderly relatives. Citrus is best grafted when the trees (both scion and rootstock) are growing vigorously. In winter it’s too cold and there isn’t enough vigour in the trees for the grafts to reliably take. November is the earliest that I’d be confident the graft will take, and you could have some limited success as late as April. But from May to October inclusive you’ll need to play a waiting game.

Unfortunately, saving Dad’s lemon tree is often an afterthought for grieving families. His place was sold a few months back, and his exhausted adult children have had to divvy up his belongings and clear the place out for handover. There may have been an estate to manage, meaning many legal hoops to jump through. It’s exhausting. In the few days between emptying the house and handing the keys over to the new owner there is usually time to reflect. Often that’s when it hits home: Dad’s gone.

“What else of his can I hold on to?”

“What will help me remember Dad?”

“How can I maintain a connection?”

To my regular readers, this article is your wake-up call. If you want to save Dad’s lemon tree, don’t wait until it’s too late. Ideally, get him to graft one for you now. Better still, get him to teach you how to do it for yourself. While you’re at it, ask for those special tomato seeds that Nonno smuggled across from Calabria in the ’60s. Pick his brains about his favourite fruit tree varieties, what vegetables to plant when, and why he is always watering the compost.

If you have, sadly, left it too late, there are plenty of other ways to honour your Dad in the garden. You could plant another of his favourite fruit trees in his memory or make a donation in his name to his local community garden. Or get together with your extended family for a passata session to share precious memories. The most important thing is to make sure that Dad’s love of gardening doesn’t pass away with him.

Collecting your grafting materials

To graft Dad’s lemon tree, you’ll need some trifoliata rootstock. (Its full name is Poncirus trifoliata, but it’s almost always referred to as trifoliata.) This is tricky to source, and you are unlikely to find it in a nursery or even online. In the past I’ve grown trifoliata rootstocks from seed, but the seed needs to be fresh to germinate. Most commercial growers don’t want to sell just one or two rootstock plants and don’t do retail anyway. If you’ve left all this to the last minute, then your best bet is to head to a retail nursery and buy an orange tree that is growing on trifoliata rootstock.

Why an orange tree? Some lemons and mandarins have graft incompatibilities with trifoliata. Buying an orange tree will enable the trunk of the orange tree to act as an interstem.

You’ll also need scion wood to graft onto this orange (or onto your rootstock, if you managed to source some). Scion wood is essentially some sticks or cuttings from Dad’s lemon tree. The type of material that you collect is critical. Aim for branches that:

• are between 5 and 10 millimetres thick

• are green in colour

• have a circular cross section.

Preparing the scion

Time is the enemy of citrus scion wood. It will quickly begin to dry out. So ideally, harvest your scion and immediately graft it onto your rootstock or orange tree. If logistics prevent you from doing this, you can store the scion for a few days, but the sooner you graft, the better your chance of success. If you absolutely must, then store your scion wood as follows:

(a) Cut the scion wood into pencil sized pieces.

(b) Cut each leaf in half – this reduces photosynthesis, and therefore transpiration, which helps the scion to stay hydrated.

(c) Seal the scion into a zip lock bag with two or three drops of water.

(d) Place the bag in the vegetable crisper of the refrigerator.

Green grafting technique

There are many grafting techniques. Most of them apply to grafting deciduous trees, in winter, while the material is still dormant. Green grafting refers to grafting evergreen trees while they are in a state of active growth. For this reason, regardless of how good your skill and technique, the biggest influence on success is the timing and aftercare of the graft.

Identify potential graft sites on your rootstock or purchased orange tree. You’re looking for branches similar to the ideal scion pieces: circular cross section, 5 to 10 millimetres thick, lush and green.

Grafting sites should be as close to the trunk as possible. This is because eventually, once some of the grafts have taken, you will aim to remove as much as possible of the original orange tree’s foliage.

You can graft each scion using either a whip and tongue graft, or a cleft graft. The cleft graft is easier to master, but the whip and tongue creates a stronger graft, and if it’s done properly, it’s more likely to succeed.

Regardless of the method used, it is important to ensure that the cambium layers of the rootstock and the scion are properly aligned. The cambium layer contains the cambium meristem, which is the only living tissue present in the stem. A good connection is vital to ensure nutrients can be transported from the rootstock to the scion, to keep the cambium layer in the scion alive.

Whip and tongue graft

The most common grafting method is the whip and tongue graft. This graft is applicable in many circumstances and is used for grafting apples, pears and stone fruit when dormant in winter. I also use it for green grafting citrus.

(a) Start by making a diagonal cut on the scion. Avoid “whittling” and ensure a good, clean cut on both sides.

(b) Make a similar cut on the rootstock

(c) Ideally, make the two cuts mirror each other, so that the sliced timber is the same length on both pieces.

(d) Make a lengthwise cut in the scion, and one in the rootstock, about one third back from the pointed end of the timber. The incision should run perfectly parallel to the wood.

(e) Join the scion to the rootstock as per the image. Adjust the union to ensure maximum contact between the two cambium layers.

(f) Bind the union tightly with grafting tape.

Cleft graft

Cleft grafting is commonly used for grafting citrus and other evergreen trees. It can also be used for “reworking” established deciduous trees over to new varieties.

(a) To make a cleft graft, cut the base of the scion into a V-shaped wedge.

(b) Trim the top of the scion down to two to six nodes.

(c) Cut a rootstock branch (or orange tree branch) off cleanly at a 90 degree angle.

(d) Cut the rootstock branch vertically down the middle to receive the scion.

(e) Push the scion down into the incision in the rootstock branch. Ideally, the scion and rootstock diameters are the same, to maximise cambium layer contact on both sides of the graft.

(f) Bind the union well to enhance cambium layer contact and to prevent drying out of the scion via the graft union.

Does all that slicing seem a bit dicey? Do you like your fingers where they are? If you organise your scion and rootstock or orange tree, then I can do the grafting for you. You can bring your materials to my place in Kyneton, or book a consult and I’ll come to you.

Find out more

Aftercare for your grafted citrus

This bit is the most important.

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In April 2024, my “Beurre Hardy” pear tree produced ripe fruit for the first time. The fruit was delicious: thin skin, buttery flesh, sweet juice that ran everywhere. “Beurre Hardy” is an incredible pear variety. There must have been around 50 kilos of fruit on that small tree, and a delicate pear like that doesn’t keep for very long. I started giving away the pears to friends, family and neighbours.

That same month, my friendly woodchip mulch guy Bryn dropped off another 20 cubic metre delivery. As he drove out the bottom gate, he was already onto his third pear. Soon afterwards, he sent me a text. “Mate, the last pear I ate was disgusting,” he wrote. “It was full of worms.”

I’d been expecting this moment since we moved to Kyneton. The “worms” were the maggots of Queensland fruit fly (QFF), widely regarded as a serious pest by Australian orchardists and backyard growers. I immediately contacted everyone I’d recently given fruit to and explained what they needed to look for if they didn’t want to end up with a mouthful of maggots and a backyard infestation of their own. Over the next few weeks, I searched my orchard daily and watched the infestation spread to other pears, nashis and then apples.

I was devastated

Never again would I enjoy sampling a delicious, juicy plum right there in the orchard. My children would need to learn to bring fruit inside, carefully cut it up and inspect for maggots before eating it. Depression kicked in. Why bother growing fruit at all?

Then, some months later, another reader’s story filled me with hope. I’ve already shared Eileen’s experience of dealing with Queensland fruit fly. Reading her story replaced my depression with optimism. Many readers commented that it provided a beacon of light during a dark time in their own Queensland fruit fly journey.

The pesky flies returned in the summer of 2024–25, and now I’ve had two summers of observing them in my orchard. While I don’t have enough practical, personal experience with this pest to write a comprehensive guide to controlling them, I have made some observations, and I’ve also been trained by Agribusiness Yarra Valley in best practices for preventing, monitoring and managing outbreaks.

There’s a saying “If you want to learn about something, write about it.” My mind is a busy place and there are a lot of thoughts swimming around inside there. To help me get my head around Queensland fruit fly, I’ve written about it.

I’ve annoyed a few experts (again)

Usually, my work is reviewed only by my editor before I click “send”. But my knowledge of Queensland fruit fly isn’t as strong as my knowledge of some other aspects of gardening, so for this and other posts on Queensland fruit fly, I asked some experts for help.

To say they were bit uncomfortable with what I’d written is an understatement. They asked me to highlight that I’ve written about my journey, my take on this pest, and my plan for dealing with it in my orchard. My approach contradicts some of the recommendations made by Agriculture Victoria and some scientists.

Time to make a cuppa

Settle in for a long read. I’ve published my work as a series of three posts on my Leaf, Root & Fruit website.

• Post one in the series looks at what Queensland fruit fly is. I’ve described the life cycle and the patterns I’ve noticed, and I’ve summed up the science I’ve studied.

  Read post one

• Post two runs through the many control strategies that we as home gardeners have at our disposal.

  Read post two

• Post three explains some alternative strategies to put the brakes on the pest. These are my outside-the-box ideas.

  Read post three

Managing Queensland fruit fly is the biggest problem Australian backyard orchardists face. I’ve made all my posts on this topic free for everyone to read. Please share them with fellow gardeners to help them better understand and fight these pulp-plundering fruit felons.

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I’ve written about this Beurre Bosc pear tree several times now. In 2024 I discussed its remarkable performance in producing 91 kilograms of pears in one season. That’s a lot of pears considering its size, vigorous rootstock, minimal pruning and utter lack of water and fertiliser.

This year, in April 2025, the same tree produced “only” 43 kilograms of pears. But I was over the moon about it, because I was expecting only about a dozen pears.

For my first five autumns in Kyneton, this tree has produced an epic crop one year and a paltry crop the next. It’s called biennial cropping. The tree “works too hard” one year and takes a holiday the next year. It’s very common in most fruit trees, including apricots and citrus and especially pome fruit such as apples and pears.

“Experts” will tell you that biennial cropping is something best prevented because once a tree is in a biennial cropping pattern, it’s impossible to correct. But I’m not so sure. I’ve been experimenting with my Beurre Bosc, aiming to even out the on-off cycle of fruit production. It’s still early days but the 43-kilogram crop this year is a good sign that I’m getting there. I’m trying a few different tricks, but the most obvious one is fruit thinning.

Fruit thinning is usually applied to prevent biennial cropping in the first place. I’m now hopeful that it can also be used to strategically coax a stubborn tree out of a biennial fruiting pattern.

Eh? Thinning fruit makes it fatter?

It does indeed. The premise is simple. Each tree has a given number of leaves. A huge tree may have millions, but your backyard fruit tree is likely to have tens of thousands (go on, count them and prove me wrong). Every leaf uses energy from sunlight to chemically recombine water and carbon dioxide into glucose (sugar) and oxygen. Photosynthesis!

Glucose is a basic sugar. Once the tree has generated it via photosynthesis, it can convert it into all sorts of other complex sugars. Glucose can become lignin or cellulose to be used in the trunk and branches to provide strength. Glucose can move to other parts of the plant to give energy for growth. Or it can be concentrated in the fruit to give it sweetness.

The key takeaway from all of this is that the tree has a limited number of leaves. If leaf surface area is limited, then so is sugar production.

Fruit thinning manipulates how the tree distributes the sugar. Left to its own devices, a hypothetical tree may set, say, 200 fruits. It produces ‘X’ amount of sugar and divides it fairly evenly between those 200 fruits.

If we interfere and remove half of those 200 fruits when they are still small and immature, then each of the remaining 100 pieces of fruit could potentially receive twice as much sugar (and twice as much of the other nutrients that the plant uses to develop fruit).

The result of fruit thinning is less fruit, but fruit with a higher quantity of sugar and nutrition – sweeter and larger fruit. Thin fruit to make it fat.

Fat fruit is where it’s at

Thinning immature fruit allows the tree to reduce the energy, sugar, nutrients and water its fruit requires. This allows the tree to re-direct some resources to maintaining tree health and vigour. However, you don’t want to overdo the fruit thinning because then the tree would put all that energy into growing foliage, making it bigger and in need of a severe prune, which we usually want to avoid. A balanced approach to thinning is important (more on that shortly).

Thinning fruit isn’t just about preventing biennial cropping or encouraging bigger and sweeter fruit. It also reduces hiding spaces where pests such as earwigs and harlequins can congregate. Fewer pests equals less damage and fewer blemishes on the skin of the remaining fruit. Fruit thinning could allow you to have 100 huge apples, most of them blemish-free, rather than 200 medium-sized apples, most of them covered in marks and spots.

How do you thin fruit?

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In last month’s post, I listed 10 fruit trees I’d include when designing a backyard orchard for the ultimate spread of ripe fruit across the year (more on my design service here). My list held a few surprises and many glaring omissions, because I found it so difficult to whittle the list down to just 10. So today’s list highlights another 10 varieties that are worth considering. Do you have space to grow 20 fruit trees? Then this list combined with last month’s is perfect for you. If there was something on last month’s list that you don’t want to grow, then you might want to use today’s list to make informed substitutions. A fig for a persimmon, a nectarine for a peach, apricot blossom for cherry blossom. Mix and match to suit your needs.

When reading this second list of fruit trees, please remember all the caveats and considerations that I outlined in my post last month.

No, lemons are not my favourite fruit

Again, these trees are listed in order of ripening time and not in order of priority or my personal preference. In many cases I’m splitting hairs when it comes to priority. For me, the trees in the original post are higher priority than those in this post. But no doubt you will see some things differently. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments.

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Eureka Lemon

Harvest: All year round

You might argue that a lemon tree should be numero uno on the priority list. And yes, lemon trees are bountiful. Yes, they produce all year round. Yes, they are very useful. And indeed, if you live in an area where lemons are scarce, then you should plant a lemon tree STAT. Make it a priority. Otherwise, read on for all the reasons why you shouldn’t plant a lemon tree.

Firstly, most folks don’t chow down on fresh lemons. You just need a lemon here to flavour a fish dish, a half dozen lemons there for lemon butter. A single lemon tree can produce enough lemons to keep several households well stocked. Folks are often very happy to share their excess around, and there are lemon trees everywhere. Usually, you can help yourself to a few fruits overhanging a fence line. Find a friend with a lemon tree and arrange to exchange some of their lemons now for a share in some of your precious greengages in future years. If we all plant a lemon tree we will all be overwhelmed with lemons. If your growing space is limited, then lean on the support of others for your lemon supply. Grow something less common instead, like a persimmon.

Citrus trees are subtropical and are not that well suited to the harsh winters of Central Victoria. But they typically thrive in Melbourne. Read more about overcoming the challenges of growing citrus in a cool temperate climate like mine here. I have three Eureka lemon trees and they all cope well with the cold.

Alternatives: Lisbon lemons are also a good option for cool climates. Some people prefer the Meyer lemon for its sweeter flavour. The Lemonade tree produces fruit without the acidity so you can enjoy them straight from the tree – a tasty novelty.

Crimson Baby Nectarine

Harvest: December

This nectarine is a yellow-fleshed clingstone packed full of juicy sweetness. Its early fruiting justifies its inclusion despite its moderate curly leaf susceptibility. A nectarine is a smooth-skinned peach. Nectarines and peaches are the same species (Prunus persica) and both are self-fertile. You can usually plant a peach or nectarine seed and the seedling will grow out true to type (meaning it will produce fruit of similar quality to the parent). However, don’t forget the importance of grafting trees onto ideal rootstocks to help control vigour and other attributes of the tree.

Alternative: Goldmine has strong resistance to curly leaf but fruits much later in the season (mid-February to early March)

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In my recent round-up of rare berries, I discussed some varieties that are best left on the retail nursery shelf. Chokeberries (the name says it all) and goumi (admittedly ornamental and nitrogen fixing, but terrible to eat) are two that I’d recommend you bypass. Today I discuss a few fruit trees that sound good on paper, but that I’ve found reasons to avoid growing.

Mulberry tree not everyone’s cup of tea

Mulberries are very sentimental trees that inspire childhood memories of mulberry stained fingers and faces. These old trees still grace farmyards abandoned decades ago. Sometimes the trees have blown over in the wind but continue to grow in a gnarled, twisted, horizontal fashion. They are bullet-proof and the fruit is delicious. I’ve worked out that every time you prune a mulberry tree, it fruits in response – I once had four crops from one tree in a single growing season! Why wouldn’t you want to plant a mulberry?

Well, firstly, they grow into monsters. Yes, you can purchase dwarf mulberries. But not all dwarfs are created equal and even the dwarf mulberry trees grow vigorously. A mulberry tree can quickly grow to 20 metres tall, and often wider than that. If you’re planting one in a suburban backyard the mulberry might quickly dominate. Soon you’ll have room to grow only (admittedly lots of) mulberries.

It’s just not above the ground that this tree reigns supreme. The tree has very distinctive yellow roots. If you plant a mulberry, you’ll soon see a lot of the roots because they get into everything. I have a mulberry tree in my productive garden. It was planted by the previous owners, and I didn’t see any harm in leaving it there for a few more years. But now I’m finding the yellow mulberry roots snaking everywhere. This year they invaded the corn patch and the saucing tomatoes and reduced their yields.

The roots are not fine and matted like citrus roots. They are long and snaking, seeking moisture and nutrients. When they find a jackpot, they quickly expand to dominate. Terrible destruction reigns if they find their way into gaps in geriatric pipes and plumbing.

If you have a large property and can plant a mulberry in isolation, then go for it. Otherwise, I’d give it a miss. And avoid Hick’s Fancy in frosty areas like mine – it flowers too early, and the frost damage prevents fruit set. English Black or Shahtoot are better choices.

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In a recent post I shared my own experience in determining how many fruit trees are too many. Yes, I’m extreme in my approach, but I’ve found out that even I have my limits. This winter some of my fruit trees got the chop.

Last week I discussed how many fruit trees is ideal for a backyard orchard. Many of my readers were surprised at how low that number was.

Today’s post is a list of varieties that I reckon you should consider including in your backyard orchard.

This isn’t clickbait. It’s not a hastily compiled list of my 10 favourite fruit varieties. In fact, some of my personal top 10 didn’t even make the cut. But if you asked me to design a backyard orchard and include 10 reliable trees that produce a spread of delicious ripe fruit across the year, then this is what I’d probably include. It’s a list of what I’d plant based on four factors: pollination, ripening times, resilience and flavour.

I’ve been meaning to write this post for years. But it meant poring through mountains of journal entries, scrutinising years’ worth of ripening and harvesting data, and reviewing all my taste test notes. I kept putting it off, and it took me ages to compile, but now I’ve finally completed it.

You and I will probably have different favourite fruits and different flavour preferences. You may garden in a cooler or warmer climate where the ripening times need adjusting. Regardless, if you’re thinking about planting some fruit trees this winter, then this list is a good place to start.

Caveats and considerations

Designing an orchard means considering many factors. Designing even a small orchard of just 20 x 20 metres can take me dozens of hours (more on my design service here). I need to consider rootstock choice, layout, espalier versus freestanding trees, netting by hand or building a permanent netted enclosure, access and irrigation. Once all that’s decided upon, it’s time to get busy selecting fruit. Here are some of the factors that I consider when selecting fruit trees for clients.

Pollination

Some fruit trees are self-fertile – peaches, for example. They’ll pollinate themselves, so you don’t need to grow a second tree for pollination. Apples and pears must have a cross-pollinator of a compatible variety (two Beurre Bosc pears won’t pollinate each other; you’ll need, say, a Beurre Bosc and a Williams).

Ripening times

Cherries ripen around Christmas. Summer is stone fruit season. Autumn provides an abundance of pears and apples. Citrus can be a winter staple. But within each type of fruit, there are early, mid- and late-season varieties. By using a ripening chart such as this one, you can select fruit for year-round abundance. If you are designing a kitchen garden for a school, then don’t plant half a dozen fruit trees that all ripen during the January school holidays. Spread the harvest across the year.

Resilience

Some trees are bulletproof. It doesn’t matter where you locate them. Others are sensitive to high humidity or other environmental conditions. For example, apricots grow well in Kyneton, but they produce fruit only in good years, when the conditions in spring are favourable. Some varieties of apple are more resistant to woolly aphid or apple scab than others. Certain peaches are more susceptible to curly leaf. Careful variety selection can reduce or completely prevent disease outbreaks without any need for sprays.

Flavour

Grow what you like to eat. If you are going to harvest 90-odd kilos of fruit from your pear tree then you’d better enjoy the flavour. Flavour preference is the tricky part of compiling this list. What tastes great to me may not be your cup of tea. Wherever possible, I recommend you taste a variety before you plant it.

The trees that follow are listed in order of ripening in my orchard. These periods are approximate and vary annually. In Melbourne, early fruit, such as cherries, will ripen sooner than what I’ve listed. Late-season fruit is especially variable in its harvest period.

If you want to plant fewer trees you can make an informed decision about which trees to cull from the list based on the notes I’ve included.

Lapins Cherry

Harvest: Late December.

For the last two Christmases, I’ve supplied a glass bowl filled with a kilo of homegrown cherries for my family’s Christmas Day lunch, picked from my Lapins cherry tree in the days before. One kilo of cherries doesn’t sound like much, but the tree is tiny and punching well above its weight in terms of productivity. Lapins is self-fertile and doesn’t need a cross-pollinator. I have several other cherry varieties, but the Lapins has proven the most resilient and problem-free. And they taste great.

Alternatives: Other self-fertile cherry varieties that don’t require a cross-pollinator are Stella and Sir Don.

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Deciding on the number of fruit trees to plant is a bit like deciding on your ideal number of chickens to keep. The answer is always three more than you already have. To some backyard growers it’s perfectly logical to say “I’ve never tried a plumcot before, so I’ll squeeze it in and devote three years of growing it to find out whether I like it”. There are so many different varieties of fruit, and it is mighty tempting to try to cram all of them into your backyard.

I recently wrote about why I’m removing some fruit trees from my own orchard – I planted too many. Today’s post looks at how many fruit trees is ideal for your own backyard orchard – how to find the sweet spot.

How many trees can you fit?

Are you working with a tiny courtyard or a hobby farm? Within that space, what is available for planting? Do you need to leave some backyard space where the kids can kick the footy (in my experience footies and fruit trees don’t coexist very well), the dog can run, or you can entertain or hold Saturday night barbeques?

Tree size affects the equation. And that leads me to rootstock selection. Choice of rootstock will determine how big the trees will ultimately become and therefore how many trees you can squeeze in (more on that here).

Some trees are grafted onto rootstocks that will encourage the trees to grow into utter monsters 15-plus metres tall. Other rootstocks will keep trees to a more modest 3 metres tall even with minimal pruning or other intervention on your part. Then there are the super dwarf trees that will grow to only about 1.5 metres tall and can be used for stepovers or growing in pots.

Many factors can influence tree spacing, but by oversimplifying things I can give you a rough guide. You should space free-standing dwarf fruit trees approximately 3.5 to 4 metres apart. Note that once the fruit trees are mature this won’t leave room for access paths between the trees. You might want to consider allowing 5 to 6 metres between rows of trees, with an intra-row space of around 4 metres.

Planting apricots, plums and peaches together? The spacing will need to be tweaked for each tree as they all max out at different sizes. Planting on semi-dwarf or full-sized rootstocks? The spacing will need to be greatly increased.

How much time do you have?

As I alluded to in my recent post, it doesn’t take much time to plant an extra couple of fruit trees. But every autumn it’ll take a great deal of extra time to pick and harvest that fruit. It will also take extra time to net the trees, and patrol them for pests such as Queensland Fruit Fly. You might need to prune them, and water them too. Curbing your enthusiasm at planting time will help create a more balanced life for your future self.

A neglected orchard can become an environmental hazard. All that unmanaged fruit will harbour pests that will spread to neighbouring orchards. It will attract parrots and rodents. Our native wildlife has not evolved eating soft fleshy fruit. Whatever sized orchard you decide to plant, please make sure you can protect and maintain it.

How much fruit do you need?

My fruit tree harvest starts with cherries in December, followed by stone fruit in summer. Apples, pears and nashis ripen through autumn. The persimmons ripen indoors and provide fruit right through to July. The citrus picks up in late winter (citrus fruits are typically an early winter staple in Melbourne but they ripen much later here in Kyneton). There’s a fruit famine in early spring. But if you include the strawberries, which provide abundance in November, there’s a gap of only two months where I can’t enjoy fresh fruit from my garden. Check out the ripening chart in this post for more information on all of this.

Folks growing in a warm temperate climate such as Melbourne’s can manage to eat fresh fruit for most of the year with just 10 well selected fruit trees.

Optimising the final number

If space is limited, then 10 trees is more than enough. Ten mature dwarf fruit trees could provide you with around 400 to 1000 kilograms of delicious home-grown fruit spread across the year.

Even if you have enough space to devote to growing more, then go beyond that number with caution. Twenty fruit trees are manageable for some, but likely excessive. It’s a lot of work to maintain a backyard orchard of that size. Twenty fruit trees is no longer “dabbling” – at this point you’re becoming a serious part-time orchardist. You’ll be busy in spring, but you’ll be inundated in autumn.

Next week, I’ll provide a list of fruit tree varieties that you might want to consider including if you are going to limit yourself to an orchard of 10 fruit trees. It’s a list of what I’d plant based on four factors: pollination, ripening times, resilience and flavour.

I’ve been meaning to write the post for years. But it meant poring through mountains of journal entries, scrutinising years’ worth of ripening and harvesting data, and reviewing all my taste test notes. I kept putting it off, and it took me ages to compile, but now I’ve finally completed it.

It will land in the inboxes of paid subscribers next Tuesday morning. If you haven’t already done so, go paid to make sure you receive it.

The design of any orchard needs to consider:

• Layout, spacing and access

• Ripening times and harvest

• Rootstock selection

• Tree resilience and susceptibility to pests and disease

• Pollination

• Irrigation

• Crop protection

This post gives a good overview of all the above topics and more.

Getting everything just right takes a lot of consideration, but that effort will repay you with increased yields for less work. If you need advice tailored to your individual site, then you can request a site consult. Together we can explore your property and discuss your vision.

Find out more about garden consults

You can see all my posts about backyard orchards here.

My family and I moved to Kyneton in June 2019. The property we purchased had some wonderful garden spaces, lush established trees, clipped hedges and fancy raised garden beds.

But much of it required a lot of maintenance and we couldn’t keep up with the weeding, the pruning, the hedge trimming, the mowing, the planting, and the harvesting. Well, at least, we couldn’t manage it all on our own. Either we needed to invest in an army of gardeners, or something else needed to change.

Over the past six years I have slowly converted some of the garden spaces into low maintenance landscapes. This has made living here more enjoyable. Rather than arriving home from work and seeing one giant to-do list, I am now able to see beauty in the garden. I have time to kick the footy with the kids without feeling like I should be weeding the berry patch or cutting back the buddleias in the Piet Garden.

The Med Garden

Med Garden is short for Mediterranean Garden, so named because when we moved here, it was full of plants that thrived in a Mediterranean climate.

Huge swathes of lavender provided fodder for bees. Masses of rugosas (a primitive type of rose) produced rich scents. Dozens of table grapes grew along a fancy diagonal trellis. Twenty olive trees were carefully laid out in a grid. After purchasing the property, we found out that the olives were sterile ornamentals, because “Why would you bother growing your own when Barfold Olives is just up the road?”. A granitic sand pathway dog-legged its way downhill through the garden, so every time rain fell heavily, the path washed out onto the surrounding garden beds. Within months of us moving in, triangular areas (“dancefloors”) mulched with dyed black pine bark grew an abundance of weeds. In short, the Med Garden quickly became a high maintenance eyesore.

My partner Caryn and I had initially wanted to convert this space into a children’s garden. You know the type: dry creek beds, teepees, aromatic sensory plants and mud pits. But we took too long to get around to it. Now the kids are in school and they wouldn’t get much use out of it. Besides, the whole property is a children’s garden. There are puddles to splash in, trees to climb and sticks to sword-fight with. They can dig, run and jump without needing some constructed landscape in which to do so.

I became used to it

When you look at something for long enough you stop seeing it. It becomes too familiar. And that’s what happened to me and the Med Garden. For the past two years it has sat in a state of semi-demolition. Utterly neglected. The grapes and olives remain. A line of rugosas highlights where the path used to be. When the grass and weeds become knee high, we mow them.

I think the delay in action came from a lack of ideas on what to do with the space. We don’t need any more fruit trees. We don’t have the time to maintain any more fancy gardens. There wasn’t much of a vision.

It was time that changed.

A vision for the future

With every design I do for clients, I complete a client brief and come up with a vision statement. It’s a bit like what some corporate folks might call a mission statement. It’s a snappy summary of the garden that I’m about to design. I include it to make sure that the client knows they have been heard and understood. But it’s also important for me to refer to during the various stages of design.

Back in 2019, Caryn and I crafted a vision statement for our own garden:

If the garden is supposed to evolve with and adapt to our family, then it makes sense to involve the whole family in the design process.

Until now, I’d been solely responsible for designing most of the changes we’ve made to the garden. But the Med Garden has always been earmarked as a family space. This time, rather than showing Caryn and the kids a final design for their approval, I wanted to involve them from the get-go.

Back to the drawing board

I printed up a dozen copies of a base map with a basic outline of the Med Garden space and the footy paddock adjacent to it. I spoke to each family member about what I wanted them to do.

I asked them to consider two major questions:

• Should we remove the fence between the footy paddock and the Med Garden to make one large space, or leave things as they are, two smaller spaces?

• Should we remove the timber rotunda (it probably only had a few years left in it anyway), or leave it for now?

I also wanted them to consider our constraints:

• The space is to be incredibly low maintenance

• Budget is tight now, so the design needs to be cheap to implement

• I want to plant more nut trees, and I’d like to incorporate as many as I can in this space

• The open space where we kick the football could stay where it is, or be moved up closer to the house.

Other than that, it was free rein, and all options would be considered. It was time to see what they came up with.

Emily (age five) was first to present her design. She included flowers such as roses, sunflowers and poppies. An apple was the only tree. She also drew a dog and a kennel. The footy oval was to remain as is.

Angus (age eight) came running up to me a bit later with his design and I was very impressed. He had included a few nut trees but the feature of the design was a BMX bike track. This nailed the brief I had given him.

Caryn shared her thoughts verbally. The two of us agreed that a parklike area with grass (not lawn) growing under huge trees would be ideal. Caryn also wanted a picking garden in the north-east corner of the space to mirror the triangle garden adjacent in the orchard space. While such a garden is relatively low maintenance, it still requires some maintenance and needs watering. I’m not keen on adding a single ounce of work more than I need to. We compromised. There will be swathes of spring bulbs planted under the trees, especially in the area closest to the front gate. Once they’ve died back, at the start of each summer we will run the mower over them.

I’m keen to remove the fence between the two areas and open it up, but the other three want to keep it. I think the kids are worried about losing their footy field to Dad’s penchant for planting. We have agreed to leave it there until the kids stop using the footy field. The rotunda is also to remain – until it falls.

I’d already researched nut trees. Many of them grow big, very big, especially pecans and walnuts, which can grow to 30 metres. Most of the nut trees are also incredibly slow to grow and produce.

Because nut trees grow so big, but also take a long time to grow big, they provide opportunities for the space in the short term. For example, a BMX bike track could weave in around the young trees. It’s not ideal from a soil compaction point of view, but if the track is defined, I’m sure the trees will cope with it. Angus will get his wish.

The footy paddock will stay where it is, and some trees can grow on the periphery. If the trees get smashed and broken by a footy, then so be it; we’ll prune or replant them until the footy paddock is no longer required.

Refining the design

I took everyone’s ideas and started to put them together in SketchUp (a computer program for design).

I don’t have much experience with growing nut trees. I needed to rely on a lot of research. How big do they grow? What type of conditions do they require? How much water do they need? Do they need cross-pollination from a different variety? What varieties are available for sale in Australia? At the end of this post, I’ve included a summary of the nutty notes I compiled during my research phase.

I focused on positioning the nut trees first. My research had determined that each of the candidate nut trees could be categorised into one of three sizes (3 metres, 5 metres or 15+ metres in my cool temperate climate). This is what I came up with.

I presented this tree layout to the family and asked for feedback. They were all happy with it and keen to get designing the bike path. The kids started tracing lines across the page but then resorted to Lego figurines riding bikes across the plan.

The problem was that the kids’ bike path designs were a bit too complex to implement. They understood the complexity of scale (the Lego bikes really helped with this) but didn’t quite understand the practicality of all those twists and turns. Plus, the site is on a slope, and I know some of their jumps and other design features won’t work if they are frantically puffing and pedalling their way back uphill.

Caryn and I came up with similar bike path designs, but they were mirrored. They say opposites attract, and I zigged north when she zagged south. I liked Caryn’s perspective on it, so we went with her plan.

When we headed into the space to walk it we decided to retain that idea as only a rough guide for now, rather than locking in the bike path design. We figured we need to see how the kids use the area once the trees are planted, in the same way that designers of public parks wait for a year or so for the desire lines to appear before determining the best locations for permanent paved paths.

What’s next?

Part of the push to get started on this design was the April school holidays. Rather than going camping, we stayed at home. I wanted to find an activity for the family to work on together, and I wanted to provide an opportunity for those who needed to let off some cabin-fever-related steam. I’ve started teaching Angus to use basic power tools such as the reciprocating saw. He can drive the ride-on mower (only for the purposes of towing the trailer, not actual mowing – I like his toes where they are) and I let both kids stuff the chipper with prunings. Angus was especially keen to use these tools to help remove any of the unwanted plants from the Med Garden. He and I did a lot of the tree and shrub removal together. He grunted and shoved, pushed and pulled, dug and smashed. Each morning the allure of the mower and power tools had him itching to get outside and kept him engaged on the tasks much longer than I thought it would.

I could see his sense of accomplishment and pride whenever he finally wrested a stump from the ground. At the end of each “demolition session” (said aloud with as deep a voice as you can muster) we would stand together and look back at the newly extended dancefloor. He’d run inside and ask his mum and sister to come and see what we’d done.

Together Angus and I translated the printed scale design into pegs in the ground to show where the new trees would go. We used trigonometry, maths and geometry to create a perfect circle for the hazelnuts and to peg out where each tree would go. I’ve watched him grow as a person and this nut grove will always remind me of that.

Emily and Caryn would pop out and lend a hand from time to time. But a five-year-old whose feet can’t reach the mower pedals and who isn’t allowed to use the reciprocating saw was never going to be as interested as her big brother. I’m hoping she will become more involved when it comes time to plan and set up the BMX track, which will free up Caryn to be more involved too.

I’ll send you an update on the Med Garden’s conversion to a nut grove when it’s starting to take shape.

In the meantime, you can download a copy of my notes on the various nut trees I’m planting. I created them mostly for my own benefit during the design process, so they may have a few typos and discrepancies.

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My orchard helps me to mark the passage of time. It’s a living calendar. I marvel at the seasonality of my deciduous fruit trees and record the dates that the buds burst into blossom. I eagerly watch the fruit swell and relish seeing my children sampling the ripening fruit on hot summer days.

Pruning is my mindfulness activity. Espaliers are my intricate, photosynthesising works of art.

There are so many reasons why I love growing my own fruit.

I’ve found out that you can plant a lot of fruit trees on six acres. It’s easy to go overboard. Early on, I said to myself, “I’ll sell the excess, or I’ll give it away to friends or family.” That’s how I justified planting all those trees. “What’s a few more trees here or there? The more the merrier.”

Now I’m rethinking that wisdom.

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Last autumn I experienced an outbreak of Queensland Fruit Fly (Bactrocera tryoni) in my orchard. The discovery was devastating. I wondered if I’d ever enjoy the satisfaction of biting into a freshly picked piece of fruit again. My readers were very supportive. One reader’s comment on a social media post particularly inspired a sense of optimism. Eileen Ray wrote that she had first discovered Queensland Fruit Fly in her garden nearly 20 years ago.

I’m just beginning my journey with Queensland Fruit Fly, but Eileen has been successfully managing it for years. I’m keen to understand her approach and I know many of my readers will be too. Eileen has kindly agreed to share her wisdom with us.

Eileen’s journey with Queensland Fruit Fly

I am retired. I live on a slightly larger block than normal in Ascot Vale. I moved here in the 1990s and already there was a huge fig tree, peach and kiwi vines. Every time something died I replaced it with something edible, so now I also have a grape vine, apples, assorted berries, cumquat, plums (in the chook run where there is no cherry slug), pears, mulberries, mandarin, lemons, babaco, apricot, limes, almond, goji, tamarillo, assorted currants which are yet to fruit, and macadamia. Unfortunately the peach tree died of old age. It had produced the very biggest and sweetest clingstone I've ever eaten. (Other people have back yards. I have an edible jungle.)

In about 2007 there was an outbreak of Queensland Fruit Fly in Melbourne. We were letterboxed about it and told to keep an eye on the garden.

I used to pick tomatoes as they started to change colour – a result of a constant rat problem – and keep them on a large white platter where I could see the colour changes easily. One day I noticed some slime under a tomato. I cut it open and out jumped a maggot. I wondered...

I got in touch with the Department of Primary Industries (DPI) who told me the outbreak was a long way from here, but if I was happy to leave a sample outside someone would collect it and determine if it was actually Queensland Fruit Fly. Unfortunately it was. The exclusion zone for Queensland Fruit Fly was immediately widened to include a much greater area of Melbourne. At times I was upset that I wasn't allowed to take salad to work for lunch – I worked on the other side of town. The DPI staff came and inspected everyone's back yards and sprayed and put out traps. (For a few years I had the very best nectarine crops because they had also stopped the codling moth.) I found lots of infected fruit and veggies over the next while and was determined to try and stop the problem as unlike codling moth, the entire piece of fruit or veg affected is completely inedible. At least with codling moth one could cut out affected bits and eat the rest.

I was interviewed on Gardening Australia at the time. They filmed someone from the DPI pouring poison on my garden (a place which I still haven't planted again.)

Trapping has been the key

I don't use poison in my garden. I want to feel comfortable eating stuff.

My approach to living with Queensland Fruit Fly is simple: keep trapping. Mid-spring I put out both male and female traps. I do use the male traps from Bunnings, and some of the female traps, but also some home made ones. I have the traps all over the garden. So I need the home made ones as the others are expensive.

I use a mix of 1 tablespoon cloudy ammonia to 1 cup fruit juice in the home made female traps. I buy the cheapest – apple or blackcurrant and apple. I belive that any fruit juice other than pineapple works.

I know these work as I used to often watch the females fly in but never come out again. At the end of the season there are lots of remains in the bottles. Traps are hung ½ meter to 2 metres above ground.

On my normal suburban block I have 6 female traps, mostly in the backyard where my fruit trees and vegetables are, and 2 male traps with one in the front and the other in the back. The more male Queensland Fruit Fly I spot, the more often I change the mixture in the female traps.

I usually don't replace the liquid in the female traps unless they look to be really drying up or filled with rain. [Note that Agriculture Victoria advises that the mixture can last up to three weeks but should be changed weekly for best results.] In late autumn, when it's too cold for Queensland Fruit Fly to be out and about, they need to be taken down. I'm usually put off by the contents of the traps. I pour them into a large flat container and leave it to dry out over winter. It's never a pretty sight.

Vigilant surveillance

Another important trick is to pick every piece of fruit. Don't let any fall to the ground as the Queensland Fruit Fly maggots might escape before you find them. Every piece of fruit that does fall to the ground is picked up, examined for maggots and, if I'm suspicious, the fruit is zapped in the microwave before composting.

Last year, I didn’t lose any produce to Queensland Fruit Fly, but that is unusual. The norm is the occasional tomato or chilli is affected. The nectarine tree had to be chopped down as it was too close to the house and affecting the foundations, and that was another major place I'd find them.

So far this year I haven't lost any produce to Queensland Fruit Fly. This I think is the third year in a row of success.

Why bother?

The stuff I buy is nowhere near as fresh. I know because it goes off so quickly. Home grown mostly tastes so much better. I don't waste as much as I know the effort that has gone into producing it in the first place. The chooks rarely even get leftovers as I work out how to incorporate them into another meal. Ugly veggies are the norm but taste great. I have found documentation of my being concerned about climate change since the 1990s. I would love to be able to leave a better planet to my descendants. Growing food is counter-cultural too. In my youth we protested against uranium mines and the Vietnam War. So I'm still a hippy at heart.

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A silver lining

Part of my food journey has resulted from the first Queensland Fruit Fly outbreak. I run a garden swap at my local church and one day a guy turned up with his full Fowler’s Vacola set and jars and announced he wasn't doing it any more as his apricot tree had Queensland Fruit Fly and he'd had it cut down in disgust! It took me a while to gain confidence, but I joined the Facebook group Fowler’s Vacola Users and found a whole community of people who patiently answered beginners’ questions with a wealth of information. It took about 15 years to get the confidence, but I have recently run very basic introduction to preserving classes to help others who don’t know where to start.

Lately I've been processing lots of foods to sell for fundraising for charities, both home grown and bought, although people are starting to bring their excess stuff to me to process too. Last year I processed over 600 jars of jams, pickles, relishes, sauces, cordials, etc in a tiny old-fashioned kitchen with just the one Fowler’s unit.

A massive thank you to Eileen for sharing her story with us. I’m hugely appreciative of both the wisdom and the optimism that it inspires. In my own short journey with Queensland Fruit Fly, I have bounced back from deep despair to a more optimistic view of how this pest can be managed. The more I research and the more stories I hear from gardeners such as Eileen, the brighter the future feels for home grown food.

I’ve published my approach to managing Queensland fruit fly as a series of three posts on my Leaf, Root & Fruit website.

• Post one in the series looks at what Queensland fruit fly is. I’ve described the life cycle and the patterns I’ve noticed, and I’ve summed up the science I’ve studied.

Read post one

• Post two runs through the many control strategies that we as home gardeners have at our disposal.

Read post two

• Post three explains some alternative strategies to put the brakes on the pest. These are my outside-the-box ideas.

Read post three

I love mulching. It’s one of my favourite gardening jobs. I love watching as the mountain of a mulch pile slowly diminishes. I love the physicality of filling barrows with the stuff and pushing them through the garden. I love seeing the way it instantly transforms a space to make it look neat and tidy. I love the practical benefits mulch brings to my garden.

Want to sell your house? Get mulching.

Want to make your garden look neat and tidy? Get mulching.

Want to weed your garden less? Get mulching.

Want to get fit? Get mulching.

Want to use less water in the garden? Get mulching.

If you want value for money in the garden, nothing beats investing in spreading a layer of mulch across your property.

Where in the garden should you use woodchip mulch?

With the exception of the vegetable patch, the answer is everywhere! (More on mulching the vegetable patch here).

For what it is and what it can do for your garden, mulch is incredibly cheap. It’s a very low maintenance surface. I use it to suppress weeds and retain moisture in perennial beds such as edible forest gardens. I use it as a ground cover under some of my fruit trees. I even use it on the paths to create anti-swales.

How thick should the mulch layer be?

This is another one of those “how long is a piece of string?” questions. It really depends on your circumstances:

• What are you mulching?

• What type of irrigation do you use?

• How reliable is your supply of irrigation water?

• How much summer rainfall do you receive?

My garden receives very low rainfall in summer. But my property has reliable access to water:

• Many sheds and buildings capture rainwater in several large tanks.

• My property has a bore that provides slightly salty water, okay for irrigating much of the garden.

• The property also has a dam.

And if all of that fails, we’re connected to mains water supplied by some of the most reliable reservoirs in Australia.

Because of this situation, I don’t rely on rainfall to keep my garden thriving through summer. Instead, I capture as much water as I can in winter, when it is abundant, and then focus on delivering the water as efficiently as possible to the garden.

I do this by installing drip irrigation on the soil surface and then covering the irrigation with around 15 cm of woodchip mulch. This set-up means that hardly any water is lost to evaporation. A few years back, I set up some of my garden beds this way and then planted into them between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. The plants were mostly tube stock. I carefully tunnelled down through the mulch layer, located an irrigation dripper and then planted the plant. Often it was only the bottom of the root ball that was in contact with the soil.

On some days I needed to plant hundreds of tube stock quickly before the plants dried out in the hot sun, so they went in without much care or attention. I just banged them in. Then I watered them well by hand once and after that they had to rely on the irrigation system. Those small, tender plants were planted at the beginning of a long hot and dry summer, and they were given only minimal irrigation. Every fortnight they were watered for 30 minutes (through drippers with a low 1.6 L/h flow rate). Yet despite this, they thrived. This is because the only way the water could leave the garden bed was via transpiration from the plants. Perversely, the bigger the plants have grown, the more they have transpired and the more water they require to thrive.

Apart from reducing soil evaporation to almost nothing, another benefit of all that mulch is that weeds struggle to take hold. For the first few years I’ve hardly had to pull any weeds from these garden beds. By topping up the mulch layer every second year, I’m also preventing any wind-borne weeds from establishing.

Thick mulch does have a downside

The downside of using so much woodchip mulch is that it takes a lot of rain to infiltrate down to the soil. I know this because when I received a heavy downpour of around 60 mm in February one year, the rain didn’t make it through the layer of woodchip mulch to the garden soil. For me, this isn’t a problem, as the irrigation system is so efficient. However, if you have limited access to water and are reliant on summer rainfall to keep your garden alive, then only a thin layer of mulch (if any) should be used.

Thick mulch can also cause issues for some grasses and other plants that are sensitive to collar rot or crown rot.

The thickness of the mulch layer you spread will depend on your individual circumstances. There’s no rule that says “one thickness suits all” when it comes to mulch.

What sort of woodchip mulch is best?

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Citrus such as lemons and oranges are great backyard orchard trees. For some folks the quintessential lemon tree is a sentimental inclusion, because “Dad always had a lemon tree”. On quite a few occasions I’ve been called in to collect scions from a very old tree in the backyard of the family home, just before it changes hands. I can then graft that piece of branch onto a new tree, so that the family can continue the legacy in their new home. For some gardeners, citrus provide a cultural connection to a previous homeland, far away from here. The humble lemon tree is an essential backyard (or front yard) inclusion for some Melbourne households who don’t grow any other food.

Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore

Citrus originated in Asia. The current thinking is that they evolved and radiated out from the foothills of the Himalayas. Over millions of years, citrus first spread naturally and more recently have been spread by humans so they now occur over much of Asia. Even Australia can claim some of its own citrus, with finger limes and other native citrus.

The naturally occurring range for citrus is mostly the sub-tropical regions. Citrus can be temperamental when grown outside a sub-tropical climate, but they can be placated and coaxed into good productivity in warm temperate climates, such as Melbourne’s.

Citrus have particular growth patterns in sub-tropical regions such as Southeast Asia. These patterns are different from those in major citrus producing areas, such as, say, Queensland, which is different again from Mildura’s. Citrus grows differently again in Melbourne, where I have plenty of experience growing oranges, lemons, limes, mandarins and other citrus. Warm-temperate climates are not an ideal place to grow citrus, but you can still get them thriving. When my family lived in Melbourne I put together a five-part series on growing citrus for warm-temperate gardeners (start at part one here).

But what about cool temperate climates, like where I’ve moved to, in Kyneton? Our frosts can be brutal and our summers hot and dry. Kyneton isn’t exactly sub-tropical. But just like Christmas tomatoes and avocados you can indeed grow citrus in a cool temperate climate, like mine.

Citrus are fickle trees

They are easily stressed. They hate it

• too hot

• too cold

• too dry

• too wet

• without enough soil nutrients

• with too much soil nutrient.

And, like me, they utterly despise the wind.

A stressed citrus tree is not a productive tree. In fact, it’s a downright miserable tree. A stressed citrus tree will usually loose its blossoms, its immature fruit and especially its leaves. In a temperate climate (warm or cool), a citrus tree will usually take just over 12 months from flowering to ripen the fruit. If you stress the tree at any point (and don’t manage to kill it), you’ll often lose an entire year’s crop. That means no citrus for a whole year.

There’s a big difference, climate-wise, between Southeast Asia and cool temperate Kyneton. Relative to the sub-tropics, our winters and summers are quite extreme and have the potential to cause stress to a citrus tree. Any attempts to grow citrus will need to take this into account.

The devil is in the detail

Heading to your local nursery in winter, buying a random lemon tree and then plonking it into the ground in the middle of an open paddock is the quickest way to waste your precious time and money. Don’t bother. If you want to grow citrus in a cool temperate climate you’re going to need to think things through and potentially mollycoddle them a bit. Here are some important areas in which to focus your mollycoddling.

Variety choice is essential

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Many a night I’ve lain awake wondering what is the best thing to place or plant underneath fruit trees. Should it be living plants of some sort? What about mulch to retain moisture and prevent competition from plants?

I’ve spent hours weighing up the pros and cons of each choice.

The conclusion? I don’t think there is a perfect choice that suits every situation. There are too many factors at play: annual rainfall, irrigation set-up, edible forest garden plans, access for chickens, access for picking and harvesting equipment, pest risks. It’s a complex equation and likely to leave you bamboozled.

Here are a few of the options that I think are worth considering for your backyard orchard.

Want to know more about this incredibly interesting topic? Come along to my September 21 workshop on Ecological Succession to learn all about:

• Using weeds as indicators of soil health

• Edible forest gardening

• Differences in preparing soil for vegetable patches and orchards

• Weed control methods

Find out more

Grass or lawn

Grass is bad for fruit trees. Or so we’re often told. The shallow root systems of both grass and citrus apparently compete with each other. Having grass under your citrus trees (or any fruit trees) will have a huge negative impact.

I’m not so sure.

I’ve seen many productive fruit trees surrounded by grass. In fact, any competition by the grass is likely to be offset by the fact that it is retaining moisture in the soil and supporting a healthy soil food web.

Lawns under fruit trees (even citrus) are perfectly okay, in my experience.

Edible forest gardens

The opposite of lawns under fruit trees is edible forest gardening. The concept is simple. No one weeds, waters, fertilises or maintains a forest, yet it thrives.

We can take the principles of how a forest thrives and structure our gardens to mimic a forest ecosystem. There are lots of ways to interpret the concept of an edible forest garden. I describe my interpretation as “a cottage garden with fruit trees plonked in it”.

You can read a huge list of potential perennial understory plants you might use in your orchard here.

Vegetables

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Over the years I’ve learnt a lot about chickens and I’ve learnt a lot about fruit trees. Here’s what I know about putting the two together.

Why are chickens so good in the orchard?

Chickens are great at pest control. They are particularly good at foraging in the soil for pupating larvae of pests such as codling moth and Queensland fruit fly. This can help to break the pest’s life cycle. Chickens will also make a tidy meal of all sorts of other protein-rich visitors to your garden. I’ve even seen them fighting over mice. Unfortunately, they don’t like the taste of harlequin bugs – apparently you’ll need guinea fowl for controlling those.

Chicken manure acts as a natural fertiliser for your orchard, but be careful not to overdo it or you risk ending up with enormous and unmanageable trees – remember my neglected but productive pear tree?

I have plenty of plants growing under my fruit trees (more on what I’ve planted and some alternative options here). At certain times of the year, the space can become a bit of a jungle. I use chickens to tame the jungle rather than weeding it myself.

Chickens also provide the obvious benefits of eggs and plenty of entertainment.

Time flies when you’re watching chickens. (That would be a great pun, if only chickens were better fliers.)

You can have too much of a good thing

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Woolly aphid (Eriosoma lanigerum) is a sap sucking pest of apple trees. It has a fluffy white appearance and usually appears in autumn. Affected branches may show distorted growth the following year.

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Michelle wanted some advice on how to manage her nashi tree. It was neglected and the rootstock had begun to take over.

“Is there any way I can salvage my nashi fruit tree so it produces the desired nashi fruit again and stops the root stock from growing rampantly?” she wrote. “It has only ever produced the desired nashi fruit on one big branch, but it has always been bountiful on that branch. It would also be nice to get my view of the Dandenong Ranges back again as the monster tree is blocking it out completely.”

Essentially, Michelle will need to make some drastic cuts and remove the branches that have shot from the rootstock.

Removing the branches that have grown from the rootstock will have two main consequences:

1. Almost two-thirds of the tree will need to be removed. The tree is going to create a huge amount of vigorous foliage growth in response. Going forward it will be difficult to keep the fruit tree small.

2. It is going to be difficult to cut the rootstock branches off cleanly. It is likely they will continue to send out side shoots forever. This means Michelle will need to be extra vigilant to keep it from happening again.

This sort of problem growth from the rootstock can occur with any grafted fruit tree. It’s quite common in citrus, cherries and many other stone fruit. As always, prevention is better than cure. Here’s what to look for in your fruit trees and how to fix it before it becomes a major, chronic issue for your fruit tree.

A stick in time saves nine

Spotting emerging rootstock shoots early and removing them can make life much easier. Once the branches start to take hold, they can create a bigger issue. Often rootstock varieties are quite vigorous and they’ll quickly outgrow the desired variety of tree that’s been grafted on top.

Rootstock shoots often look different from the rest of the tree. I can tell that the shoots in the image above are from the rootstock because their leaf shape is completely different. The rootstock is trifoliata, which in Latin means “three lobed leaf”. Some rootstocks will be much thornier than the rest of the tree.

Sometimes – in plums, for example – the emerging rootstock shoots have different coloured foliage from the rest of the tree.

What should I do if things have already grown a bit out of hand?

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Last week I discussed the hidden cost of growing fruit trees in pots. In most circumstances I’d recommend focusing on growing blueberries or raspberries in pots instead.

You might be a renter, have terrible soil or just want to gain some experience with growing some trees in pots. Whatever the reason, here are a few tips for getting the most out of your potted fruit trees.

Rootstock selection

Growing fruit trees in pots requires careful selection of rootstocks. Generally, aim for dwarf trees. The rootstocks on dwarf trees are not very vigorous. Therefore, they won’t become pot bound as quickly. This means you don’t have to pot them up as often.

Read more about rootstock selection here.

Variety choice

Grow varieties that you like to eat. Pay close attention to the timing of fruiting. Harvests from potted trees can be very small compared to those from trees growing in the ground, but spreading the harvest out can avoid gluts.

Read more about harvest timing and review my ripening chart here.

What sized pot should you use?

As a minimum I’d be using a 50cm pot for a bare-rooted or young fruit tree. As the tree grows you’ll need to pot it up. I do this repeatedly until I get to a 110L pot. After that the pots become too heavy and unmanageable. Some trees, such as apples on M9 rootstock, can be grown in smaller pots, but they won’t be very productive until they get some more room.

I know that some folks bare-root their trees (uproot them and wash the roots) and replace the potting mix every second year, instead of increasing the pot size. It is a bit more work, but it seems to work well for them.

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In most cases, use a saucer

Adding a saucer underneath the pot has two advantages:

• When potting mix becomes dry it repels water (becomes hydrophobic) and the water runs down the side of the pot and out the holes in the bottom. A saucer captures this water and allows it to infiltrate back up the soil profile via capillary action.

• A potted fruit tree that has direct contact with the soil will soon send roots out the holes in the bottom of the pot and into the soil underneath. In three months you may struggle to move the pot. A saucer helps to break the connection between the potting mix and soil. Don’t make the rookie error that many have made before you.

I find that using a saucer creates waterlogging problems for some plants, such as blueberries. In this case forego the saucer but keep the pot off the soil with some bricks, tiles or similar.

Irrigation systems

All plants need water. Some more than others. Generally, deciduous fruit trees don’t need much water. Citrus trees need a lot.

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I’ve planted, maintained and harvested from many fruit trees for my clients over the years and I’ve learnt a lot in the process. I was a renter for a decade before I moved to our forever home, here in Kyneton, and I grew almost all my own fruit trees in pots until then.

You can learn a lot about fruit trees by growing them in pots. You can also learn a lot about what not to do. I’ve recently discovered something about potted fruit trees that I hadn’t appreciated before now.

Rootbound: Why you shouldn’t grow fruit trees in pots

I’ve done a lot of research and reading of scientific literature on growing fruit trees. Conventional wisdom says that a fruit tree grown in a pot will become root-bound. Sure, you can pot it in a bigger pot each year (until you run out of practical pot sizes) but the tree is still limited in where it can put its roots.

When I moved to our new garden in Kyneton I decided that I wouldn’t bother to plant my established potted fruit trees into the ground. Logic says that instead of planting a large, established but root-bound potted tree into the ground you are better off starting with a fresh, young bare-rooted tree. This tree will establish a vigorous root system and ultimately become stronger and more productive than the potted trees with a “head start”. So that’s what I did. I gave away most of my established fruit trees and invested in new stock when I planted out my netted enclosure.

The sentimental exceptions

I’m not hugely sentimental. But there were a few of my potted trees that I was a bit fond of. Quite a few were set up as espaliers and I had grafted each branch to a different variety (more on that here). It had taken a lot of effort and these trees had been instrumental in my self-taught journey of fruit tree grafting and training espaliers. So I decided to plant them along the northern perimeter of the netted enclosure.

There were two other potted trees that were given a spot in the netted enclosure. Both trees were pruned to an open vase shape and planted as free-standing trees. One was a large Elephant Heart plum on full sized rootstock. This tree hadn’t been very productive in its pot. But I liked the shape and it was one of the first fruit trees I’d planted in a pot. It was another sentimental inclusion.

The second tree was a Divinity apricot. It had produced decent quantities of fruit as a potted tree, and the fruit has absolutely amazing flavour. I just had to include it for the flavour alone.

However, my main motivation for planting these established trees was to see what would happen. I’ve always advised others against it and I wanted to test my own advice. I’ve done this in a few other areas of the garden too: planting trees on the wrong rootstock (they’ve since grown too vigorously) and incorrectly pruning apple trees (they produced hardly any fruit).

My thoughts were that the root-bound trees would struggle to establish a strong root system. I thought I’d likely be pulling them out in a few years to replace them with bare-rooted dwarf trees.

Planting the established potted trees

I also removed a thick mat of roots at the base of the root ball by cutting off the bottom 5 cm.

I didn’t prune the canopy of the tree at all. I just planted the trees, watered them in and left them to it.

The outcome of planting established potted trees

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Five years ago, when we moved to our property in Kyneton, we inherited a sparse orchard planted by the previous owners. Most of the fruit trees were around five or six years old, but they were all relatively small for their age.

Of the 35 trees in the orchard, three were pears: a Williams, a Doyenne du Comice and a Beurre Bosc. All three pears were grafted onto what I would consider the wrong rootstock for backyard growers.

Generally, when pears are grafted onto D6 calleryana they grow into monster sized trees, sometimes over 15 metres tall.

Yet the pear trees in my orchard have remained very small. They each measure around 3 metres tall and 2 metres wide, even on these vigorous rootstocks.

For most households, there are many reasons to prefer small fruit trees over rampant monsters. Small fruit trees are easier to prune, easier to net, easier to spray (if you use Bordeaux spray, for example) and easier to pick fruit from. So I’m not concerned that my pear trees have remained very small – in fact I’m relieved!

“What’s your secret?” I hear you ask

If you’re reading this post, then chances are you have a monster in your garden, a fruit tree on a vigorous rootstock that’s taken off. You’d need a ladder to pick the fruit, if you could beat the birds, that is. But the tree has become too big to net, so the birds get the lot.

Each year you probably take to it with the secateurs in an attempt to restrain it, and each year it responds with even more vigour, reaching for the sky and taking over the entire garden.

If only there was a magic wand that you could wave to keep the tree small and productive.

Exhibit A: My Beurre Bosc pear tree

Nothing gets a point across like a productive pear tree and there’s no finer example of one than my Beurre Bosc pear. As mentioned, it’s on a vigorous rootstock, and at around 10 years of age it should be around four or five times the size it is.

The secret lies in how it’s being treated.

Our native soil is granitic sand with a pH of 5.5. It’s devoid of nearly every mineral that plants need to thrive. When I conducted a soil test, the results showed that the only mineral we have in excess is iron. This is “hungry country”.

Despite the lack of soil nutrients, I don’t fertilise my deciduous fruit trees (citrus and avocados are a different story). I don’t even top-dress my deciduous fruit trees with compost. Not once in five years have they been fed.

We have more rainfall here in Kyneton than many areas of Melbourne. However, unlike Melbourne, Kyneton gets most of its rainfall in winter. Summer is usually very dry compared to Melbourne and usually a few degrees hotter each day.  It can be a brutal place for a tree to grow.

However, I rarely water my fruit trees. This particular Beurre Bosc tree has been watered a miserly five times since we moved here.

Not fives times per summer. Just five times in total.

Each watering was a thorough and deep soaking, but I watered only frequently enough to keep a drought-stressed tree alive. Even with our very dry February and March, the tree didn’t receive a single drop of water from me this summer.

In terms of pruning, this tree has received very little. I can remember only twice giving it the lightest of haircuts. I trimmed off only the odd watershoot to help get the netting over it in early December.

To sum up, my Beurre Bosc pear tree is neglected:

• It hasn’t been fertilised and grows in poor soil

• It is hardly ever watered

• It receives only an occasional light prune.

It is this neglect that keeps the tree small. If I watered it more, and if I increased the availability of soil nutrients and pruned it harder, it would explode in size.

“Don’t you need to feed and water your tree to get it to fruit?”

This may be the case for, say, citrus. But for my Beurre Bosc, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. This year, I picked 91kg of fruit from the tree.

You can fertilise your fruit trees, water them well and get them thriving. They’ll produce even more fruit for you than mine does. However, they’ll also grow into monsters. You can’t net monsters, which means the birds will get the lot anyway.

So give your trees a dose of neglect and save all that compost and water for your vegetables. Your fruit trees will thank you for it with a huge crop and far fewer pruning requirements.

Just keep in mind that if the tree has been pampered for years, then the sudden switch to neglect may stress it more than you had intended. Consider weaning it off the unnecessary life support over the next few years.

“Too late,” you say, “The horse has bolted!”

Yes, it’s difficult (if not impossible) to restrain a rampant tree.

Yes, rootstock selection is crucial to a successful backyard orchard.

Yes, it’s going to be a challenge.

But all is not lost.

There is still hope for your monster fruit tree.

Here are a few different strategies for you to consider using to reduce the size of your backyard tree and keep it productive.

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