Understanding a Microclimate and Growing Fruit

When buying real estate, buyers and vendors know it’s location, location, location. Location is just as important when planting a fruit tree or plants. A backyard fruit grower who sets up an orchard in the right location in their garden is going to prosper with edible crops.

Poor understanding of a microclimate will bring disappointing results, every season, that at best will be frustrating to the fruit grower and at worst can lead a keen gardener to think that they can not grow fruit ever in their backyard garden.

Microclimates in the Backyard

Microclimates are the variations within the climate of the overall backyard area. Walls, hedges, amount of sunshine thrown onto the area, shade from adjacent buildings and other structures and the position of existing plants introduce subtle differences across the backyard area or microclimates.

In The Berry Grower’s Companion (Timber Press, 2000), author Barbara L. Bowling, who has taught pomology and horticulture at Rutgers University and Pennsylvania State University, writes ‚”Technically, the term microclimate is used to describe very local conditions, such as the temperature or relative humidity within a canopy of a plant, but it is often used more broadly to describe the conditions at an individual site… nothing beats measuring the conditions of a specific site yourself”.

Measuring Microclimates in the Backyard

Farm suppliers, garden centres, online gardening stores and other gardeners, perhaps on eBay, will sell equipment for collecting date on the variations within the climate of a prospective fruit grower’s backyard area. Gardening equipment that will measure important climate data includes:

• A maximum and minimum thermometer will do a good job when taking measurements from the same area of soil in the backyard. When buying a soil thermometer, a maximum/minimum thermometer has two mercury columns and can also display the current temperature.
• Rain gauges can offer new insights into rainfall across a yard. By collecting the data personally, a gardener will believe that there can be a three-fold difference from one area to another depending on location. This data can be combined with observations of where water stands on the soil and for how long after rainfall.
• Soil pH testing kits that do what they say on the label.

Planning Fruit Location to Grow Well

In Vegetable and Fruit Gardening: The Definitive Guide to Successful Growing, (Dorling Kindersley, 2008) Michael Pollock in ‘Growing Fruit and Vegetables’ lists four key variations in garden climate creating a microclimate:

1. Open areas
2. Walls and buildings
3. Sheltering hedges
4. Low-lying areas

Sunshine on open areas of a backyard will be a good location for early crops. Backyard garden walls and other structures can create wind funnels that damage fruit crops and could offer protection to some other location. Hedging can be an effective wind and rain barrier to fruits planted adjacent. In sloping backyard gardens, pockets of frost on the colder wetter soil are likely to form in low-lying areas.

Planting garden fruit, whether alpine strawberries, highbush blueberry, a pear tree or quince requires the fruit grower to understand their backyard garden’s microclimates and some planning of fruit location to grow well.