Time for fruit trees!

Jun 16, 2020

The cooler months of the year are a great time to get fruit & nut trees/vines/bushes in the ground and give them a chance to get their root system for feeding and watering established before summer comes along and tries to annihilate them.

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To get your mouth watering (sorry but you’ll have to wait a few years): mango, most citrus, avocado, bananas, lychee, fig, mulberry, passionfruit, persimmon, raspberry (Heritage variety), grapes (humid tolerant variety such as Black Isabella), pecan, pomegranate, blueberries, starfruit, tamarillo, davidson’s plum. And more…

Most stonefruit need much more cold days than we have here, known as ‘chill hours’. Thanks to the help of Daley’s Fruit Tree Nursery, I’ve calculated Bellingen chill hours to be medium to low (tending to medium) which is 450-330 annual hours.

You will get away with plums and peach/nectarine if you choose the variety carefully by the number of required chill hours (and net the peach/nectarine against fruit fly). Apples? Possible, just, but really don’t bother. Buy the fruit from Dorrigo where they do really well.

Please check the size (height and width) a plant needs! There are dwarf varieties of a lot of fruit trees, but not all. Some fruit trees can be enormous and aren’t suitable for a backyard. Mark out the width with a string rope circle. Guaranteed it will be bigger than you think.