An Amazing Urban Orchard With 12 Fruit Trees!
Do you find most store bought fruit to be tasteless and yearn for fresh fruit that actually tastes like fruit? What you need is your very own urban orchard!
Back in 2005 we started to look for a new house in a better neighbourhood closer to my work at the university. We also wanted a bigger, more modern house.
The garden wasn’t a huge criteria at the time as we had just started to grow some vegetables, fruit and flowers in our first house. We were still like many people, buying most of our vegetables and fruit at the grocery store.
Our real estate agent let us know that a house was for sale in our chosen location. I took a break at work and met my wife at the house. Nice looking house in a nice neighbourhood. Inside the house was a bit dated and we could see it would take a bit of work to update it.
However as we stepped out on the back deck, can you imagine the sight that greeted us?
In addition to extensive vegetable beds, we saw an urban orchard full of fruit trees of every type, variety and maturity!
We knew right away that this was the house and property for us.
You can’t buy 20 year old fruit trees and plant them in your garden, so we considered these to be priceless. You could say we bought an orchard with a house attached!
12 Fruit Trees In An Urban Orchard
Yes, crammed into our small suburban backyard are 12 fruit trees! Here’s what we have in our urban orchard:
Peach Tree
This one is planted under the southwest roof overhang of our house for protection from rain.
Here on the west coast of Canada we get a disease called peach leaf curl in spring when we have rain. The overhang helps a bit but some leaves still get it if sticking out past the overhang.
This however doesn’t seem to affect fruit production.
The peach harvest happens usually sometime in August and we skin, halve and pit the peaches and freeze them on baking sheets and then transfer them to bags to enjoy all year through in green smoothies and on top of oatmeal and cereal.
We also bake a couple of peach pies and eat them fresh during the harvest season.
Sweet Cherry Tree
The tree is planted on the northwest side of our second floor deck. It is tall but with its location we don’t get much shade from it when sitting on the deck. But it does produce a beautiful display of cherry blossoms each spring.
Unfortunately most of the blossoms either don’t develop into cherries or do but then fall off. Pollination is a problem as we’re not aware of any other sweet cherry trees nearby which can help with cross pollination.
The birds, raccoons and squirrels also get a lot of them so we don’t get that many cherries, some years none.
Fig Trees (2)
We have two fig trees on the north side of our backyard. We used to actually have four trees but they were too crowded and we really didn’t need all of them as well, so we cut down two.
Since our climate in summertime is Mediterranean, these do quite well.
In the Mediterranean a second crop ripens in fall but in our case we only get the first crop ripening due to our short stretch of hot weather in summer.
We eat them fresh, skin and all – they are so sweet! And as with the peaches we also halve them and freeze them for use in smoothies in the winter.
Apple Trees (2)
We have two apple trees.
One is a transparent apple. This tree produces early, so usually we can pick already in July.
The apples are not great for eating fresh as they can be a bit mealy. Instead we make lots of applesauce from these apples. We only need to add a small amount of maple syrup to sweeten the sauce.
Once made, we freeze it in yoghurt containers in our chest freezer. And use the sauce in oatmeal, on top of cereal and for potato pancakes.
We also have another tree which is smaller but produces the most beautiful red apples. These are great for regular eating but also dry well, so I try to make enough to take as snacks to work and school in the fall.
Pear Trees (2)
And there are two pear trees.
One pear tree is a dwarf variety, but with two different kinds of pears as it’s been grafted. It does quite well considering it’s size. I have some issues with rust on the leaves that seems to vary each year but doesn’t seem o affect fruit production that much.
The other tree is grafted with one half bearing Asian pears, the other half regular pears. However it looks like the Asian pear graft is more or less dead and doesn’t produce anymore. And in general the tree doesn’t do as well as the other one as it is next to a tall hedge and my huge plum tree and doesn’t get enough sunlight.
Yellow Plum Tree
This is a huge tree! I still have some photos of it when we moved to this house in 2005 and it was still a manageable size. It is now way too big for an urban backyard and I have done some major trimming on it to try and keep it to a reasonable size, but it just keeps growing bigger each year!
It’s now doing much better after we cut down a hedge next to it. It produces very juicy, yellow plums. We either eat them as they are or make jam or jelly from it. You can’t really bake with them as there is just too much juice.
Although the racoons like the plums as much as we do, so we lose quite a few each year to the masked bandits!
For some reason in 2022 we had no plums at all on the tree, even though it was full of blossoms that spring. Maybe due to some hard pruning I did or the blossoms were affected by rain or wind and didn’t get pollinated.
Banana Tree
We bought this in spring 2018 for a steal at our local nursery’s garage sale.
It is a Musa basjoo, which is a hardy banana tree and can survive cooler temperatures.
Other than in summer when I moved it out, it lives in my greenhouse. I transplanted it to a bigger planter that I built out of cedar. However in the summer of 2023 I had to move it out of the greenhouse as it simply has grown too tall and the new leaves can’t fully unfurl anymore.
I’ve placed it close to my house for protection in winter, but I will still need to protect it with some leaves and burlap to avoid damage during our colder periods of winter.
Hope to eventually get some bananas from it!
Lemon And Mandarin Trees
Since I have a greenhouse, I thought the best fruit to grow in it would be lemons and mandarins. I had thought about getting these trees for a few years until I finally bought them in the spring/summer of 2022. I’ve planted them in my raised bed in the greenhouse where they will stay protected from frost and freezing in winter and get lots of heat in summer.
The lemon tree is now producing and we hope to harvest our first lemons sometime in 2023. It is an ever bearing Meyer lemon so should supply us with fresh lemons all year! Can’t wait to have freshly squeezed lemonade in summer.