June is the best month to buy and plant deciduous fruit trees. Follow these timely tips to help you choose the right ones for your garden, writes Helen Young.

Deciduous fruit trees are dormant in mid-winter, so they're sold 'bare-root' – without soil or pot – making them easy to transport to garden centres, or by post direct from grower to you. Buying trees this way is cheaper and offers the widest choice.

What to choose
It's enticing to imagine picking bucketloads of fruit from your own trees, but if you don't choose wisely, you may be disappointed. Deciduous fruit trees include stone fruits (peach, nectarine, plum and apricot), pomme fruits(apple, quince, nashi and pear), and others such as mulberry, persimmon, pomegranate and fig. Most of these prefer a cool climate and many require a certain number of 'chilling hours' each winter, below about 7°C, before they'll set fruit. So selecting the correct varieties for your area is critical. If you're not in a cold area, look for 'low-chill' varieties. Mulberries, pomegranates, persimmons and figs will grow in warm to subtropical regions.

Some fruit trees, particularly apples, pears and Japanese plums, require more than one tree for cross-pollination in order to produce fruit. Some even require the pollinating tree to be a different variety, so make sure you get expert advice when choosing these. Many fruit trees are partially self-fertile, meaning they produce fruit on their own but bear bigger and better crops when cross-pollinated. Lastly, there are self-fertile varieties, which are perfectly productive on their own. Mulberries and figs are naturally self-fertile.

Fruit salad, anyone?
For those short on space, it's possible to plant two or even three different varieties of a fruit together. Called duos and trios, the trees are planted 150 millimetres apart in the same large hole and grow together like one tree. This gives a wider fruit selection and covers cross-pollination needs in one easy solution. 'Fruit salad' or multi-grafted trees are also available. These have two or three different varieties grafted onto a single root system. The trick with these is to prune each variety to keep them all in balance. And for large pots, look for varieties grafted onto dwarfing rootstocks, or miniature varieties such as Ballerina apples and Trixzie nectarines and peaches.

Growing tips

Choose a sheltered spot with at least six hours of sun per day.

Fruit trees need well-drained soil.

Add compost and manures to soil a few weeks before planting.

Keep trees evenly watered and well mulched.

Recommended books

Consult books such as Organic Fruit Growing by Annette McFarlane (ABC Books, $35), The Complete Book of Fruit Growing in Australia by Louis Glowinski (Lothian Books, $39.95) or Discovering Fruit and Nuts by Susanna Lyle (CSIRO Publishing, $79.95).

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