This time of year our mailboxes will often get flooded with garden catalogs. For those of us planning to plant some kind of fruit, we can get in a quandry of what to plant. The catalogs can make us want it all, but we need to balance what we want, with what we have reasonable time to take care of, and be able to handle the harvest (which depending on what it is, can be overwhelming.). I suggest on anything you plant, that you start slow, and increase your plantings gradually (not that I necessarily followed my own advice.). I would recommend you also consider the following things:
What is my Location Like?
What do I like?
How much effort will the plant take?
Where am I going to get the plant from?
How long will it take to get a crop?
How perishable is the crop?
How much processing does the crop take?
In the rest of my entry, I'll discuss these topics.
Location:
The ideal location for the majority of fruit crops is sunny with fertile, well drained, loamy soil with a pH near neutral to very slightly acid. Very few of us have perfect sites. Some are close enough that we can make do with what we have. My soil is more clay than loam and it is not as well drained as I could like, but for most plants, it will do.
But if your site is one of the more extreme sites, you might want to choose your plantings carefully. Poor soil, but well drained? Consider Sea Buckthorn. Shady, but in temperate south? Consider Ribes (currants and goosebrries) or maybe PawPaw. Sometimes a particular variety can be more tolerant of certain condiitions than the rest of the related cultivars.
What do you Like:
There's no use planting a fruit you're not going to use it. Select something that you're going to like. It can be fun to experiment, but since it will take several years for most fruit plants to bear, it doesn't generally pay to plant something you're going to be indifferent towards. If you want to try something unusual, try to find someone who has it already. Local fruit groups can go a long ways towards helping in that end. These are groups of fruit growing enthusiasts. Some groups that I'm aware of are:
Midwest Fruit Explorers (MidFEx): Chicago area active fruit growers.
Southern Fruit Fellowship (SFF): Covers the southeastern states.
Backyard Fruit Growers: Pennsylvania Group
There is also a national fruit explorers group that can be a resource: North American Fruit Explorers (NAFEX) and a group based out of California: California Rare Fruit Growers (CRFG)
However, sometimes if you want to try something new, you have to be the first in your area. Sometimes by doing this you'll have a great result and sometimes you'll wonder, "Why did I plant this?"
I do suggest one caveat. If you're going to plant something, don't plant a variety that is widely available in the grocery stores. For example, you are not going to be able to grow a red delicious apple and justify the effort at the cost you can buy them in the store.
How much effort will the plant take?
Some fruits are so easy to grow that it takes almost no effort, other may have intense work periouds, with other times being fairly easy. And again others take constant intervention to produce a decent crop. The effort required may vary depending on your weather conditions and where you live. A good general guide (for the midAtlantic) on the web that I'm aware of is Joe Volk's Fruit for Home Gardeners that rates fruit from Excellent to Worst in terms of ease of growing, harvesting, and using the fruit. I might not agree 100% with every category (I might move a fruit or two up or down a category, but it is an excellent starting point to get an idea of the amount of effort required per fruit type.
Where am I going to get the plant from?
Ideally, you'd buy your plants from a local nursery, who had grown the plants themselves so they were acclimated to your area. Sometimes you can do this. But often even the nurseries are selling plants they received from a wholesaler, and often these plants are generic, well known varieties, but not necessarily well adapted to your conditions. For most of my fruit plant purchases, I've had to turn to mail order to purchase most of what I wanted. But how do you know if the mailorder company you are ordering from is reputable. 1) Look to see if their deals are "too good to be true" then they probably are. 2) Another way is too look your comany up in the following Garden Watchdog Guide to Gardening by Mail which has ratings of the companies by other mail order customers.
How long will it take to get a crop?
This will depend on what you grow and sometimes the variety that you grow. Many berries will have a crop by the second year after planting (and sometimes a limited crop the first year. ) Other things can take many years to start cropping and maybe even more to settle down to consistant cropping. There's a saying for European pears - 'you plant pears for your heirs'. With dwarfing rootstock, its not usually this bad, but they can be recalcitrant. And apples can be very variable as to when they will crop. Some varieties will attempt to crop in the 2nd year after planting, while there's a well known variety, Northern Spy, that can take many years to come into bearing.
How perishable is the crop?
The answer to this question is that it depends on what you grow and sometimes the variety that you grow. For example, raspberries are extremely perishable, and can start to mold in a day or two even with refrigeration. Summer apples need to be used right away, while many of the late season apples are designed to store for quite some time and some can be stored until spring under normal 'root cellar' conditions.
How much processing does the crop take?
I think the ideal is where you can go out to the tree or plant, pick the fruit, and bite into it. However there are some delicious fruits that are generally processes before they are used. One example of this is black currant. It makes a delicious jelly, but before it is cooked it generally has an unpleasant underlying flavor. Another example is quince. The fruit of this is so dense, that is generally has to be cooked to be palatable, but is very fragrant and tasty then. It can be an advantage to have the option to process the fruit, but it can be a burden to know you must process a fruit in order to use it.
