5 Tips to Grow a Healthy Fruit Tree

These 5 tips go a little beyond the basic planting practices used when planting any tree. There are a few special things that work particularly well when planting a fruit tree! 

1. Pruning

Most fruit trees should be pruned to promote:

• Lateral branch growth, as these promote fruit setting buds.
• Thinning the canopy in order to allow light into the fruit, and to promote airflow to minimize foliar disease.
• Balance the vegetative growth, with the reproductive growth. (Shoot buds vs fruit buds). A mature fruit tree should have a ratio of 2:1 on fruit setting buds to shoot promoting buds.

2. Nutrition

As a general rule, you would want to feed your fruit tree a balanced fertilizer. This is a fertilizer where the 3 numbers on the bag are somewhat even, like a 10-15-10 or 20-20-20.

Avoid feeding your trees an unbalanced food, such as 46-0-0, 0-52-0, or 0-0-52. These are meant to supplement truplants where specific deficiencies have been diagnosed by a professional.

3. Branch Tying

This is an old trick that works really well to promote more development of fruit setting buds over shoot promoting buds.
If you tie your branches down with a string attached to the main trunk at an angle of - or below - 45 degrees for one growing season, the branch will set fruit buds for the following year, and thereby increase your potential yield of fruit.

4. Soil Support Around the Root Zone

Adding compost, animal manures, kelp, fish emulsions and other natural, holistic foods around the root zone, will encourage microbial growth and stimulate an immune response in your fruit tree.
Anything that stimulates an immune response in your tree, will increase your yields, and reduce the need for sprays against pests and diseases.
Adding Root Rescue for example every 2nd or 3rd year is a great way to insure that this part of the tree's immunity is supported.

5. Year End Residue Treatment

As growing season draws to a close, and all the leaves have fallen off your fruit tree, remove these and compost them if possible.
Then mix a 1 % solution of Black strap molasses into a backpack sprayer and spray down your entire tree, along with the ground beneath the tree all the way out to the drip line of the tree (where the canopy reaches out to).

This completely natural product that you can buy at any grocery store will effectively deal with any disease vectoring spores left from diseases like mildew, or scab.

By coating the tree and the ground with this raw type of sugar, you are in essence inviting in natural occurring fungus spores that will feed on your disease vectoring spores over the winter, and into the early spring.

In addition, Black Strap molasses is loaded with a lot of minerals, that the tree has the ability of absorb through its buds and young bark even after the leaves have dropped.

We hope these tips help to keep your fruit trees thriving! Call 1-877-289-3813 to preorder your fruit trees today (pick up May 2021).