Garden Tips: Consider planting unusual fruit

Fruit trees are a lot of work because of the pruning and spraying needed to keep them healthy and productive. The only reason to grow fruit trees in is because you want the tasty fruit of a variety you cannot get in a grocery store or at a local farmers market.

If you are willing to take on the large responsibility of growing a fruit tree, check mail-order nurseries that offer something different than what big box stores offer. One of these nurseries is Raintree Nursery, three hours west in Morton. View their offerings at raintreenursery.com or ask them to send a catalog. Even if you are not interested in growing fruit trees, check them out to see the interesting variety of garden edibles offered, from ordinary tree fruit and berries to unusual and exotic fruit-bearing plants.

In a recent email from Raintree, a pear called Abbe Fetel caught my eye. They say that Abbe Fetel is a pear cultivar developed in 1866 by the French Abbot for which it is named. These elongated pears are the most popular variety in Italy and are savored for sweet white, juicy flesh. Abbe Fetel is said to “pair well with a low-salt Italian cheese.”

Raintree offers popular pear cultivars, along with a number of other less familiar ones, including heirloom, popular European, keeper and perry varieties. Perry pears are grown specifically for making pear cider. If you are more comfortable with apple cider, Raintree also offers apple varieties for cider making.

For a fruit tree requiring less attention than apples, pears or cherries, consider planting a plum. In addition to well known plum varieties, Raintree offers varieties like Moldavian, a freestone desert plum with small red to purple fruit and yellow flesh, or Golden Nectar, a self-pollinating large yellow oblong freestone desert plum with golden flesh. They also sell a pluot (a plum-apricot cross) and a pecotum (a peach, apricot and plum cross).

In addition to fruit, Raintree offers another edible that Washington gardeners have had trouble buying. A quarantine on hops plants shipped into Washington have made it difficult to obtain one or two hops plants for home gardens. Raintree offers Golden Hops, a desirable ornamental vine with yellow leaves and aromatic flowers, as well as three other varieties used in brewing.

Along with familiar fruit, Raintree also offers an eclectic mix of uncommon fruit, like edible dogwoods, paw paws, jujube, medlar, goji berry, goumi, cinnamon vine and even gingko.

Did you know that the fruit of gingko trees is unbelievably smelly, resembling the odor of dog manure? One of Raintree’s offerings is Salem Lady, a fruit-producing female gingko that requires a male gingko in the vicinity for the production of fruit. So why would anyone want a tree with these odiferous fruit? It is because the nuts, about the size of a small almond, in the center of the stinky fruit are a delicacy in Asian cultures. (If you do not want your gingko producing smelly fruit, only plant an all male tree.)

The Raintree catalog is worth perusing while you wait for winter to turn into spring. While you are at it, check out One Green World at onegreenworld.com. They also offer a selection of fruit- and nut-bearing plants, including native Northwest berries.

This story was originally published January 16, 2016 at 11:24 PM with the headline "Garden Tips: Consider planting unusual fruit."