Tree fruit

Do you love hazelnut nut-butter, like Nutella? Would you like to harvest and bake with nuts grown on your own property? Then consider adding hazelnuts to your landscape. Within 4-5 years, you’ll be harvesting nuts from your own plants.

Many gardeners are starting their fall garden and landscape clean-up - which is good and bad. Garden sanitation, if insects or diseases were a problem this year, is an important step to reduce problems next year. But we need to balance pest control with allowing habitat for beneficial insects and pollinators. So, how can that be done? 

Growing fruits in the home orchard takes work and patience. So, when trees fail to bear, despite all the gardener’s work, it’s very disappointing. If your harvest is looking less than ideal this year, there are several reasons trees fail to set fruit and produce a good crop.  

Frost Damage

Productive fruit trees with an abundance of high-quality fruit don't just happen. They result from good cultural practices, including pruning. However, fruit tree pruning is often neglected by the home gardener either due to a lack of pruning skills and knowledge, or due to fear plants will be damaged or killed by incorrect pruning.

Peaches and apricots are a favorite summer fruit, and a great source of dietary fiber, Niacin, Potassium and Vitamin C. Growing peaches and apricots in Nebraska is a challenge, but still many gardeners are successful and looking forward to harvest in the next few weeks.

It will be time to start pruning fruit trees later this month. As pruning begins, it's important to have a good skills at identifying fire blight symptoms and have a multi-pronged approach for control, especially in very susceptible trees. Pruning and sanitation are important control strategies, but improper cleaning of pruning equipment between cuts can easily spread the disease.

It's too early to begin fruit tree pruning now, but it's not too early to prepare. For homeowners with only a few fruit trees - who can choose the ideal time for pruning their trees - it's best to wait until just before new growth begins. This is typically late February into March. Wounds heal fastest when pruned at this time. This is especially important for tender fruit trees (apricot, peach, nectarine, sweet cherry); early pruning of these trees could lead to cold damage at the pruning sites.

As you begin pruning this spring, keep an eye out for a common problem found on plants in the stone fruit family called Black Knot. It's a widespread fungal disease that affects plum and cherry, and occasionally infects apricots, peaches and other plants in the Prunus genus, like chokecherry. Black knot is common throughout Nebraska in wild plum thickets.

Two odd diseases that may occur on home-grown peaches and plums are called peach leaf curl (photo above) and plum pockets. Peach leaf curl is common and widespread, and can be found in Nebraska wherever peaches are grown although it is usually not severe in the drier areas of western Nebraska. The disease is favored by the milder, wetter climate of eastern Nebraska.

Although leaf curl is principally a disease of peaches, nectarines also can be infected. Related fungi of the Taphrina genus cause similar diseases such as plum pockets and leaf blisters on oak, maple, and elm.

Knowing when to harvest pears is confusing to many gardeners, because tree ripened pears often do not usually have good quality. They develop stone or grit cells, or a mealy texture that makes the fruit less desirable. Pears ripen from the inside out, a characteristic more pronounced in tree ripened fruits. So when the outside flesh has become slightly soft and appears to have good eating quality, the inside flesh is soft and brown.