I put in 15 or so assorted fruit trees 12 odd years ago. Mostly apple, plum/prune, cherry, pear. Also a couple of peach trees. I have learned of a variety of threats to fruit trees that can thwart success. A lot of them you may not have to contend with being in a different locale. I put in the first dozen in a section of my field that's sloping and hard to hay so I figured it would be a good place for fruit trees. In a couple of places I wanted to put trees, it took about 3 hours to dig the small hole due to large rocks. I had to import dirt from elsewhere on the property to actually plant. This should have been a clue but NOOOO!. I wanted the trees
there. Most did OK but one died in a couple of years so I dug it out and replanted. This time I dug a bit deeper and found I'd planted it over a very large rock that didn't leave much room for roots or water.
After planting the initial dozen trees, the family and I left for a week to go to RPK for my wife's cousin's wedding since she wanted our young son to be the ring bearer. Upon returning home, I went to check on my new trees to discover there was not leaf one left. The deer had been busy in my absence. T posts and chicken wire around each tree to keep the deer out (and also serve as trellises for blackberry vines
) and a lot of watering and most of them recovered since it was still spring.
Over the next couple of years, a few of the trees started to turn brown and die even though I was conscientously watering them. After removing the chicken wire so I could get in and brushing away the tall grass from the trunk to inspect I found them girdled by some sort of rodent, most likely voles or mice. So, in addition to the chicken wire around the whole tree, I had to add a 12" tall sleeve of mesh rabbit wire around the trunk.
Then my cows discovered the tasty trees and managed to maul their way through the barbed wire to snack on them. Chicken wire is pretty effective against deer but woefully inadequate against cows. Where the deer were content to neatly clip off all the leaves they could reach, the cows liked to break off large chunks of the tree down to where they could eat more of them
Heavier, better fences around the orchard are (and have been for quite a while) on the to do list. I'm not optimistic since "the ONE" is planning to take even more of my already meager resources of time and money.
Peach leaf curl caused my peach trees to have to grow two sets of leaves per year (I was trying to avoid doing any spraying), birds enjoy my cherries, and ants like to sometimes get into the prunes. I've gotten the most yield (an overstatement if ever there was one) from the plums and apple trees. They were starting to do better until I got cows again last fall with predictable results.
They take quite a bit of watering here for the two months of drought that breaks up the rainy season. This gets a bit time consuming unless you can set up a good irrigation system (that time and money thing again).
So have at it. I love having fruit trees. I hope to live long enough to actually enjoy a useful quantity of fruit from them. You may have better circumstances or better luck than I, or you may just be a better farmer (wouldn't be hard). Fewer trees, closer in would help too but here that would put them in the shade of some giant oak trees so it probably would help either.
Good luck, enjoy.
