Greetings all,
I am new to fruit growing. I have recently bought an acreage in Iowa & built a home. Last year I planted several fruit & nut trees, & plan on planting several each year.
We had a harsh winter last year & none of the peach or plums I planted made it.
My soil is loamy. A mixture of black dirt & sand.
I planted the trees, put a 6 ft fence around them (tons of deer here) and mulched them all with wood chips.
This spring I sprinkled some 10-10-10 fertilizer around the base.
Some of my trees are only 3 ft tall, others are 6.
Any good advice you have to give will be appreciated.
Craig
If your peaches and plums didn't survive an Iowa winter (Zone 4 - 5) they must not have been hardy varieties. Not sure where you got your trees but if you got them at a big box store (Home Depot, Lowes, etc.) they probably were not suitable for your winters, these types of places don't normally do a very good job selling the right trees for the right area. The hardiest peaches, Reliance and Madison, are only hardy to Zone 5.
I'd recommend picking up a copy of the "Fruit, Berry, and Nut Inventory" which is put out by the Seed Savers Exchange. This book lists characteristics of fruiting cultivars and their hardiness zones. It will help you pick cultivars that are hardy for your zone, resistant to diseases to common to your area, and ripening date so you can have continual harvest.
It's also a possibility that the mulch around your tree trunks smothered the tree, watch for planting depth vs. the depth the tree grew in the nursery. Planting too deep will cause the root crown to rot. One other possiblity is that mice chewed through the bark at the soil surface under the mulch and girdled the tree. Rootstock might grow back but the grafted cultivar will be lost.
It's cold where I live and some of my trees still haven't woken up. So maybe yours aren't dead.
For plums, the Stanley Prune seems to do well here. Our weather is cold and dry; I don't know what weather you have in Ohio. My Stanley is just now showing a bit of color in the flower buds. (April 25)
The Japanese plum varieties will live, but it's pretty rare to get fruit. They bloom too early and they seem to have little resistance to wind. So if my blooms don't freeze, all the little plums fall off as soon as we get a strong wind.
My trees are about 6 years old and this year will be the first year I am going to fertilize them. They won't get fed until June. I don't want to encourage a lot of tender new growth early in the season, because it will just freeze. Whether to feed them or not is going to depend upon your soil.
I don't know a lot about feeding trees in general, just what seems to work for me. I find that the advice from the local experts about what to grow around here is pretty worthless. According to them, I can't grow fruit except maybe get a few apples 1 year out of 5-6. So, if they can't get fruit, I'm not going to ask them how they feed their trees.
This forum has got some sharp people. They'll know how to feed fruit trees.
Thanks all,
I buy from both Gurneys & Menards. I seem to have better luck with the ones from Menards believe it or not. I picked up some Cherry, Apple, and Peach this weekend, they were 7-8 ft tall, some with blooms on them allready. $25 ea. How can you beat that?
The ones from Gurneys are lucky to see 3 ft, and seems to take forever to wake them up. They never did look great last year & I am sure the were weak heading into a very hard winter.
I did go out & find a few shoots from the base of the trees so a few of them are still alive. I am going to try & keep them going, even if they will be long run projects.
One thing I did not do last year was wrap the trunks. I will do that this fall.
I noticed all my nut trees are just starting to bud so I am going to hold out hope on all of them for another month or so.
Thanks
Craig
[quote="Oregon Woodsmoke":2niaslck] Our weather is cold and dry; I don't know what weather you have in Ohio. …
The Japanese plum varieties will live, but it's pretty rare to get fruit. They bloom too early and they seem to have little resistance to wind. So if my blooms don't freeze, all the little plums fall off as soon as we get a strong wind. [/quote:2niaslck]
Hey Woodsmoke, so I’m not the only one who calls Iowa Ohio … though a friend recently took it well 
…I’m actually responding to your Japanese, or “Asian plums.†For years mine would also appear to set fruit. The blossom petals would fall off and it looked like a great crop. Then, as wind-sheltered as I am – they’d all fall off! Year after year, with likely only one or two maturing fruit per year per tree… What I finally figured out was they weren’t pollinated, thus tried to grow but couldn’t.
Be sure you’ve good pollination, that’s my latest project! You may likely be right about the late hard freezes… but it seems to me those plums should fruit for you ‘over there.’
Regarding fertilizing, the following was just posted on the same subject and sounds like good advice to me. Though some prefer organic… I’ve done both:
[quote="Bnhpr":2niaslck]Young trees should get an npk mix, like 10-10-10 if last years growth was less than 12" on the central leader. I like to see 36" on the central leader for the first 3-5 years, depending rootsock and varietal growth habits (spur, tip bearing etc) Asians will often have several upright, vigorous leaders. Normal growth is about 18" on each. On mature trees, leaf analysis is about the only dependable way to asess fertilizer needs.
Ben[/quote:2niaslck]
Thanks Ben, and welcome aboard -- All 
[quote="xroads":1jjkkl1c] I picked up some Cherry, Apple, and Peach this weekend, they were 7-8 ft tall, some with blooms on them allready. $25 ea. How can you beat that? [/quote:1jjkkl1c]
Craig, that’s about the going price… but what I look for is roots. Often time trees too large for economical shipping will have their ‘bare roots’ whacked back and stuffed into a five gallon bucket. I’d suspect they’re missing around 2/3’s of their original roots…
On the few trees I’ve bought like that I’ll really prune them back when planting, to balance the roots with the top. It’s not pretty… but it beats the slow demise I’ve witnessed from ‘top heavy’ trees attempting to feed too much structure from too few roots.
Any more I gravitate toward the smaller trees with large masses of roots. I’ve planted a lot of them, and if protected from government goats (deer) you’d be amazed how much ‘catching up’ they’ll do in one season!
Just keep the water to those tall guys and don’t use any fertilizer so hot it burns those all-important rootlets!
Viron, pollination might be the problem. There were fruit trees next door until a new renter moved in and put their horse in the orchard. Bye-bye fruit trees. No more plum next door.
I suspect the plum is a Shiro. It's solid yellow, no blush. I've got a Stanley, but the two trees are out of sync with their blooming period.
How big are the plums when they fall off because they weren't pollinated? Mine all came off the tree when they were about twice the size of an olive. There was a wind storm and the next morning they were all on the ground. Ditto for about 10% of my nectarines.
Shiro’s are prolific, but they do need a pollenizer… Mine uses a Satsuma, if slightly earlier.
I was thinking of your early blooming problem ‘yesterday’ as I noticed my Burbank Red Ace (Asian plum) still had blossoms - some just opening! But that’s been my problem with that tree, or at least one of them … my Shiro and Satsuma blooms are long gone by the time the Red Ace opens up. I’d matched it with an Ozark Premier (two plums I’ll drop anything to eat!), which has a similar bloom time. Next problem: they’re too closely related to pollenize each other… took me a decade and some deep internet research to figure that out 
…I’d have to run across the orchard in the rain to tell you what variety I grafted on to pollinate them… but maybe you’d do better with ‘those’ later blooming Asians..?
Unlike yours, my ‘un-fertile’ plumlets are tiny, likely 3/16’s of an inch in diameter when they’ll fall off in mass, stems and all. But until they do, they look like the ‘real thing!’ Maybe it is an environmental problem with yours dropping after having gotten so big..? Could a combination of wind & heat stress them that bad?
I spent the three hottest days of 08 in Klamath Falls, my first visit there. It had hit 108 in Medford! K-Falls has all kinds of water though, I was so impressed with the beautiful fruit trees around town – surprising we don’t have more commentary from over there..? I wonder if ultra watering can save fruit in such a desert environment? …sure liked it over there… even checked out a house, with 4 established apple trees - one, a ripe Gravenstein! …and the price was more than right…
Thanks,
Being new to all of this I am not a good judge of how much roots I should have. They all had a big root about 6 inches accross, and then some small fingers coming off them 2-3 inches or so.
Some of these trees has several dozen branches coming off them, many in bloom.
Should I cut all the branches back a foot or so & remove all blooms? They have such nice leaves on them I hate to do that, but if it will help in the long run I will.
Thanks again
Craig
Idyllwild
simplepress
jafar
Marsha H
Viron
John S
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