Are You Using The Best Fertilizer For Your Fruit Trees?

Fertilizer can help any of your landscape trees, but it is absolutely necessary for fruit trees. You might enjoy a fruit tree’s blossoms and the shade it offers, but the primary purpose for fruit trees in the garden is the fruit. In order to produce abundant and juicy fruit, a fruit tree has to be healthy.

What is the best fertilizer for fruit trees? Is 16-16-16 fertilizer good for fruit trees? That depends on the type of tree and how fast it is growing. Read on for information about fertilizer for fruit trees.

Fruit trees are hungry trees, feeding heavily on mineral nutrients in the soil. Some 16 elements are considered essential nutrients, and fruit trees require all of them. But their primary need is for macronutrients, including nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium (the NPK nutrients listed on every fertilizer package), as well as calcium, magnesium and sulfur.

How about carbon, hydrogen and oxygen? These are also necessary for fruit trees, but you don’t have to consider them when it comes to fertilizer. The trees get these from the air, the water and organic matter found in the soil.

The key to providing soil for fruit trees is to figure out first which nutrients your soil already contains. The fertilizer you add can be organic or conventional (chemical), but it should only contain nutrients that are lacking in the soil.

Apple fertilizer needs vary year to year. Keep your eye on the annual growth of your young apple trees. Their growth each year will dictate whether to increase fertilizer amounts.

From the ages of 1 year to 3 years, apple trees should add a foot (30 cm) of growth or more every year. If they are growing less than that, you’ll need to increase the amount of fertilizer by 50% the following year.

Once an apple tree