What Fruit Trees to Plant at a School

Q. I am working on a new project serving middle and high school age kids. The idea of fruit trees around their garden area came up and I’m wondering what trees you would suggest. They will have approximately 9 trees spaced on a grid.

A. Make sure the trees are spaced a minimum of ten feet apart and are semi dwarf.

Dwarfing or Semidwarfing Rootstocks

All fruit trees should be grafted onto dwarfing or semi dwarfing rootstocks (Citation for stone fruit, M111 for apples, OHxF333 for pears). If you don’t know the rootstock then the plant label should say “semi dwarf” or “dwarf”, not “standard”.

Many fruit and ornamental trees are grafted. The :dogleg" appearing on the trunk of a young tree is because its grafted.

Early Producers

            Since these are kids and they are normally not is school from June – September, I would think you would avoid trees that produce fruit then. That still leaves you with early producers like May Pride peach, Early Grande Peach, FlordaKing or FlordaPrince peach, Earlitreat peach, Flavorosa pluot. Royal Rosa, Flavor Giant, Katy, or Gold Kist apricots. These should produce fruit from late May until maybe early June.

There are some very early peaches like Earlitreat and FlordaKing or FlordaPrince which will probably produce peaches before June graduation.

Late Producers

For late producing fruit trees I would pick Pink Lady or Sundowner (red) or Mutsu (green) apples, Bartlett or red Bartlett pear, or Bosc pear, your favorite pomegranate, Flavor Grenade or Flavor Finale pluots, Emerald Beaut plum, Giant Fuyu persimmon or any Fuyu or Chocolate persimmon. I would suggest avoiding late producing peach. I would avoid any nectarines due to the scarring of fruit from insects. Nectarines are difficult to produce without spraying for insects. No late peaches because there aren’t any good ones in my opinion. The best peaches are in late June, July and August.

Enerald Beaut plum produces good but late fruit in Las Vegas.

Non Desert Recommendations

Be careful of planting fruit trees based upon recommendations from people not living in desert regions. The tree will most likely grow but it’s more of a question about the quality of the fruit it produces. It’s different. An interesting exploration for these children would be to compare the quality of the fruit produced by their trees with the quality of fruit purchased at the grocery store.

Flavor Finale pluot is a good fruit tree for late production in the fall.

            Dave Wilson Nursery online has a harvest calendar that you can download to your computer for your reference. The harvest schedule is for central California but is very close to harvest times in southern Nevada with a few exceptions. Be careful of fruit recommendations from non-desert climates.