Tips And Tricks To Help Your Fruit Trees Grow And Produce Faster

An apple tree can take up to five years to bear fruit, a pear tree between four and six, and a sweet cherry up to seven. The worst part? This countdown begins after you plant the young trees in your yard, and doesn't include the year or two of growth they experienced in the nursery. Naturally, you want to shorten the time from planting to enjoying the juicy fruit. Unfortunately, there's no quick solution, and when there is one (looking at you, multi-year holes), it's often a hotly debated technique.

Fruit trees generally grow between 18 to 30 inches each year before they start producing fruit. Once they become productive, they grow between 12 and 18 inches annually. Your goal should be to achieve the upper range of their growth rates (and not push beyond), as very fast growth can delay fruit production. To lay the ground for success, there are a few things to consider before planting a fruit tree in your backyard, such as where you're purchasing your tree, the variety's rootstock (if it's grafted), its suitability to your area, and the condition of the tree. After that, focus on providing it with "optimal" conditions — not just what it can tolerate — to promote better growth. Let's explore the various tips and tricks to encourage your fruit trees to grow and produce faster, starting with tree selection specifics and then moving on to pruning techniques, watering tips, and more. 

Love the honey crisp apple from your supermarket? Before imagining how delicious it would taste when you cut the miles between farm-to-store to a few footsteps from your yard to the kitchen, pump the brakes. Fruit trees can attract a legion of pests and diseases that maim their growth — unless controlled with an arsenal of fungicides and pesticides. This situation is especially true for the fruit varieties lining your supermarket shelves. Another concern is that stores mostly carry temperate fruits. Temperate fruit trees have specific chilling requirements (cold hours necessary to induce dormancy), and they may not grow and produce well if your area is too warm. Conversely, extreme cold can also injure fruit trees and wreck harvests.  

Since most homeowners have grown up gorging on commercially cultivated varieties, they generally look for the same cultivars to grow — a demand big-box retailers and garden centers are happy to fulfill. This can become problematic once you get your tree into the ground and start counting down the years to your first harvest. Instead of steady, healthy growth leading up to a sweet yield in the future, you might face a number of issues that slow down the vigor of your tree. If the cultivar simply can't tolerate the cold in your area, frost damage could destroy the sapling's terminal bud, impacting growth. Or, if it's susceptible to fatal bacterial disease like fire blight, you might (at best) enjoy very few fruit, or worse, lose the tree completely. Fortunately, you can avoid all of this and fast-track your way to bountiful harvests by buying varieties that are more suitable to the home orchard and which have been bred to withstand disease and environmental pressures.

A specialist fruit tree nursery in your area will be more likely to carry varieties well-adapted to your local conditions, and should be able to offer advice around which to select. Besides choosing fruit tree varieties that are cold hardy for your area, also only opt for disease-resistant cultivars. For instance, apple varieties like 'Redfree' and 'Liberty' are resistant to the aforementioned and highly damaging fire blight. 

Although some fruit trees can be grown from seed, they generally bear fruit faster when they're grafted. Grafting is a technique where two different varieties are combined, with the rootstock determining the tree's height and growth, while the scion (the top part) determines the fruits you get. Fruit trees grown from seed won't be true to type, therefore it's recommended that home gardeners opt for a grafted specimen. Moreover, the tree should be grafted on a dwarfing or semi-dwarfing rootstock. This is because such stocks keep the tree short in comparison to standard trees. For apple and pear trees, this also brings with it the added advantage of faster fruit production than standard counterparts — in some cases, they may start to bear nearly three years early.

To take advantage of these fast-tracked yields, look for apple trees grafted on M.9, M.26, Bud 9, or MM106 rootstocks. In pears, look for semi-dwarfing rootstocks like OHxF 87, OHxF 333, or OHxF 513. If you can't find your desired variety grafted on these rootstocks, consider going through this beginner's guide to grafting fruit trees (and common mistakes to avoid) to develop your own.

You can buy different kinds of fruit trees, such as balled and burlapped (B&B), potted, and bare-root. But when growth rates and fruit production are chief concerns, bare-root trees fare better than most. To put this into perspective, B&B trees are excavated from the ground using a tree spade machine. Despite best efforts, such trees can lose nearly 90% of their lateral roots, which slows down their post-establishment growth. Similarly, potted plants often develop girdling roots — these can circle the trunk or main stem, eventually asphyxiating it in severe cases. But even if their root system was near-perfect, these trees may not be comfortable with the new garden soil, which in most cases is a tad inferior to the potting soil mix. Thanks to all of this, potted fruit trees may be quite slow to take off after being planted into the ground. If the tree became pot-bound, it could take quite awhile to push forth new growth after being planted. Also, since they're relatively older — justifying their greater price point — it's difficult to give potted trees a whip cut. This can be disadvantageous as whip cuts are necessary for creating a desirable shape in fruit trees. 

In contrast, bare-root trees are dug out from the field with most of their roots intact. In fact, their root system is nearly 200% bigger than B&B trees. They're dug out when they're still small, explaining why they're younger than containerized trees and easily whipped. Once you plant them (which should be almost immediately, as you want to get those bare roots into the ground asap), the roots from these young trees can quickly adapt to your garden soil and resume their growth.

If you've just planted your fruit tree, prune it right away to encourage faster growth. Bare-root trees lose about ¼ of their root system during removal. Trimming back their tops in a similar proportion ensures the energy resources are redirected into the root system, invigorating them and boosting growth. You must also prune your fruit trees regularly thereafter and maintain an annual pruning schedule. When you prune your trees the right way, you open up their structure, improving air circulation and sunlight exposure. Apart from dissuading fungal spores from taking over, this encourages budding, and, subsequently, fruiting for oncoming years. Without it, your precious trees will only set fruit on their tips, as the fruit-bearing lower branches will be overshadowed.

Fruit trees are typically pruned using either the central leader method (where a central stem in the middle is chosen as the leader), the open center method (where there are multiple main stems around the edge, and a thinned-out center), or a hybrid of these two. Apple, pear, apricot, and plum trees are often pruned using the central leader approach. Under this method, you choose one central leading stem and prune the remaining stems to create even spacing (about 6 to 10 inches) between the ones you keep. Ideally, the stems you don't snip off should protrude out from the main stem at nice wide angles (roughly 60-80 degrees). The remaining branches should grow stronger and produce faster. Vertical shoots tend to display what's known as "vegetative vigor." As you prune your tree to have more horizontally angled branches, this will encourage development of fruiting spurs.

If you have a fruit tree that's naturally vertically spreading, such as a peach or nectarine, choose the open center training technique. Start by selecting a few main, scaffolding branches around the edge. If you have just planted the tree, you may need to cut off the main stem about 18-36 inches from the base. As your tree grows, you'll want to keep thinning out, making heading cuts where necessary, and pruning irregular and criss-cross growth. Simultaneously, you must remove any suckers growing out from the tree's base. Otherwise, they'll keep consuming energy and delay fruiting. Keeping the area mulched helps reduce suckering.

To encourage faster growth and production, ensure your fruit trees receive direct sunlight for at least six to eight hours per day. Why is this important? Because, like any other landscape tree, most fruit trees depend on sun exposure to carry out photosynthesis. Without full sun, fruit trees will grow slower.

Besides speeding growth, full sunlight also improves flowering. For an inner branch to initiate budding, it must receive at least 35% of the light captured by the tree. This is why proper pruning is so crucial. Otherwise, the onset of new flowers and fruits may be impacted, as well as fruit quality — both in terms of size and taste. Full sun exposure also enables the foliage to dry out quickly after rains. This helps to prevent fungal diseases like cedar apple rust which are notorious for impacting fruit yields and weakening trees. Even light shade-tolerant species like pineapple guava perform better in full sunlight. Besides planting your fruit tree in a full sun position, keep an eye on surrounding shrubs and trees to ensure their canopies don't start to overshadow it. Also, avoid siting fruit trees near tall buildings or other structural elements that may block sunlight.

If you feel like your fruit tree isn't growing fast enough, ask yourself: Are you watering the newly planted tree in your lawn enough? If a fruit tree's feeder roots don't get adequate water, this can not only starve them of moisture, but impact nutritional uptake as well, which is a recipe for slow growth and sad young fruit trees. Even if you are watering your fruit tree regularly, you might be doing it the wrong way. Oftentimes, gardeners grab a bucket, lug it around the yard, and dunk it near the tree's base. Mission accomplished, right? If only it were that simple. Juvenile fruit trees need ample water in their initial growth stages to develop a strong root system. But their feeder roots are not concentrated around the tree's base alone; they spread far wider. This is why you need to water your fruit trees beyond their drip line. A tree's drip line is a hypothetical circle that extends out as wide as the tree's canopy, but on the ground. Feeder roots are typically in this zone.

Besides watering around the drip line, you also shouldn't offload the water bucket in one go. Young fruit trees can't take up water rapidly, and dumping a big bucket of water onto the ground isn't likely to result in good penetration, especially if has dried out. Instead of soaking in and saturating the soil, the water is likely to run off. Aim to apply water slowly, so it can seep into the soil around the feeder roots. Either pour water or hose the ground slowly (make sure to run the hose beforehand if it's stored in the sun to discard hot water) or use drip irrigation.

Another way to inspire your fruit trees to produce more is to intercrop them with flowers. The reason? To bring more pollinators into your yard and garden. While giving fruit trees compatible partners for cross-fertilization is necessary, providing them with pollinators, especially honeybees, is just as important. But before you start planting flowering shrubs, groundcovers, or annuals, make sure your soil is enriched with nutrients, or the trees and the flowering plants might end up competing with each other for resources. Also, consider growing your fruit trees in a square grid pattern, as opposed to planting them in straight rows. This will further improve cross-pollination and may even encourage pollinator action that's generally missing in exposed sites during poor weather conditions (like rain or gales), because the clump of trees may provide more protection for each other than those planted in a straight line.

Avoid growing flowering plants directly underneath the fruit tree, especially those that are likely to create a dense bush of growth against the trunk, as this could make the tree more susceptible to fungal diseases. Vegetation crowding the trunk may also aggravate suckering. Usually, strawberries, chives, clover, or any low-growing veggies or flowers are good contenders. Finally, minimize pesticide use in your garden to avoid hurting pollinators.

While it's easy to avoid underplanting directly below fruit trees, this won't prohibit weeds or grass (if the trees are growing in a lawn) from venturing underneath. This poses problems because, when trying to stimulate quicker growth and bearing, you must provide the young roots with a wide, competition-free berth to establish themselves — pitting them against weeds won't do fruit trees any favors. Even worse, thick weed growth around fruit tree trunks may invite things like voles and borers, which can further damage the tree. Plus, experimental evidence suggests that the presence of grass against apple tree trunks slows growth and reduces budding. This is due to the fact that grass has dense, fibrous roots that uptake essential resources before tree roots can.

So, to ensure tree vigor and growth, keep the area free of grass and weeds. Carefully dig out any weeds and encroaching grass (while trying to not harm the tree roots), or suppress the undesired growth with cardboard sheet mulching. Once the area underneath your fruit tree is clear, keep the bed mulched to prevent new weeds and grass seeds from germinating. 

Sometimes, young trees begin producing fruit earlier than their projected bearing age. In fact, one prime reason gardeners are drawn to buying potted fruit trees is that they're often already bearing. The problem with this approach is that the young tree (both in the ground and the pot) ends up channeling all its resources into producing a few fruits, rather than developing its roots. In the initial couple of years, fruit trees are still essentially saplings and can't support fruit production and vigorous growth at the same time. 

So, while it's tempting to allow the young trees to continue bearing new fruit, a better approach is to remove all the fruitlets as they form to redirect energy resources. You can also opt to remove any flowers before they even have a chance to turn into fruitlets, but just be careful that you don't snip off vegetative growth nodes at the same time. Follow this practice for around three years. After proper establishment, your fruit trees will grow faster and stronger. Also, continue to thin out apple and pear tree fruit as these trees mature. Their seeds release chemicals that impede nearby flower bud formation. This could reduce fruit production in the subsequent year.

Another nifty way to trick your fruit tree into producing faster is to notch its dormant buds. Basically, the aim is to redirect the flow of carbohydrates into the dormant bud and force it to transform into a fruiting bud. But how can you do that?

Around late winter, pick out the branches that are at least a year old, though you can use this technique on two-year-old stems, too. The reason we're targeting them and not the new buds is because, even if they aren't notched, they'll die in any case, and so, are safe to experiment with. Take a ⅜-inch-wide file with a coarse tip. Use it to cut the dormant branch around ⅛ inch underneath the targeted bud. Cut deep enough until you see the white tissue layer. You can also use a knife or pruning shears. This will stall carbohydrate movement in the stem, forcing resources to gather in the dormant bud, encouraging fruiting. This technique works particularly well for sweet cherry trees and is known as under-notching. You can also use notching to induce a vegetative bud where you want a new branch to grow, but for this you will need to notch above the node, not below. 

If your fruit trees aren't gaining 12 inches of growth in the planting year, they're likely running low on nitrogen. Similarly, ones that aren't putting out 18 inches annually on their shoots after two or three years in your garden soil may be suffering from nutritional or water deficiencies. After checking your watering method (as described previously), consider feeding your fruit trees with a slow-release fertilizer.

Ideally, base your fertilization schedule on a soil test, as overfertilization can work conversely, further delaying bud development and fruiting. If your soil needs a boost, it's usually recommended to spread a balanced fertilizer like 10-10-10. However, you might need to use a different nutrient ratio, depending on the results of your soil test. Start applying fertilizer around 3 feet away from the tree trunk in a circular band and extend it to the drip line. Carry out the feeding during spring while the fruit trees are waking up from dormancy, but are yet to bud out. If you aren't a big fan of chemical-based fertilizers, simply swap them out for homemade compost.