Grow delicious fruit at home! Discover expert tips on planting, pruning, and caring for fruit trees and berry bushes for a bountiful harvest.
Plant a fresh Surinam cherry seed within hours of eating the fruit, keep it warm and moist, and you can have a fruiting tree in 2 to 3 years. Surinam cherry, Eugenia uniflora, is a tropical shrub or small tree…
You can grow sarguelas from a branch cutting that is at least 4 feet long, and that single cutting can carry fruit in 2 to 3 years. The seed route takes 4 to 5 years and succeeds less often. I…
You can grow santol (Sandoricum koetjape) from seed in as little as 10 to 21 days to germination, but the honest timeline to your first fruit is 5 to 7 years, and the fruit may turn out sour. A grafted…
You can grow a tangelo from the seed of a ripe fruit, and the tree can fruit in 2 to 3 years if you buy a grafted sapling instead. A tangelo is a hybrid citrus, a tangerine crossed with a…
Yes, you can grow a quince from the seeds of a ripe fruit, and a grafted tree gives you fruit in three to five years. The seeds need a full three months of cold stratification before they germinate. Quince, the…
Yes, ugli fruit is real. It is a natural Jamaican tangelo, a tangerine crossed with a grapefruit, discovered growing wild near Brown’s Town, Jamaica, around 1917. The fastest route to fruit is a grafted tree, which can harvest in 2…
Yes, you can grow a tamarillo from the seeds of a ripe fruit, and a seed-grown tree can hand you its first harvest 18 to 24 months later. No other fruit tree moves that fast. The tamarillo is a tree…
You can grow a white sapote tree from seed, and a fresh seed sprouts in two to four weeks in warm soil. I still find it remarkable that a seed this large wakes up that fast with nothing more than…
Buy a nursery-grown salal plant, set it in shade too deep for blueberries, and expect real establishment in 2 to 3 years. Salal is Gaultheria shallon, a broadleaf evergreen in the heather family native from Alaska to California, where it…
Yes, tayberries need support. Their canes grow 2 metres or more in a single season, and a plant carrying up to 20 lb of fruit will drag itself to the ground without wires. A simple set of wires or a…
Yes, you can grow salmonberries at home, and an established plant fruits within 1 year. Salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis) is a Pacific Northwest native berry shrub that thrives in wet, partial shade where most fruit crops give up. It grows easily…
Plant bare-root saskatoon stock for a first small crop in 2 to 3 years, with full production around year 5. The same plant is sold as juneberry and serviceberry, and all three names point to one cold-hardy native shrub, Amelanchier…
Plant one red currant bush in a pot at least 45 cm wide, fill it with soil-based compost, set it in full sun or light shade, and expect your first real harvest in year two. Red currants are among the…
A white currant bush in a 10-gallon pot will give you your first small harvest in its second season and a full crop of translucent berries by year three. Pick one of the pale Ribes rubrum cultivars, plant it bare-root…
You can grow thimbleberries from seed, cuttings, or rhizome division, and an established plant fruits in about one year. Thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus) is a thornless, thicket-forming native shrub of western North America, and its berries taste better homegrown because they…
You can grow a persimmon tree from seed, and the seed will germinate reliably if you give it what it wants: two to three days of soaking, 60 to 90 days of cold stratification in the refrigerator, and a deep…
You can grow a pear tree from a seed pulled out of a ripe pear. Clean the seeds, cold stratify them for 60 to 90 days in a damp paper towel in the fridge, then sow them 1 inch deep…
You can grow a plum tree from a pit in your kitchen. Crack the pit, stratify the seed in a damp towel in the fridge for 2 to 12 weeks, plant it 2 inches deep, and expect a fruiting tree…
You can grow a plumcot from a grafted nursery tree in USDA zones 5 to 9 and expect the first real harvest in 2 to 4 years, if you plant two compatible trees close together and give them 500 to…
Plantains (Musa × paradisiaca) grow from suckers, not seeds. A healthy 12 to 20 inch sucker planted in full sun, in fertile well-drained soil, fruits in 10 to 18 months. This guide walks you through the whole cycle, from picking…
