Grow a Pomegranate Tree!

Once considered a fruit for royalty, the pomegranate may be a delicious addition to your backyard orchard or edible landscaping. Its beautiful, showy, red-orange flowers become decorative fruit within the fall, crammed with juicy arils for you to enjoy all year long!

Getting ready to plant

Pomegranates are best grown from cuttings to make sure the standard of the fruit produced. There are many sorts of pomegranate trees to settle on from, including the ever-popular Wonderful, yummy pink Sweet, and unique non-staining Eversweet. Select a location with full sun, and permit a 20 ft diameter space for your tree to grow into unless you propose on keeping it smaller by pruning. If planting as a hedge, you’ll plant them as close as 10 feet apart. Learn more about shaping your pomegranate during this article. Pomegranates are adaptable to several soil types, though they grow best in loamy soil with good drainage. the perfect climate is zone 7 to 12, with short, mild winters and low humidity. they’ll be grown in containers in colder places, and kept indoors or during a greenhouse over winter. If your tree’s trunk is broken or killed by frost, it’ll typically grow new suckers which will be trained into a replacement trunk. Ambrosia pomegranate

Caring for your tree

Pomegranates have relatively low tide requirements and may survive drought conditions for several years (although during that point, the harvest is going to be smaller). an excessive amount of or uneven amounts of water, either from irregular or over-irrigating, heavy summer rains, or high humidity, may result in fruit cracking, decreased fruit production, and other problems. it’s not necessary to prune your pomegranate trees, but it can help with the simple harvest, better fruit, and for a shapelier tree. Pomegranates naturally grow in bush-form and produce many suckers. this is often ideal for hedges or living walls, but not for many other situations. When your tree maybe a year old, select one to 6 trunks to keep; prune the remainder at the bottom. Most professional orchardists prefer five or six, because they’re going to produce fruit sooner, need less care, and recover quicker if damaged by frost. When doing maintenance pruning because the tree grows, prune lightly, and never trim all the branches within the same year. Pomegranates fruit on short new shoots that come from wood that’s quite one year old, so pruning all new growth back directly may result in nothing to reap the subsequent seasons. you ought to also prune back any new suckers that you simply don’t want to grow into trunks. 

Harvest Time!

Your pomegranates can begin to fruit within a year of planting. However, don’t be worried if the primary few years’ fruits mature late, or drop before maturing. it’ll take 5 to six years for the tree to mature and produce large harvests. Fruits are often harvested as soon as they reach their mature complexion, feel heavy, and sound metallic when tapped. If left on the tree too long, they’re going to split open; they’ll also split if it rains during harvest season. If this happens to your fruit, you’ll still harvest and luxuriate in it, but it can’t be stored whole. Fruit should be harvested with pruning snips, and not pulled from the branch. they will be stored whole during a cool place for several weeks, or in refrigeration for 3 months. for extended storage, you’ll de-seed and freeze the arils whole. You’ll also extract the juice by running the arils through a food strainer or a blender and straining out the seeds; the juice is often frozen for up to six months or made into a spread of canned foods like syrup (also called grenadine), jelly, and more.

Grow a Pomegranate Tree!

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