My First Multi Graft Fruit Tree

I have been so busy gardening these past few weeks that I feel all sore and tired.  We finally had our old ash tree stump ground and I ended up with an enormous pile of chips on the patio and an even bigger hole in my lawn. We couldn't really leave the hole unfilled, and covering it with sod seemed too boring, so we decided to plant another tree. We thought a fruit tree would be nice next to a patio, providing, besides fruit, a bit of shade and a nice shape to look at without growing too large or out of scale with the rest of the garden. We settled on a pluot.

Here it is fresh from the nursery and festooned with tags like a Christmas tree

Pluots are a cross between plums and apricots, and some varieties, in particular Flavor King and Flavor Supreme, are among the best fruit I have ever eaten.

Some of my last year's pluots

The fruit comes off the tree absolutely perfect every time, no worms, bugs or rot. Even squirrels don't take bites out of them. All I do is spray them once a year with dormant spray.

We emptied chips out of the hole and filled it with native soil and a good planting mix

Unfortunately, undamaged, beautiful and tasty fruit grows on trees that are really tricky to take care of. They are either too weak even on rootstock (reminds me of some roses), or too vigorous gaining size quickly at the expense of flowering and setting fruit. They crack, they need to be hard-pruned every year, they are finicky about pollination. I chose a 4-in-1 tree with these issues in mind.

All done, the tree in the ground and four roses at the base. We did leave some room to come up to the tree :)

 Generally I try to avoid multi graft fruit trees because I can see how some grafts would be stronger than others and dominate the tree creating lots of pruning issues in future.

The chips were spread as mulch around the roses and perennials

However, in the case of pluots, a multi graft had a few definite advantages. First, I hope that having four varieties within inches of each other would make pollination a bit more of a certainty, so I would finally get to eat some of the wonderful Flavor Supreme which our single variety tree refuses to bear for me. Another is that I hope that the trunk will be less prone to cracking. I placed the strongest graft facing north, and the weakest facing south (it seems they were grafted with this specific placement in mind). We will see how it turns out, but my hopes are high.

And I hope the roses like the mulch