Sun

Most fruit trees and many berry bushes require full sun light through the growing season. The sun is always shifting its position in the sky. This shift becomes more dramatic the farther north you live.  If you have the patience for it, the best plan is to take a full year to observe a patch. Simply place an 8 foot stake in the soil and every week note the influence of the sun on the stake, its shadow and any influence by other trees. A tree without leaves in spring can suddenly become a horrible shade block in the full leaf of summer.

While many orchard supply companies will tell you that a fruit tree needs a minimum of 6 hours of full sun per day, I would honestly advocate a site with a bare minimum of 8 hours of full sun. In my opinion for all sun-loving fruit trees the ideal is a location where the tree gets at least 12 hours of full sunlight during the summer solstice in late June.

If you aren’t inclined to spend a whole year watching the sun, or you have a location that is wide open then you can turn your attention to the soil.

The composition and quality of you soil plays a huge factor in how successful the trees will be.  It is not unreasonable to assume that the root system of a fruit tree will be twice the size of the tree itself. Clay soil tends to hold onto a lot of water. It also compacts and restricts the roots. For some types of trees, like apples, overly wet roots can be a death sentence. At the same time, sandy soil has poor water retention which causes the tree to expand its roots desperately deep.

In both of these instances you may need to take action to amend the soil before planting a single tree.

While there are elaborate scientific tests you can have done to determine the composition of your soil, you can still get a pretty good idea from manipulating it by hand.

Simply take a small handful of soil, around 1 cup in volume, from 12 to 16 inches below the sod layer. Make sure the soil is modestly moist.  If it hasn’t rained recently in your area, I would just give the area one inch of water the night before.

Form the soil into a ball. Try to squeeze it out into a tube form slightly longer than the width of your palm. If it falls apart easily, then it is on the sandy side. If it holds together but feels hard it might have too much clay. The ideal is a 1 inch tube of soil that still holds together yet is not hard.

This will go a long way towards helping you plan either what you want to plant, or if you are willing to take on the added expense of amending a large amount of soil. Trees like peaches and apples prefer sandy soil, while many plums and berries prefer wet clay soils. We will discuss this later in the individual entries for each type of fruit.

As a rule of thumb you can get a rough idea of the kind of soil a tree prefers by the juiciness of its fruit. A strawberry plant likes moist soil because it is quickly pulling that moisture up each day and using it to plump the berries. An apple takes a long time to develop its fruit and thus doesn’t use as much water in the short term. Overly wet roots tend to sulk and invite problems, pests and soil borne disease to the apple tree.