My goal is to have some kind of fresh fruit to eat each month. I’m doing pretty good with: fresh stone fruit (peaches, plums, apricots and nectarines) from April to July; apples and pears from June to September; pomegranates and figs in September and October; six different kinds of citrus from November to March. This takes some planning, and I am not yet getting fruit during the whole year but as the trees mature over the next few years the fruiting year will fill out.
One of the things that I do is plant trees in hedgerows – three or four kinds of the same kind of trees in a row. This gives me a the opportunity to have several different kinds of the same fruit planted where the fruit ripens at different times.
In the front yard I have a hedgerow of citrus – 17 trees long. 13 navels, 1 lemon, 1 limequat, 1 lime, and 1 trovita orange. These trees are 4 feet apart.
Also there is an apple tree hedge with four different kinds of apples: Anna, Dorset, Einsheimer, and Pettingill. They are planted three feet apart and I am working on pleaching the branches together. Pleaching is a natural process that naturally has the branches grow together, making the hedgerow stronger.
This first picture was when the apple tree hedge was planted in 2003.
And this is the trees this year. I suspect that I will harvest 100 pounds of apples from this hedge, this year.
More Later...Greg
