The Home Orchard: Growing Your Own Deciduous Fruit and Nut Trees

Chuck Ingels is one of the main authors and technical editors of The Home Orchard, the best book available on growing deciduous fruit and nut trees for home gardeners in California, and at last week’s Master Gardener conference in Long Beach I attended a presentation Ingels gave on training and pruning fruit trees. The presentation reminded me of why I like The Home Orchard so much. The presentation was — and The Home Orchard is — detailed, supported with excellent photographs, and full of clear explanations that can get a new grower off to a great start as well as keep a seasoned orchardist engaged.The Home Orchard: Growing Your Own Deciduous Fruit and Nut Trees, edited by Chuck Ingels, Pamela Geisel, and Maxwell Norton is a comprehensive guide. As the book’s introduction says, “You will learn how trees grow, which species grow best in particular regions and soils, what varieties are avaliable (and how to select the right one), and how to prepare the soil, plant the trees, water and fertilize, prune and graft, thin the fruit, diagnose problems, control pests, and harvest the fruits of your labors.”Many of the book’s photographs were taken by Chuck Ingels himself, some of them in his own backyard. And this is one of my favorite things about Ingels: he talks (and writes) about what he knows, first hand. Ingels works for the University of California Cooperative Extension, but he doesn’t just visit commercial peach orchards and then report what works on those farms. Ingels continually plants and trains and prunes and experiments with peach and apple and persimmon trees in his own yard as well, and he documents it and can report it to us on whether it might work in our yards. Yards are different from farms.While I have read other books on growing fruit trees, The Home Orchard is my favorite one in large part because it’s written from and for California. A comparative book that I own is called The Holistic Orchard by Michael Phillips. The Holistic Orchard is useful in many ways but is irrelevant and even misleading on some topics for me because of its author’s far-off perspective: Phillips lives in the mountainous woods of northern New Hampshire. That’s another world. Phillips may know how to save fruit trees from being killed by arctic winters, but we barely get frost in my yard; he has no idea how to guide me in irrigating through a dry Southern California summer.Some of the chapters of Ingels’s The Home Orchard that I find most useful include the one on irrigation, and also the one on grafting. That chapter helped me successfully create a couple of trees in my yard that have multiple varieties on them. I have a Dapple Dandy pluot that I grafted a Burgundy plum and a Flavor Grenade pluot onto. I also have a Snow Queen nectarine that I grafted a Red Baron peach and a Frank peach onto, all with the indirect help of Ingels and The Home Orchard.Perhaps my favorite line from the book is about fertilizing: “Although deciduous fruit trees require many nutrients for tree growth and fruit production, those grown in backyard settings in typical sandy loam to clay loam soil with proper irrigation rarely need to be fertilized.” The emphasis is mine. One of my pet peeves is how much home gardeners feel pressured to fertilize their fruit trees. I’ve never fertilized any of my deciduous fruit trees, and I’ve always had so much fruit that the trees need to be thinned — and this is in different locations, in different yards, in different soils.During his conference presentation, Ingels mentioned that The Home Orchard is in the process of being revised. At the moment, the manuscript is at the peer-review stage (since it’s a University of California publication). The second edition should be available to us in a year or two, he said. He also said that one training technique that will get more coverage in the new edition is espaliering (growing trees along a two-dimensional plane). Apparently, this is the most popular way to grow apples up in Washington nowadays.I hope that in addition to more pages on the espalier technique there are also more mentions of some Southern California-specific items. For example, in the last ten years or so, many growers here have found success with apple varieties that were thought to only do well in locations with colder winters like Washington. And there is no mention in The Home Orchard of pecan varieties suitable for us even though I know people who are successfully growing pecans in Southern California.All in all, The Home Orchard is a reliable and broad guide to growing deciduous fruit and nut trees in California, and one that I’ve been reading and re-reading since I discovered it. I know of no better book on the topic, except maybe I will in a year or two.

With plenty of tables, photos and illustrations and a handy appendix on crop-by-crop calendars, this is a must-have guide for anyone living in California who wants to grow successful fruit or nut crops. Every imaginable topic is broached, including detailed chapters on Grafting, Integrated Pest Management (IPM), Failure to Bear and Physiological Disorders (think "split pit" of peaches or splitting, cracking or doubling of cherries).Please note that this book does NOT include information on Citrus, Avocados, or Subtropicals. It is confined to these temperate fruit varieties: figs, pomegranates, persimmons, quinces, cherries, apples, apricots, apriums, peaches, nectarines, pears (both European and Asian), plums, pluots and plumcots. The nut varieties discussed include almonds, walnuts, pistachios and pecans.

I bought this for guidance when I found myself overseeing an 80 tree mixed fruit tree orchard with limited guidance. The organization of the book is good. The content is well researched. The advice is practical. I would recommend.

This book is incredibly informative and a great resource for home gardeners! I have learned a lot about caring for my trees and have a much better understanding of them now. I am looking forward to improved harvests from my orchard in the future.

This is a very good resource for the homeowner with several trees or even a small orchard. It is easy to read for the novice but contains a good amount of detail as well. The book is beautiful and well designed with many useful color figures. I have dozens of orchard books ranging from basic to very technical, but I would recommend this to any homeowner or small-scale producer. One strength of this book is that it has a good chapter on budding and grafting. The IPM section is also well organized out for novice fruit growers.

i really like this book, although the first couple of chapters relate to california, the information and the how to stuff is amazing,for anywhere i live in new Mexico. good info on planting pruning feeding recognizing diseases, and solutions for almost anything that can come up for the backyard orchard enthusiast. the chilling and sunlight guides can be complex, but just finding your hardiness zones in catalogs solve that problem for example stark brothers places me in hardiness zone 6A, lists the appropriate trees to buy, and go from there. I really am glad that I bought this book

What a great books. Science driven and reviewed by university professionals. I live in Utah, and its mostly make for California growers, which was not made clear in the title of the book. However, the data and info is still great for my location.

Good fruit tree book with responsible and usable information. I have to modify it a bit for the Mojave Desert. I will use it in combination with The Home Orchard Handbook for a class I am teaching this fall on small orchard/fruit tree management offered this Fall on Eventbrite in Las Vegas..