I get asked a good bit about what fruit plants are good to grow in our area. The assumption is what kind of fruits can I grow in my yard without a whole lot of trouble.
Peaches are a nightmare to get much production because of the endless supply of insects and disease that will keep you spraying once a week for about four months. And the amount of pruning you must do to keep fruit at a manageable height isn’t much fun either.
A lot of other fruits need way more chill hours per year than our milder climate can provide. So, the No. 1 fruit I tell folks to plant that works best in our area is blueberries.
Why blueberries?
They are easy to grow, like our climate, are nutritious, and have few pest problems. A bonus is that they are attractive enough to grow as landscape plants.
In our area, we grow two types of blueberries – rabbiteye and southern highbush. Rabbiteyes are native to the South and are so named because the berries turn pink before they go blue, like the eye color of a white rabbit.