Neil Sperry: Follow these tips for growing fruit in your North Texas garden

If you’re interested in growing fruit in your backyard garden, I have some important facts you might want to read through before you get started. I’ve had Dr. George Ray McEachern as a guest on my radio program (WBAP 820-AM, 8-10 a.m. Sundays) one day in early February each year for the last 41 years. He has recently retired as fruit and pecan specialist emeritus with the Texas AgriLife Extension of Texas A&M, but he has still been willing to come back. My background is in landscape horticulture, and I have found his information to be really helpful to my listeners (and me).

From what Dr. McEachern shared recently and what I’ve learned over the past many decades, here are the basics you’ll want to keep in mind as you plan your own personal orchard.

Not all types of fruit crops are equally well suited to North Central Texas. There’s no point in trying a type that has little or no chance of producing well in your area. So, when it comes to growing fruit outdoors, freezes make avocados and citrus impossible unless they’re in a large greenhouse. Blueberries and muscadines can’t handle our alkaline soils. Bartlett pears are ravaged by fire blight in Texas. Apricots get caught by late freezes. Strawberries and raspberries are difficult — realistically, impossible because of our heat. Really, so are cherries — we’re just too warm summers and winters to suit them.

Dr. McEachern always gives us his Top 10 list of the best fruit varieties for North Central Texas. They do change a bit from one year to the next. These are based on ease of production and dependability. Here is his list from two weekends ago.

• Pears: Orient (grows better) or LeConte (higher quality fruit)

• Blackberries: Kiowa (large fruit) and Ouachita (heavy producer)

• Plums: Methley (self-pollinating, and probably the best single fruit tree if you only have room for one tree).

• PD-resistant grapes: Blanc du Bois (white), Black Spanish (wine or juice) and Champanel (jelly) — Pierce’s disease is a fatal bacterium that severely limits production of many traditional table grapes in our area.

• Peaches: Redglobe and Ranger along the Red River; Harvester in Dallas; Junegold (Waco area)

• Persimmons: Eureka

• Pecans: Sioux (outstanding quality), Caddo (outstanding disease resistance), Desirable (large)

• Blueberries: Tifblue (Must have extremely acidic soils such as East Texas).

• Figs: Celeste

• Apples: Mollie’s Delicious is best, but also can grow Jonagold, Gala, Fuji and the very tart Granny Smith.

Texas A&M and its AgriLife Extension experts have assembled a superior collection of fact sheets on all the various types of fruit crops you might want to grow. They’re all collected within this central hub named simply “Fruit & Nut Resources” from Texas A&M AgriLife Extension. I would suggest you get that bookmarked on your computer for future reference. Hats off to the several specialists who worked so hard to prepare it.

As you are buying your plants …

Buy from a reputable dealer. Local independent retail garden centers stock many of these varieties growing in containers so that you’ll get all their roots intact. That will gain you a year or two to first production, although it also will increase the per-plant cost compared to bare-rooted trees bought from one of the fruit-growing specialty nurseries you’ll find in our state.

In either case you’ll want to buy four- to five-foot fruit trees and five- to six-foot pecan trees. Those will be large enough to have proven their vigor and small enough that you can prune them back to train their scaffold branching. That’s especially important for peaches and plums where you want to have three branches that originate at equal angles around the trunk and stand 22 to 26 inches from the ground. Apples and pears should be pruned back to 26 to 30 inches.

Pecans are pruned only if they are dug bare-rooted (no soil ball around the roots). In that case they are cut back by half. Follow-up pruning in each case, then, will be to remove unwanted shoots that take away from the final desired growth form of the tree.

If you vary from recommended varieties in the list above, remember the term “chilling hours.” We are in a part of Texas that averages about 750 or 800 hours of temperatures between 32 and 45 degrees. That’s an important factor in determining how well adapted certain fruit varieties will be to a specific location.

Using peaches as an example, if you choose a “low-chilling” variety that needs only 300 hours of chilling temperatures, and if you grow it in North Central Texas where we typically get 800 hours, it will try to bloom with a warm spell in January. It will already have had its cold needs met. Subsequent late freezes will ruin the flowers and fruit. Conversely, a variety that requires 1,200 hours of chilling will never come into bloom in the Metroplex.

Know each crop’s required spacing. Crowding only leads to eventual disappointment. Give the new plantings great care from the day that they’re planted and follow Texas A&M recommendations for insect and disease prevention each year.

Fruit growing isn’t easy. If you follow the TAMU guidelines, you’ll be able to succeed, but you’ll need to stay vigilant. But your results will make you proud of your efforts.