Your Fruit Trees Will Produce 2 Times More Fruits

If you’ve done everything you can and you still aren’t getting the yields you want, try some of these tips to boost your garden’s health and increase the amount of fruit your trees and bushes produce.

Go with dwarfs

If you don’t want to wait several years to get fruit from your garden, consider planting dwarf varieties of your favorite trees. Dwarfs don’t grow as tall or as wide as a full-size tree so they begin to bear fruit within the first 2-3 years. These smaller trees also don’t require as much space, making them perfect for gardeners who want to grow their own fruit but don’t have a lot of land.

Prune as needed

Fruit-trees ideally need to be trained in their first few years of growth into the shape you want them to maintain throughout their productive lives. Pruning should be done at the end of winter, before the tree comes out of dormancy.

Root-suckers and water-sprouts

It is important to recognize that not all growth is good-growth. The production of flowers and fruit require a huge investment of nutrients and energy from your plants so you want to be certain that these resources aren’t being wasted where they aren’t needed. Root-suckers and water sprouts are two such wastes.

New shoots that grow from the rootstock of a grafted fruit tree are known as root-suckers. These growths often look like a new plant that has taken root at the base of the existing parent. On the other hand, Water-sprouts are vertical shoots that grow straight-up from the established limbs of trees. While these growths aren’t nearly as undesirable as root-suckers, they can still be a waste of nutrients if they aren’t properly controlled.

Encourage Pollination

Among your native plants, make sure something is blooming each season. Beneficial animals like bees, hummingbirds, butterflies, and bats are a few of the top-pollinators. For this reason, it is important to keep your garden hospitable for wildlife. Avoid overuse of pesticides which can kill beneficial-insects.

Know your soil

Plants are a lot like people in that different varieties and species have different tastes. It is important to know what balance of nutrients and trace minerals is best for each plant. Soil-pH can also play a big part in maximizing fruit yields. If you aren’t sure what kind of soil you have, it’s always better to test samples from around your trees and shrubs. Once you know what’s missing, you can amend the soil to boost future fruit-production.

Harvest everything

This is perhaps the easiest advice to follow when it comes to growing successful fruit trees. Still, it bears mentioning. Unharvested fruit left-on the branch at the end of the season actually signals to the tree or bush that it made too much that-year. During the next growing season, the plant will actually produce less as a result. So make sure to pick-all of the fruit that your garden grows and let your plants know that you just can’t get enough!