"Fruit Salad" trees

[LisaJean]

Has anyone seen these things for sale in catalogs? They are trees that have been grafted to grow several different varieties of fruit on ONE tree. Like plums, nectarines, peaches, pears, etc, all on one tree.

I was looking at this thing in the catalog, and was intrigued. But then I noticed that there was no photograph of the tree... just an artist's rendering. That was a red flag. Like, if they can't get one to grow, even to take a photo of it, why should I buy it? LOL

 

[jmk3482]

Yeah, I've seen those too. I was intrigued but I asked about them on here and found that you need to be careful where you buy them from. All those catalogs that you get in the mail are suppliers from the same place; directgardening.com. But their cheap prices are a tell. A lot of people get dead or rotted plants. Someone sent me a link to a site that has reviews for online nurseries that I found helpful:

http://davesgarden.com/products/gwd/

 

[ams3651]

My boyfriend planted one of those a few years ago and it died..dont know why though.

 

[shortcake1806]

My family has owned and operated nurseries for years and I can honestly say these are a complete waste of money. For apples to bare well you need another variety to polinate them. So even if you purchased two of these trees they wouldn't work. The grafts fruit at different times so you'd never really have fruit cocktail.

 

[patandchickens]

I don't know, I used to know an apple tree that has, if memory serves, pear and peach (? - this was a while back) grafted onto it and all three things fruited fine with perfectly respectible crops for their branch sizes. Of *course* you don't get them all fruiting at once, I don't think anyone claims you do?

The main problem as I see it is that the vast majority of those multi-fruit grafted trees come from discount outlets and are such pieces of cr ap that you'll be lucky if they live at all, let alone ever produce anything edible. But that is true of normal fruit trees from that sort of vendor as well It does not pay to "cheap out" on buying trees in general and fruit trees in particular.

FWIW, a lot of apple varieties are self-fertile to some degree (including some common and good ones, like Golden Delicious)... although with most of them you will still get rather better fruit set with a pollinator.


Pat

 

[shortcake1806]

Yes, if you wanted to graft a pear and peach onto the same root stock you could create a multiple fruit tree. However, this is different from the supposed fruit cocktail trees the OP was asking about.

I think the idea these places are selling is that you can harvest all these different fruits at the same time and that's false. By naming it a fruit cocktail tree you are implying that all these fruits can be combined and eated at the same time.

And you are correct some apples will self polinate but they will usually produce low quality and low yeilds.

 

[OaklandCityFarmer]

We had a similar discussion, here's the thread: http://www.theeasygarden.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=23039

Personally I think they're more of a novelty than anything else. If grown in the right conditions I suppose they could produce some fruit.

Multi-variety apple grafts seem to do well though, IME.