Choosing Fruits for Your Home Garden 



By J. R. Mattern, 



Pennsyl- 



BEFORE you can 

 get very far in the actual 

 plans for a home fruit garden you 

 must have an adequate and accur- 

 ate idea of what a home fruit garden is, 

 its relation to your daily fare, its cost to 

 you, and its value to you. The word gar- 

 den in this connection misleads many 

 people in America. A garden is not merely 

 a cabbage patch, nor only a flower bed, 

 but a place where you may grow all 

 the good things you need that your climate 

 and soil will permit. For myself, fruits 

 form a larger part of my daily fare than 

 vegetables, and I consume more fruits than 

 flowers. My garden, therefore, is largely 

 a fruit garden, and in addition to vegeta- 

 bles and flowers, it contains apples, peaches, 

 pears, cherries, plums, grapes, strawberries 

 and all the other berries. 



How much of your garden should grow 

 fruit and how much vegetables and poultry 

 is a matter that involves diet and health. 

 Undoubtedly some people do live on vege- 

 ables and grains and meats with fair com- 

 fort and satisfaction, but the diet that makes 

 for a healthy body brim full of spirits and 

 energy that may be made to count at work 

 or play under the direction of the clear- 

 seeing brain it carries is the body that is fed 

 its due share of fruit every day in the year. 

 Each day's fare for most people should in- 

 clude enough fruit to form a half to three- 

 fourths of its bulk. Seldom will any person 

 or family eat anywhere near this much unless 

 it grows right handy to the kitchen door. 

 To grow the proper amount in propor- 

 tion to vegetables, fruit trees and plants 

 should occupy eight or ten times as much 

 ground as vegetables. 



Each eighth acre fruit garden will cost 

 from ten to fifteen dollars to set properly, 

 and each garden so set and tended should 

 produce for you not less than fifty dollars' 

 worth of fruit each year, plus the added en- 

 joyment of eating clean, flawless, fresh fruit 

 that you yourself grew, plus a highly satis- 

 factory gain in the health and spirits of 

 your family if you have not been eating 

 enough fruit, as almost invariably is the 

 case where fruit must be bought. 



Your climate and soil are the determin- 



TELLING WHAT CAN BE GROWN BEST IN 

 SPACES OF LIMITED SIZE — A PRACTI- 

 CAL HELP IN PLANTING FOR YOUR 

 PARTICULAR REQUIREMENTS— HOW 

 TO MAKE A BALANCED GARDEN 



[Editor's Note: This is the beginning of a 

 series of articles on the home fruit garden. 

 Later numbers will deal more specifically with 

 particular crops and varieties from the home view 

 point.] 



ing factors in the selection of the fruits 

 and the varieties that may be grown in 

 your garden. Right here I must point 

 out that almost every known fruit will 

 grow almost everywhere and produce to 

 a certain extent, but to be worthy of 

 planting in a home fruit garden, a vari- 

 ety must thrive and produce to its 

 maximum at that place. It must grow 

 to its greatest perfection under your con- 

 ditions. 



In my neighbor's garden there is a 

 peach tree ten years old that never has 

 yielded more than a dozen peaches. An- 

 other man in Pennsylvania has some orange 

 and lemon trees which sometimes produce 

 for him a few little green fruits. These are 

 radical examples of fruits that should not be 

 planted in those sections for their yields, and 

 such fruits are easily guarded against. But 

 other kinds of undesirable fruits are harder 

 to avoid. For instance, with the kind of 

 peach tree that yields three pecks when it 

 ought to yield five pecks, and the kind of 

 apple tree that yields fruit of fairly good 

 flavor when it should yield fruit of the finest 

 flavor, the weakness is not apparent with- 

 out specific information. Such information 

 is what this article, and others to follow, will 

 give. 



Since fine discrimination in the selection 

 of what to plant is so vital to the proper 

 success of our garden, let us get at the rea- 

 sons which underlie the climatic and soil 

 requirements of different varieties of fruits 

 in order that we may classify and sort in- 

 telligently. It is almost a universal rule 

 that varieties of fruits reach their greatest 

 perfection only when growing where all the 

 conditions are similar to those under which 

 they originated. There are a few notable 

 exceptions to this rule, such as Duchess and 

 Yellow Transparent Apple, and Elberta 

 Peach, but the rule holds good with a hun- 

 dred varieties where it misses with one. The 

 features of your garden which are covered 

 by the term "conditions," are (i) soil, (2) 

 temperature, (3) light, (4) water supply, 

 (5) the purposes for which the fruit is 

 wanted, and (6) individual preferences of 

 the family. 



There are three primary classes of soil — 

 loam, clay and sand — and many different 

 combinations of these. Most varieties of 

 fruit have their preferences for one or an- 

 other kind of soil. Yellow Newtown apple, 

 for instance, reaches great perfection (and 

 this is practically the only soil in which it 

 succeeds) in a certain clay soil which tulip 

 trees naturally prefer and in which they 



223 



most 



found growing 

 wild. In the de- 

 tailed articles on 

 varieties to fol- 

 low the soil pre- 

 ferences of each 

 sort will be 

 dicated. 



Temperature 

 is a more com- 

 plicated matter. 



It is the total heat of the season which 

 counts in growing and ripening and coloring 

 fruit, and latitude is the primary governor 

 of this, as illustrated broadly by the differ- 

 ences of temperature of North Carolina and 

 New York. But the effects of latitude 

 quite often are changed entirely, so far as 

 fruit growing is concerned, by altitude, by 

 local topography, and by nearby bodies of 

 water. Every five hundred feet of eleva- 

 tion above sea level equals in effect on the 

 total heat of the season, the effect of one 

 degree of latitude north or south from the 

 equator. This means that every eight feet 

 of elevation equals about one mile farther 

 north. 



The lay of your land, or its topography, 

 has its influence through air-drainage. In 

 every section where frost comes at all there 

 are frosty nights after the growing season 

 has started. If the freezing air can drain 

 away from your land to lower levels, as it 

 will if slopes and hollows permit, your fruit 

 trees and plants will be surrounded by 

 warmer air, and blossoms or young fruit 

 will be safe. If your garden is located in a 

 pocket or floor of a hollow or valley, then 

 you may depend on any frosty air over all 

 the surrounding watershed to collect about 

 your trees. Nearby bodies of water also 

 act to prevent late spring and early fall 

 freezes, and they derive their potency from 

 the power of water to hold its temperature 

 longer than land. When there has been 

 enough warmth to develop blossoms on trees, 



