The Best & Worse Fruit Trees for a Small Backyard Garden

Not all fruit trees are created equal—especially when space is limited. In this video, I’m sharing the best fruit trees for small backyard gardens that give you great harvests without taking over your yard, along with a few that I’ve found just don’t work well in tight spaces. I’ll talk about tree size, maintenance needs, productivity, and how to choose varieties that actually thrive in small gardens.

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About My Garden
🌴 Hernando County, Florida 🌱 Zone 9B

PO Box: 🏡 Homegrown Florida
📮 4142 Mariner Blvd, #232 Spring Hill, Florida 34609 – 2468

i used to think that I was going to need a ton of acreage in order to grow fruit trees but that’s not really the case i actually grow 18 different fruit trees in my quarter acre lot backyard property and today I’m going to share with you the three best and the three worst fruit trees that you can grow in a small garden so we’re going to start out with the top ones and the best one that I can tell you that will grow in a small space is a mulberry but specifically a dwarf a dwarf mulberry i’m going to be scoring all the different fruit trees with five different conditions so that way you can see what makes them good for a small space versus what doesn’t make them good for a small space so the first one’s going to be time to harvest how quickly you can get a harvest the next one’s going to be their size then we’re going to talk about their sweetness or their bricks which is their sugar content how much they yield for one particular small tree and then also their maintenance so when it comes to a dwarf mulberry these things are amazing they will fruit on the first year now make sure that you’re growing them from a grafted tree rather than from a seed if you grow any fruit tree from a seed they’re going to take years but if you take a grafted like these this is a world’s best and a tie dwarf this one’s a semi- dwarf that one’s a full dwarf meaning that these trees stay pretty small even at their largest height if I didn’t prune them they’re only going to get about 12 feet tall but I prune them as you can see down to about six feet tall um the twi dwarf I get down to five feet tall so they can stay in a really compact spot you do not want to get non-dwarf varieties cuz mulberry trees the non-dwarf varieties get very very big now from a yield perspective I’ve never seen a tree this tiny create so much fruit this last season I think I got 30 lbs of fruit 30 lbs of berries like it was it’s always so much i always have to figure out things to do with these berries cuz I run out of stuff i just there’s so much but smoothies are a great option this year I made a freeze-dried Kool-Aid lots of really fun things you could do with all the berries that these guys produce on a sweetness scale the Bricks B I um they score them between a 10 and a 16 um which is not super sweet but it isn’t you know nothing so they have they’re kind of midlevel when it comes to sweetness so you’re not getting an immense amount of sugar but this is pretty common with most berries most berries kind of sit in that 10 to 16 range now from a maintenance perspective these guys do have a little bit of maintenance because in order to keep them super small like 5 ft you do want to prune them and since they grow so aggressively so quickly you want to prune them at least two to sometimes three times a year the other thing is uh the birds really love these berries and so they will eat them if you’re not quick enough to harvest or if you allow the fruit to fall to the ground they’ll pick them up they’ll chew them eat them and then they’ll poop purple all throughout the neighborhood so to be a good neighbor clean up the berries underneath the tree and make sure you’re harvesting every 2 or 3 days during the fruiting season it’s getting pretty hot so it’s time to put the hair up florida summers are no joke thankfully these fruit trees really love our heat and one of the ones that really love to grow in a small space is citrus particularly this guy right here is a sugar bell mandarin fruit tree now this one is special for a lot of reasons but one thing you might notice is it’s in my pool patio and you probably can’t see the bottom here but it’s in a pot eventually I am going to find it a spot out in the yard because it will prefer to be in the ground and it will produce more larger size mandarins if it is in the ground but I don’t have a spot for it right now so until I have a spot for it this guy lives right here now in terms of speed to harvest they’re about 2 to 3 years in the ground in terms of sweetness it’s a little bit less than the malberries weirdly enough i think it was a 10 to 13 on the brick scale so a little bit less sweet but you know mandarins mandarins are amazing they taste so good so you can imagine like kind of what a malberry would taste like it sweetness when you compare it to how sweet a mandarin is this guy tends to be a little bit smaller in the 6 to 10 ft range so it is what is considered a dwarf now the cool thing about um mandarins are that or any really citrus is that you can prune them down to whatever size you want so a lot of people will keep these guys as bushes rather than as trees but you could do trees as well they’re going to grow to the height that you allow them to which does mean they need a decent amount of pruning so at least twice a year um I would do a summer and a winter prune for these guys now in terms of maintenance um the biggest thing about maintenance with citrus in general is HLB hlb is citrus greening disease uh there is an Asian celid bug that came over accidentally um and pretty much infected all of the citrus trees in Florida it was catastrophic it basically wiped out all of the citrus orchids here in Florida it is awful it took out pretty much all of the citrus in people’s backyard gardens if you grew up around the same time I did here in Florida you remember everyone had a citrus tree some people had grapefruit some had oranges some had kumquats there was a million different citrus fruits trees everyone’s yard but that has slowly went away you will see them still because there are some that have survived um but most of what you see now is the the root stock so when they bought their trees they’re grafted onto a different roottock that does better for our Florida sandy soil and you get sour oranges which is the roottock of most of these so the top tree will have died from citrus greening disease and then the root stock comes up and puts out sour oranges which nobody likes to eat those some people do I get i don’t know guys but anyway the cool thing about this one the sugar belt mandarin is that it’s HLB or citrus greeny disease resistant um it does get the disease in fact I can still I can already see where the celid has kind of pinched the leaves it makes a very distinct mark on the leaves um I could already see that it’s gotten to this one it’s also gotten to my lemon which is not resistant the difference between these two is that lemon will die in about 3 years even with really great care it’s probably going to die in a few years whereas this one will live for a lot longer i don’t know if we’re 100% sure how long it will live with the disease um but it doesn’t show the effects of the disease so it still gets it the leaves might look bad you might still get the bites from the bug you know it still needs the proper care and you know fertilizing and all the things um to make sure that it produces it doesn’t produce like the old school ones used to you just stick it in the ground and you’d have hundreds of thousands of oranges but these guys you know you have to treat them a little bit more gently because of that citrus greening disease but because it’s resistant means it could last for a long time fingers crossed 10 years would be awesome i would be stoked with 10 years rounding out our top three best fruit trees to grow in a small space is going to be this guy right here this is a lowquat very beautiful very tropical tree a lot of times people use them as ornamentals rather than as fruit trees but the variety I have I forget the name here it is yehuda ye hu da makes very large loquads they are not the little tiny small round ones they have like an oval shape now these guys take a little bit longer 3 to 5 years to produce when I put this guy in the ground it took him 3 years with good care and all the things on a brick sweetness scale they take a nine to a 13 weirdly enough less than the mulberry less than the mandarins but weirdly enough I think they’re sweeter than both of them i don’t know if it’s my variety tends to be extremely sweet but wow they have now quickly become my favorite fruit now I didn’t get very many i think I got like 12 the first year so I’m really expecting a lot from this guy next year because I am obsessed with the taste of these they’re so good it it’s hard to describe them but it’s almost like every tropical fruit had a baby so pineapple mixed with orange mixed with mango like really really good the yields um they’re about 35 lbs on a full grown mature tree so um a little bit better than the mulberry not as much as the mandarin now in terms of size these guys can get big depending on your variety once again you’re looking for dwarfs small trees guys or ones that you can prune back this guy can get between 15 and 25 that is not a small tree so I prune him um I let him get as tall as he kind of wants but eventually I am going to top him at the point that I can’t reach anymore with a step stool and then you have to kind of keep them smaller in terms of their width like how wide do you want them to get but I have seen some that grow more closer to that 15t height rather than the 25 i’m not 100% sure about this variety how tall it gets but um when I was talking to Pete at Green Dreams he did take into account when we were looking through trees you know that I needed short small trees so hopefully this one is a small small one now in terms of maintenance none absolutely nothing the first year I put it in it seemed to have a little trouble with powdery mildew but this last year like no problem whatsoever i I don’t fertilize it i don’t do anything i don’t spray it for pests it is like does so well here with zero effort whatsoever it is phenomenal and I don’t water it either guys it gets watered like from the rain or during our drought season our sprinklers might hit it every now and again but I mean this guy is like the most lowmaintenance tree that you could possibly grow and it is absolutely fantastic tastewise the first one on our list for the three worst fruit trees to grow in your backyard garden is gonna start with this guy right here which is a mango in a pot we’re going to talk about that but the primary reason why the mango is not my number one pick for backyard gardens especially small backyard gardens is because how big this tree gets 30 feet on average sometimes bigger and that’s not even taking into account its spread it gets very wide um the reason I have it in a pot I desperately love mangoes up until this last year when I tasted a loquat a mango was my favorite fruit on the planet and I’ve been wanting to grow them for years in my garden uh I have bought three I think at this point three mango trees grafted i have planted them i was going to give them the space i was going to give them so much space but every winter they get killed right to the ground it’s not I’m still in Florida i’m in central Florida but my particular area has like a microclimate of very cold during the winter very hot during the summer like it’s very weird like they I sometimes get as hot as Miami and I’m not even close to that but I get as cold as like Georgia like I don’t understand what’s happening in my particular area but something about my climate these guys just can’t handle it here typically in zone 9 they can as long as you’re in the you know B part versus the A part but for me they don’t work from a bricks taste scale the sweetness scale top of the list 18 to 20 one of the sweetest fruits that you can possibly eat it is amazing and they come in so many varieties this is a Glen mango this is definitely the mango you want to grow if you’re a first-time mango grower it is just out of the box a simple one to grow now I don’t know what I’m going to do with this like I know I can’t put in the yard it’s too big to grow in a pot i’m just making dreams come true over here i don’t know yet um now in terms of fruiting they take a while to fruit as well minimum three years for a grafted tree but you’re probably looking closer to five in terms of maintenance you are going to be dealing with some pests some disease uh you are going to have to deal with pruning because they will fruit a lot better if you clip off the tips of the leaves at certain times of the year so there is some maintenance involved there and then but yield let’s talk yield 150 lbs on average that’s even a little conservative a full grown mango tree is going to feed an entire neighborhood of mangoes and every single neighbor is going to be sick of mangoes by the time this guy is done that’s also leading to some part of the maintenance issue because they’re going to drop a lot of fruit you’re not going to be eating be able to eat them all maybe you’re not going to be able to have enough space to preserve them all i guess you can make mango chips you can make just a boatload of mango juice but the fruit dropping you’re going to have to dispose of it rats really like mangoes so yeah maintenance is a little tough but man is the yield incredible now this one’s probably going to surprise you if you’ve been watching the channel for any length of time you absolutely know I love Peachy the peach tree peachy the peach tree so so good but there are some downsides in a small space first it’s time to harvest so 3 to 5 years in the ground and then they really only produce for like 15 years so you’re going to have to replace it every 15 years and you’re going have to wait 3 to 5 years for it to produce um which is a downside i really wish they produced longer eventually peach is going to have to be replaced she’s 6 years old right now she’s pumping out the peaches on average a peach tree is going to give you about 50 lbs worth of fruit the yield is pretty good not mango good but pretty good and when you eat these peaches like let’s talk about the brick scale the sweetness scale they are 11 to 18 so just under the mangoes and above most of the other smaller fruits that we talked about this is a tropical beauty it is incredible tasting it’s a yellow peach i definitely go with a yellow peach rather than a white one if you if you only have space and you really do want to grow it go with a yellow you can preserve in can yellows and I just feel like the texture inside is less mealy than a white one heightwise peach’s a a semi dwarf i keep her I don’t know 12 to 15 ft tall um you can keep them that way if you prune them but any other peach tree other varieties they can get much larger they can get into the 20 25 range so it’s a big tree and if you do want to keep it small you’re going to be dealing with a lot of maintenance you’re going to be dealing with a lot of maintenance anyway especially down here in Florida right pests disease pruning pruning appropriately picking up the fruit so that the squirrels aren’t eating it all off the ground attracting rats like there’s a lot now I don’t do a lot with her because I did buy a variety that is meant for Florida so I don’t deal with as much uh disease but I do deal with pests i have a Sri Lanka weevil that loves this tree tears it up every summer um I have pruning that I have to do on her and it has to be really precise otherwise it can affect my fruit the next year she’s just a little finicky i think she’s worth it but she’s finicky the last one on our list of fruit trees that I definitely wouldn’t grow in a small space is going to be this guy and I know this is going to break some hearts but that’s an avocado this is a day avocado and it is known for being compact and it is known for handling some of my winters here and it does kind of but for being compact right now it’s 20 feet tall and it can get bigger i am gonna have to top this they can typically get into the 30 ft range they’re incredibly tall and then they’re going to get just as wide now in terms of fruit this is where the bad news comes in they can take anywhere from five to eight years to produce a lot of people start their avocados from seed because it is a variety that kind of comes out with all different kinds you know if you grow uh from seed you’re not going to get true to seed meaning the exact same tree but you are going to get something cool and a lot of people like to do that minimum 8 years before it’s going to fruit minimum i bought mine as a grafted adult very large tree i think it was 6 feet when I got it and it took 2 years it it uh fruited one year and then alternating years it doesn’t fruit so this year it didn’t fruit now it didn’t fruit for a number of reasons one it had a heavy fruit set the first year that it fruited and then second we had a really cold winter and when um it started to put buds on we had like 23° for two nights in a row and that was it it froze off all of those so we’re definitely not getting fruit this year so that’s a risk that you’re taking putting such a large fruit tree in and you may or may not get fruit depending on your weather or depending on if it’s an alternating year thankfully this weather happened on an alternating year so I didn’t get fruit now some people do get fruit off their avocados every single year it’s still a chance it’s still iffy i don’t think I have to tell you from a brick scale sweetness it has no sweetness avocados are not known for that they’re known for their fat nuttier content so we’re talking a 1 to2 on the brick scale but I think you guys already knew that i almost forgot to mention that avocado trees benefit from two trees so up until now all the ones that we’ve talked about really can just manage with one tree um well lowquats lowquats need two trees but there’s so many people that grow them as ornamentals like I only have one tree and it fruits just fine but avocados they not only need a second tree but they also need what’s called an A versus a B i believe mine I think it’s an A but you want a B close by thankfully my neighbor across the street I believe has a bee and they are pollinating each other but if you have a small space and you don’t have neighbors that have avocado trees you are going to need to put two of these big trees in your yard and they have to be the proper types that flower at the same time and have the opposite flowering pattern that’s that what that AB means is the pattern of when that flower opens as a female versus when it opens as a male it’s a little more complicated but the cool thing about avocados is you get a lot of fruit they’re like the mangoes we’re talking 150 lbs of yield about every other year and that is an incredible amount of fruit and then if you end up having two trees that’s 300 lb of fruit it’s a lot of avocados so then you’re going to have to figure out what to do with it you’re going to have to deal with the maintenance of cleaning it up avocados depending on the variety you grow if you grow the Florida avocado you’re going to have a lot less issues with maintenance in terms of disease and pest mine is I think a Guatemalan hybrid it’s kind of like a mix between a hos and a Florida so it does have some disease it does have some pest but I don’t treat it it does just fine but that if you’re trying to do a hos you’re going to have immense amounts of problems because of you know the the wet conditions they’re not used to that they like warm dry that’s why they grow so well out in California so here in Florida they’re a little bit more tough now you probably noticed throughout this video that I mentioned some things that you shouldn’t get in a small space living in a small space with those trees by all mean guys get the tree that you want get the fruit that you’ll eat but if you want to start small um and you want to start either in containers or you just have a tiny area those top three are going to be where it’s at but if you absolutely love mangoes or you absolutely love avocados find a spot in your yard and dedicate it but I’m just trying to open your mind to the fact of what some of these trees require versus what some of them don’t and needing to with this size you I could put like four citrus in this area where two avocados would live i could have a grapefruit an orange a kumquat a lemon all in the same spot that two of these avocado avocados would take um so just think about that when you’re thinking about the fruit trees that you want to grow i hope this was helpful uh make sure to check out my ebook Homegrown Florida Gardening Guide it talks about all the different vegetables that you can grow here in Florida and how to do it with everything you ever wanted to know happy gardening guys [Music]