Planning a homestead orchard

There's a great full colour chart at the Dave Wilson Nursery website. It graphically displays approximately when each variety of fruit and nut will be ripe and harvestable.

http://www.davewilson.com/homegrown/...ion/chart.html
It has helped my plan my own orchard, selecting varieties that ripen at different times of the year to guarranty I'll have something fresh off the tree just about the entire season.
Michael

Best resource I have even gotten concerning fruit was a booklet put out by the local extention service. It was about $5.00. It covered all the fruit and berry plants that can be grown in the state and even broke down cultivars into the regions they were best for. I have probably read it front to back a dozen times.

Call your extention. There is a difference between what you can grow and what will grow well and they know what works. There's no point in planting something that you won't do well in your soil or climate. You may get it to survive, but the time and effort put into doing so will take the fun out of it.

That being said.

BLUEBERRIES there are species of plants and cultivars that will work for everyone from florida to maine. Native, pest free (except for birds), produce fruit the year after planting (if you get 2yr old plants) and taste great. The only requirement is acid soil which is easy to produce using sulfur, peat moss and pine mulch.

Just to follow up on previous posts about keeping the trees at a manageable height, you might want to consider pruning your trees to limit their growth to between 6 and 10 feet tall (which is a bit shorter than many dwarf trees will grow if left unchecked). You can keep nearly any tree (dwarf, semi-drawrf or even standard) in the 6 - 10 foot range through attentive pruning (for an extreme example, consider Japanese bonsai). A couple of us have mentioned the Dave Wilson Nursery website, and it has some great information on this kind of aggressive pruning.

Another tree you may want to look into is Persimmon. The fruit's a lot more popular in asian cultures than it is here in America, but they taste great, the non-astringent cultivars keep well, and the trees are extremely ornamental when they've got their fruit hanging.