What's Blooming: Fruit Tree Varieties for the Front Range

Blooms on 'Golden Delicious' apple trees in the Garden of Eatin'

What’s Blooming:  Fruit Tree Varieties for the Front Range
by Sherry Fuller, Horticulturist, Gardens on Spring Creek

Blossoms are starting show, and not much is as rewarding as a large crop of home-grown fruit.  With just a little forethought you can have that bonus in your own yard!  

First, a few considerations.  How much room do you have?  Standard size fruit trees can grow too large for a city lot in just a few years.  Dwarf fruit trees are available and are cute, but sometimes the root stocks they are grafted onto aren’t as winter hardy as needed for our climate.  Semi-dwarf trees usually mature in the 10 - 12 feet size range and are often the most readily available at nurseries.  Or consider growing raspberries, currants or strawberries that are much smaller plants.  (More about them later.) 

Some varieties of fruit trees won’t produce fruit unless you plant more than one variety.  In general, most apples, pears, sweet cherries and plums need two varieties to cross pollinate and produce a large fruit crop. If a neighbor has an appropriate variety within about 100 feet of your tree, the bees will find them both and do their thing.  And crabapple trees can pollinize apple trees.

Many apple and pear varieties are very susceptible to fire blight, a devastating bacterial disease found in our area.  Check that your selected variety is at least somewhat resistant. 

'Red Haven' peaches in the Garden of Eatin'

Some types of fruit are more tolerant of our weather than others.  Varieties that bloom earlier can be damaged by extreme cold weather, so you might not get an annual crop.  Apricots, peaches and sweet cherries fall into this category.  Planting these trees in a more protected location can help.  But putting them into a really warm spot in your yard, such as against a south-facing wall, can backfire as they warm up more quickly there and bloom earlier. 

Fruit trees will produce better crops with a little more maintenance than that required by most shade trees.  They appreciate a balanced fertilizer every year applied in a broad swath around their drip line.  Most need regular irrigation through our growing season and even occasionally during the winter if it’s warm and dry.  Pruning in late winter will keep your trees shaped nicely, and removing some interior growth so sun can reach all the branches helps with fruit production.  If your tree is beginning a bumper crop, thinning some of those small fruits by removing any that seem blemished or crowded together will yield less, but larger and tastier, fruit. 

So which varieties are best for you?  Apples are one of the easiest to grow, but also can be one of the most frustrating when coddling moths attack and most of your apples have worms.  You can spray to prevent these, but one of the reasons I grow fruit is to have an unsprayed harvest. 

'Golden Delicious' apples will produce at least a few fruits without a second variety, so that is the choice of many gardeners with limited area.  'Red Delicious', 'Empire', 'Liberty' and 'Honeycrisp' are all good choices for our area that are fire blight resistant.

One of my favorite fruit tree varieties is 'Stanley' plum.  It is an Italian prune type with smaller fruit, but it is very reliable and doesn’t need a pollinizer.  Most other plum varieties can be grown here successfully, usually producing a good crop.  'Green Gage', 'Blue Damson,' 'Waneta' and 'Sapalta' are recommended for our area. 

Most sweet cherries aren’t suited to our climate but 'Stella' and 'Black Tartarian' are a bit hardier and will produce fruit in some years and both are self-fertile.  Pie or sour cherries are easier to grow here, producing a good crop most years.  'Montmorency' is the most popular, is very cold hardy and is self-fertile. 'North Star' is another good choice, and it stays quite small. 

Peaches have a reputation for producing only every few years here since their flowers are often frozen by spring weather. But lately, peaches have been yielding good crops more often than not in our area.  'Reliance' is noted for its hardiness. 'Haven,' 'Elberta' and 'Polly', a white-fleshed variety, are all good, freestone, self-fertile choices. 

If a smaller plant suits your yard better, consider growing currants.  I especially like 'Crandall Clove' and 'Gwen’s Buffalo' varieties.  These are great landscape plants with fragrant, yellow flowers in spring, large edible fruit in summer and reddish fall color.  They are drought tolerant and grow four to six feet tall and wide.  'Gwen’s Buffalo' is a variety of a western native currant and is the larger of the two.  'Crandall Clove' is an old variety with a complicated lineage.  Both reliably produce heavy crops that make great berry crisp!  

Raspberries in the Garden of Eatin'

Raspberries are also native to Colorado and easy to grow here.  'Heritage' is an old favorite variety with later fruit and shorter canes.  'Caroline' has a good yield of earlier fruit.  'Fall Gold' is a good yellow fruited variety.  Raspberries sucker out to form quite a large thicket with age, so need a dedicated space. 

Strawberries also need their own space with improved soil for a good crop.  'Ogallala' and 'Fort Laramie' are old standards that perform well here.  They need good irrigation, regular fertilizer and should have some of the small plants they produce removed to avoid overcrowding.  

For more information, our friends at Colorado State University Extension have a wealth of information about all aspects of growing fruit in our area online.  Use the “Search this Site” feature at https://extension.colostate.edu for additional resources.