Planning Your Backyard Orchard – 2024

The Beginner’s Guide to Planning Your Backyard Orchard will help you start growing fruit trees. You can use the bounty in cooking, canning, dehydrating, and eating raw fruit.

Planning Your Backyard Orchard

If you’re looking for more ideas on creating your food forest, Creating Your Own Tea Garden and How to Start a Victory Garden will help you get started.

“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”

Martin Luther

The abundance of fruit I’ve been gathering from my backyard orchard inspired this article.

My seven apple, pear, and cherry trees give me so much fruit that I can barely keep up with preserving the harvest. It’s a problem I’m happy to have.

Fruit trees are not only beautiful, they put food on my table and are easy to care for at the same time.  Why wouldn’t everyone want a few fruit trees sprinkled in their landscape?

My neighbor bought an acre of land next door a year ago. She plans to build a tiny home and create a food forest on that acre.

She still doesn’t live there full-time but has already planted her small backyard orchard.

Backyard orchards should be one of the first things you plant when buying a house because it can take a couple of years for the trees to mature enough to give you the bounty you want.

Creating a Cozy Life Group

Since you’re planning your backyard orchard, I’m guessing you like all things cozy living. I created a Facebook group called Creating a Cozy Life with over 187,000 like-minded souls.

It’s a group where we share recipes, pictures of things that leave you in awe, and ideas on how to make your life just a little bit more snug. Join here to be part of the virtual cozy cabin.

Why have a Backyard Orchard?

• Instead of just looking at beautiful trees in your yard, why not grow your food simultaneously? There’s nothing healthier than feeding your family freshly picked produce.
• Planting a fruit tree leaves a legacy. Your home might not be the only home you own, but the following people who own your home will also be able to enjoy the fruits of your effort.
• Planting a fruit tree to celebrate births, birthdays, anniversaries, and milestone achievements will provide a permanent reminder of happy days.
• Once all your fruit trees mature, you will have enough fruit to preserve for the entire year.
• If you’re growing fruit trees to start a business selling your produce, I wrote an article on How to Start a Jelly and Jam Business.

Research the Type of Trees

The fun part of planning your backyard orchard is deciding what types of trees to plant. You should pick fruit varieties that do well in your area.

There are cold-hardy varieties and low-chill varieties. You also want to consider the best trees that are disease and pest-resistance.

You can contact your local garden center and ask for recommendations on fruit trees or ask your neighbors what type of fruit trees they grow.

Know Your Backyard Orchard Gardening Zone

Your garden zone will affect your decision about the varieties of trees you pick. You can find your garden zone here on Garden.org. Simply enter your zip code, and it will give you your zone.

One of my favorite ways to determine what plants and trees work best in any area is to join a local gardening group. If you are pressed for time, you can always look for local Facebook gardening groups. They will be happy to answer any questions you have.

Keep in mind the times of the year you would like the fruit to ripen. Will all the trees you plant ripen simultaneously or would you rather have them ripened successively?

Create a spreadsheet with the different varieties of backyard fruit trees you’re interested in growing. Note the tree’s fruit production schedule.

Remember, you’ll have to preserve the harvest from your home orchard. Will you have help? If not, you must keep that in mind when you note the different ripening times.

Choosing between Dwarf, Semi Dwarf, and Standard Trees

You must also evaluate how much room you will need for each fruit tree. Some trees take up more space than others because of their tree size or root system.

There are three different-sized trees to choose from. Your needs and the amount of space you have will determine which size you choose.

Standard trees need the most space, and they take longer to mature. They also outlast dwarf and semi-dwarf trees in terms of fruit-bearing years.

Dwarf trees mature much faster than standard trees and are perfect for a small space. The downside of planting this sized tree is they won’t produce as long as standard trees.

If you have the space, add a few dwarf fruit trees and some big trees. Harvesting fruit from your plantings might take longer than you think, so the small trees will enable you to start enjoying the “fruits of your labor” (pun intended) while waiting for the large trees to produce.

Example of Spacing and Average Wait for Fruit

Cherry tree

A standard-sized cherry tree will take four to six years to mature. They need 35-40 feet spacing between trees.

Dwarf varieties can start producing fruit in as little as two years. Tree spacing for dwarf cherry trees is 8-10 feet.

Most fruit trees require a certain amount of cold hours during the winter in order to bear fruit. If your area of the country doesn’t get cold enough for the fruit to set, you could wind up with a lovely tree – but no fruit. That’s why knowing your gardening zone is so important.

Heritage Trees

Heritage trees are becoming quite popular. They may not look the prettiest, but the fruit tastes amazing.  Having fresh fruit not readily available in grocery stores will also be nice.

As always, look for the type of tree that does best in your area.

I was recently browsing a website that specialized in heirloom fruit trees. It was so fun to see the variety of fig trees available.

What Types of Fruit Trees Will You Plant?

Here are some questions you might ask yourself before deciding what types of fruit trees you need:

1. What are you and your family’s favorite types of fresh fruit?
2. Will you preserve the harvest by canning, dehydrating, and freezing it? If so, what type of fruit will you need to fulfill your preserving needs?
3. Does your fruit tree require a pollinator? When I decided on having a cherry tree in my backyard orchard, I discovered that you had to have another type of cherry tree to cross-pollinate.

Choosing a Location for Your Backyard Orchard

You’ll want to pick the best places to plant your backyard orchard on your property. The decision depends on how much sun the tree needs and the area where you live.

Does your tree need full sun or partial sun?

Knowing how wet the soil is throughout your property will also affect where you plant your backyard orchard. Most fruit trees don’t like moist soil.

An easy soil drainage test will indicate if the spot you picked for planting your fruit tree is right. 

Dig a hole approximately 14 inches wide by 14 inches deep and fill it with water. Allow the hole to drain.  

After the hole drains, fill it again with more water. If it takes a day or less to drain the second time, you’ve picked the right spot for good drainage.

I learned by living outside of Seattle to ensure you don’t plant your trees anywhere where water travels when the rainy season hits.

There were parts of my yard that the water run-off naturally gravitated to, and planting a tree where the water congregates during a rainy season would have been a mistake.

Planning your backyard orchard must be well thought out to save time waiting for your trees to mature, only to be disappointed because the tree location didn’t work.

Amending the Soil

When you decide where to plant your fruit trees, you can test your soil with a simple testing kit in the fall or early spring. You can find a soil testing kit here on Amazon.

Here’s a great video on how to take a soil test in your yard.

Depending on where you live, your soil will probably need amending, and that can take some time, depending on how much change is needed. (Sometimes years, depending on how acidic it is.)

Too acidic soil will need limestone mixed in with it to create a proper PH level.

If your soil is too alkaline, you will need compost materials or soil conditioners to decrease alkalinity.

Winter Care

The thawing and freezing of the soil throughout the fall to spring season causes it to expand and then contract, according to Dr. Diana Cochran, an extension fruit specialist at Iowa State University, in Living the Country Life Magazine. This can damage roots.

Add a 4-6-inch layer of mulch to the root zone of all your young trees to help prevent root damage from happening.

Fruit trees are also vulnerable to rodent damage in winter. To prevent these hungry pests from eating your trees, wrap them with metal mesh or commercial tree wrap 24 inches above snow depth and 3 inches below the soil, if possible.

Orchard Culture

You can have multiple fruit trees in a smaller space. Instead of planting your fruit trees like commercial growers do, you plant them closer together and keep the trees small with pruning.

Planning your backyard orchard can be exciting, especially when adding a diverse range of fruit trees.

Add citrus trees, such as lemons or oranges, for their vibrant and refreshing colors. Dwarf apple trees, available in various cultivars, are another excellent choice that brings a touch of sweetness to your orchard.

When selecting your trees, consider factors like resistance to powdery mildew, compatibility with rootstock, and the benefits of dwarf varieties. Pruning, particularly summer pruning, is essential for maintaining tree size and optimizing fruit production.

Adding nut trees can provide a delightful contrast to your fruit selection if you have the space. Throughout the planning process, remember to utilize natural resources efficiently and aim to become a knowledgeable backyard fruit grower.

So go ahead and create a flourishing oasis in your backyard, where the rustling of leaves accompanies the bountiful harvest of nature’s gifts.

We’ve reached the end of 3 Steps in Planning Your Mini Backyard Orchard. Pretty soon, you will be heading to canning and preserving your harvest.

Let me know in the comments below what type of fruit trees you plan on growing.

Be sure to join our Creating a Cozy Life group. You’re not going to believe how amazing it is!

Pin this backyard orchard post below on your garden board on Pinterest so you can refer back to it. 

You can follow me here on PINTEREST. If you use any of these tips and take a photo of your fruit trees, be sure to tag me here on INSTAGRAM.

Thanks for stopping by. I’m so happy you found us!  

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