Since many hobby gardeners nowadays only have relatively small garden areas or only a balcony at all, the so-called columnar fruit is very popular. In the meantime, more and more column-like fruit varieties are available in specialist shops, but only a few of them are really suitable for cultivation in partial shade or shade.
Blueberries prefer to grow in the shade
Suitable columnar fruit varieties for rather shady garden areas
While fruit varieties such as sweet cherries, apples and pears tend to need warm and fairly sunny locations for healthy growth, the following fruit varieties can also cope with a less sunny location under suitable conditions:
- sour cherries
- gooseberries
- blueberries
- blackberries
- quinces
- medlars
While tart cherries are also available as columnar cultivars, blackberries, gooseberries and blueberries require regular reshaping as part of the care.
Get the best out of a location
Even if there are only areas in a garden with a few hours of sunshine per day, you may still not have to give up your dream of home-grown columnar fruit. In contrast to large fruit trees, columnar fruit trees in pot culture with their limited height can sometimes also be placed close to the property line to the neighbor as a privacy screen. This may make it possible to develop sunny locations that would not have even come into consideration for normally growing fruit varieties. However, you should also not underestimate the amount of heat and light that is reflected by a white painted house wall. This can be sufficient to provide sufficient light and heat to columnar fruit that is planted nearby and is actually mostly in the shade.
tips
With columnar fruit, so-called alternation can occur more than with other fruit trees, in which years with strong yields are often followed by years with total fruit slack. In a rather shady location, the motto applies all the more that the fruit set should be thinned out in good time in order to allow a smaller amount of fruit to fully ripen under the suboptimal site conditions.