How Short Is Short?

The experts say to keep your fruit trees short. And with good reason--- with a small tree, it's ever so much easier to thin or harvest fruit, prune, spray foliar nutrients, and so on.

Keeping them short sounds easy enough. After all, we're considerably faster and more agile than a tree, and we're armed with clippers, loppers, tree saws, and even chain saws should the need arise. But Chris Rollins once quipped that the main reason to prune a tree is to correct the mistakes you made the last time you pruned it. Pruning is another one of those horticultural arts that you can learn about at your local rare fruit tree club.

All well and good, but assuming that one knows how to do it, just how short is short? Dr. Jonathan Crane, Associate Director of the Tropical Research and Education Center, was willing to spell it out in an informative powerpoint called The Ten Most Popular Subtropical Fruit Trees for the Home Landscape. His recommended heights, in feet:

Atemoya, 6-12

Avocado, 10-15

Canistel, 10-12

Carambola, 6-12

Chocolate Persimmon (what I used to call Black Sapote, until Noris Ledesma suggested this catchy handle), 12-15

Guava, 3-10

Jakfruit, 8-12

Longan, 10-15

Loquat, 12-15

Lychee, 10-15

Mamey Sapote, 12-15

Mango, 6-15

Sapodilla, 12-15

Sugar Apple, 6-12

White Sapote, 10-15

Dr. Crane's recommendation for guava is eye-catching--- as little as three feet! At his presentation at the Tropical Fruit Society of Sarasota last month, he explained that even kept this short, a guava will bud, bloom, and produce fruit. As one who would rather have a guava tree than a guava bush, eight to ten feet sounds better to me. On the other hand, I wonder how a guava hedge might look along the driveway...