Confusions

Fruit cocktail tree (peach, plum, nectarine, apricot)

The plum graft on this fruit cocktail tree seems to be a little confused about the season. I saw a few blossoms on the apple tree, too. Both trees are young....we planted the fruit cocktail tree a year ago to replace a mature and prolific apricot that had died for no apparent reason, and the apple tree last spring to replace a dwarf nectarine that probably died from a recent pond renovation.

We have had better luck with citrus trees than stone fruit trees here. The lemon, orange, and grapefruit trees we planted in 2002 have grown quite large and seem healthy, but the lifespan of our stone fruit trees is in the single digits. Sometimes I can come up with a reason from their demise (drip irrigation failure, roots disturbances from nearby renovations) and sometimes not.

My current understanding is that our planting methods may not be ideal. Early in our gardening adventure, we lost several stone fruit trees that we had planted in the lawn. Because we had successfully grown them in grassy areas of our previous two Phoenix-area backyards, we attributed their deaths to especially poorly draining, heavily compacted clay soil here. In an attempt to give them better drainage, we constructed the raised beds and filled them with better-draining soil. The problem with this method is that it's difficult to water the trees to the recommended three-foot depth because the water runs out of the raised beds. As the trees grow, their roots spread out rather shallowly in the raised beds rather than going deep, and that has been a contributing factor in their early deaths. At least that's my current hypothesis, and I'm not sure there's a way around it.