Want to grow fruit year round in your garden? Here’s how we do it – and how you can too!
Yes, you can grow fruit year round in your temperate climate garden, but it takes planning & effort!
We live in Agricultural Zone 7b on the outskirts of Greenville, SC. Our climate has cool/mild winters (temps dip into the low teens) and hot, humid summers (sustained temps over 90°F). We also have an incredible quantity and diversity of pest insects.
Farmers we know often refer to our area as a “petri dish” for plant diseases/pathogens. These conditions make it very difficult to organically grow stone fruit crops here (apples, peaches, apricots, etc).
If you live in the northeastern US or west of the Rocky Mountains, it’s far easier to grow stone fruit crops using organic growing methods since the disease and pest insect pressure in those areas is significantly reduced.
So, to some degree, where you live will dictate what types of fruit you can and should grow. (Mangos won’t grow well in Maine.)
“Push the ball down the mountain” – e.g. grow low-maintenance fruit
Chris Miller, one of my farming buddies, recounted a funny story with an old farmer he knew. Some young whipper-snapper (probably a 50 year old) was complaining about how hard it was to grow a certain crop in our area.
“I have to spray these insecticides now, then these herbicides in two weeks, then these fungicides… It’s so much work and money!” The old farmer looked at him, shook his head, and replied: “I always found it easier to push the snowball down the mountain rather than up it.”
That pretty well sums up our attitude when it comes to growing our own fruit: be lazy. For us, that means we only grow fruit that’s easy to grow here and produces abundantly.
Select fruit varieties that require minimal input and provide maximum output
Sure, we’ll make sure our fruit-producing plants have:
- healthy living soil to boost nutrition and plants’ immune system, while reducing plant stress;
- adequate water to reduce plant stress and maintain optimal growth rates, and
- a diverse plant ecosystem to live in which reduces pest and disease pressure.
However, if a plant needs much more than that, we either won’t grow it or we’ll replace it with something easier and more productive. Likewise, we highly recommend you grow fruit plants in your garden that thrive in your climate zone when grown organically.
That makes much more sense to us than repeatedly applying endocrine-disrupting neurotoxic synthetic pesticides in the place where you, your family, and your pets live.
This means we buy fruit such as certified organic apples and apricots from a grocery store if we want them, rather than growing them here. Could we use OMRI listed organic pesticides to grow apples and other stone fruit here? Probably so. But we don’t feel like making the effort.
Where can you find fruit plants ideally suited to your local climate? A local plant nursery and/or local gardening groups (real world or facebook) can be invaluable resources for finding out what grows best or even sourcing plants.
Fruit varieties we grow in our Zone 7b garden to get year round fruit production
In our ag zone, here are the low-maintenance fruit varieties we grow to get year round fruit production, listed in chronological order from spring – winter:
Red strawberries
When they produce: April – May
We grow a few different varieties of red strawberries, from the small native Fragaria virginiana (whose flavor will knock your socks off) to the standard large red hybrids, including ever-bearing varieties which produce another small round of fruit in the fall.
We’ve yet to meet a strawberry we don’t like.
Black raspberries (Rubus occidentalis)
When they produce: May – June
Blackberries
When they produce: June – July
Red and gold raspberries
When they produce: June – August (we’ll also get smaller second flushes of fruit from late summer – fall on our ever-bearing varieties)
Do we have a preference for red or gold raspberries? Yes. Both of them. And as many as we can pick and stuff our faces with at any given time.
Peaches
When they produce: August – September
We planted two peach trees years ago before we realized how difficult it is to grow peaches here organically. Some years, we have large yields and some years we have virtually no fruit. We always promise ourselves that we’ll use Bt and Surround WP/kaolin clay (two non-toxic organic insect controls) the next year, but never get around to it.
Nevertheless, we’ve promised ourselves (again), that next year we’ll try harder. We even have a bag of Surround kaolin clay ready to go for next spring!
Ground cherries
When they produce: June – July
We LOVE ground cherries, a physalis fruit native to the Americas. You will too. Ground cherry articles you should read:
Wonderberries
When they produce: June – July
A neat little nightshade fruit that tastes kinda like a watered down cross between a blueberry and a blackberry.
Blueberries (we grow early, mid, and late-season varieties)
When they produce: June – July
Blueberry eating tip: let your blueberries sit at least one day indoors at room temperature after harvesting them BEFORE eating them. They’ll be much sweeter and more flavorful if you do.
Yellow wonder strawberries
When they produce: June – September
These tiny yellow strawberries produce throughout the hot months of summer and offer incredible flavor. They don’t taste like traditional strawberries; they taste more like tropical fruit punch.
Dwarf tamarillo
When they produce: June – September
Dwarf tamarillos are an odd and interesting little fruit native to Bolivia and Argentina. It’s not a true tamarillo, it’s actually in the nightshade family.
They grow quite well here as annuals (grow like a tomato) and readily reseed. We do have one “mother plant” growing in a pot that’s four years old, so they can be grown as perennials as well if they don’t experience a frost or freeze.
How do dwarf tamarillos taste? The have a delightful array of sweet and tropical flavor notes on the front and some bitter notes on the back that some people might not like.
Elderberries
When they produce: July – August
Nope, elderberries aren’t a great fruit to eat raw, but we can’t sing their praises highly enough. They have an extraordinary flavor once cooked.
Elderberries also contain potent flu and cold-fighting compounds, which is why we use them to make elderberry syrup every year.
For more information on elderberries read our articles:
- Complete guide to growing elderberry trees
- How to make elderberry syrup
- How to make sparkling elderflower cordial
Muskmelons (cantaloupes, honeydews, etc)
When they produce: July – August
Concord grapes
When they produce: July – August
Watermelons (small early varieties – larger later varieties)
When they produce: July through September
Prickly pears
When they produce: July – September
What’s better than a cactus that makes an edible fruit (prickly pear)? A cactus that also doubles as a vegetable (nopales).
Read: How to grow and eat prickly pear cactuses
Black aronia berries (Aronia melanocarpa), aka chokeberries
When they produce: August
Aronias are a native fruit that supposedly have the highest antioxidant content of any fruit in the world. However, they aren’t exactly the most delicious fruit for fresh eating.
When they’re perfectly ripe, they do have some good flavor notes, but they also pack an unpleasant puckery astringency. I like to chew up a handful of them fresh along with a stevia leaf.
This year, we’re also experimenting with an aronia-blackberry wine. We’ll write more on that experiment at a later date…
Figs
When they produce: August
Brown turkey figs grow great here. We also grow another more cold-sensitive variety — whose tag we of course lost shortly after purchase — that produces the best figs (dark purple skin and flesh) we’ve ever tasted. However, it’s much more cold-sensitive than our brown turkey so doesn’t produce nearly as much fruit.
Pawpaws
When they produce: August – September
Oh, the pawpaw, quite possible our favorite native fruit. They can grow as large as mangoes and taste like mango-banana custard.
Additional pawpaw articles you should read:
Muscadine and scuppernong grapes
When they produce: August – September
Passion fruit (Native variety, Passiflora incarnata)
When they produce: August – October
Not only are passionfruit a gorgeous flowering vine that produces a tropical-flavored fruit, they’re also the only host plant for Gulf Fritillary butterflies.
Be sure to check out our passion fruit articles:
- How to find, ID, grow, and eat native maypop passion fruit (Passiflora incarnata)
- Recipe: passion fruit-Meyer lemon sparkling cordial
- Recipe: Pawpaw passion fruit sorbet
Persimmons
When they produce: September – October
There are plenty of wild native persimmons that we forage near our home, but we grow larger-fruited Asian persimmon varieties in our yard (such as Fuyu and Ichi-Ki-Kei-Jiro). These are also much shorter than native persimmon trees, making harvesting easier.
Read our article: Japanese vs American persimmons: growing, foraging, eating.
Guavas
When they produce: September – October
Fresh guavas smell and taste amazing. Yes, they’re a tropical fruit that doesn’t grow well in our decidedly non-tropical climate zone when planted in-ground.
However, we’ve had great success growing tropical guavas in containers. We just have to make sure they stay warm during the winter.
If you love guavas as much as we do, read: How to grow guavas in containers in cool climate zones and How to make guava ice cream using fresh guavas.
Pomegranates
When they produce: October – November (depending on first frost date)
Pomegranates root fairly easily from cuttings. Years back, our friend Eliza Holcombe gave us a cutting from a pomegranate tree that’s been in her family for over 100 years.
It’s now thriving and fruiting at Tyrant Farms and we have more cuttings rooted and ready for transplant this fall! Our pomegranates are best eaten after being nipped by first frost, which intensifies their flavor/sweetness.
Citrus
When they produce: October – March
We’re citrus fanatics. We currently grow about a dozen varieties of citrus including satsumas, blood oranges, kumquats, key limequats, makrut limes, Buddha’s hands, calamondins/calamansis, Meyer lemons, Yuzu, variegated pink lemons, and Australian blood limes.
Is it easy to grow citrus here? Yes, in the sense that in all the years we’ve been growing citrus, they’ve had zero disease pressure. In the winter (especially if they’re brought indoors), they can get spider mites and scales, which are easy to control with neem oil.
Citrus is also relatively difficult for us to grow because most citrus varieties don’t like sustained deep freezes, which are fairly frequent in our winters. So that means we grow our citrus in containers/pots, and move them into our garage on winter nights when temps are below freezing.
Our engineer friend made this process much easier for us by building a custom pot mover.
Given the indescribably delicious taste of fresh-picked organically grown blood oranges, kumquats, and other rare citrus on a winter day, we’re more than willing to put in the extra work.
Our kumquats and blood oranges keep us buried in citrus throughout January and February.
Want to grow your own organic citrus? Read our article: How to grow citrus in pots in any climate zone or check out our potted citrus garden tour.
So that’s how we get fruit from our garden year round in Ag Zone 7b! Hopefully, this article will inspire and help you grow lots of your own fruit as well.
KIGI,
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