Apple Trees: A Short and Sweet Crash Course

Ready to grow your own apple trees and provide tastier, superior apples for yourself and your family? Tired of the store-bought bags that have probably been sitting in cold storage for 18 months? Do you crave to recreate the crisp crunch of apples found at your favorite apple-picking farm from the comfort of your backyard? Then it sounds like you’re ready to plant an apple tree (or two!). Read on for a short and sweet crash course on how you can successfully grow and care for your very own apple trees. 

What Variety? Semi-Dwarf or Dwarf?

Just like when you go apple picking and you have multiple varieties available, you’re going to think to yourself which is my favorite? Do you like tart apples that are great for baking like Granny Smith or Mutsu? A snackable apple with notes of honey like Golden Delicious or Honeycrisp? Apples for canning like Gala or Fuji? There surely is an apple for every personality! But there are a few things you need to note like size and what space you have available in your garden (and including cross-pollination compatibility, which we will get to!). Luckily, most varieties sold in garden centers like ours are either a semi-dwarf or a dwarf variety, meaning they maintain a very reasonable size, around 10’-12’ or 12’-15’ in most cases. 

Cross-Pollination

When it comes to growing apple trees, it takes two to tango (or to get a nice crop of fruit in this case)! It is highly recommended—if not completely necessary—to make sure you have two compatible apple varieties for cross-pollination to occur or else you’re not going to see a substantial amount of fruit or fruit at all. It’s important to talk to someone with knowledge of what varieties can successfully cross-pollinate (like us down here at the garden center!) or find one of the hundreds of nifty charts online that can help you out, like this one! 

It should also be noted that when you plant your two compatible varieties, they need to be planted about 15’ apart for optimal cross-pollination. 

Sunlight and Soil

There’s nothing too special when it comes to what kind of environment is best for an apple tree to grow, but like most other plants, trees, or shrubs, they have a best condition they will thrive in. This includes full sun a la six to eight hours each day and being planted in well-draining, loamy soil that has been amended with something like Daddy Pete’s Plant Pleaser Planting Mix. You also want to avoid areas where water pools, such as the bottoms of hills or near ponds and other sources of water, which will help avoid root rot. 

Chill Hours: What Are They?

If you’ve already done some research on fruit trees in general, you may have come across the term ‘chill hours’ or a similar phrase like ‘cold hours’ or ‘chill units.’ There can be a lot of nitty gritty when it comes to chill hours, which is why orchards tend to care about them more than the average backyard gardener as they can impact fruit production.  

Essentially, to give the uncomplicated explanation, apple trees and other fruit trees require a certain number of hours' worth of low temperatures over the winter period to grow back strongly in the spring. This can impact the number and quality of fruit bearing blossoms, which directly impacts the quality and number of fruits the tree will bear. 

It’s easy to get caught up in the numbers, so we’re going to recommend not worrying about it too much. Unless you are very serious about creating a home orchard, the average gardener with their two apple trees will not need to be too concerned with crunching numbers and keeping track of chill hours.