How bout a standard asian pear? Is the shading due to close proximity of houses? maybe a standard will get tall enough to reach the light, if it makes it that far. I have seen a lot of apple trees that get minimal sun and do just fine, granted they are wild trees, so who knows there specifics. Good luck.

Are you in the humid part of the country? That makes shade growing of many species more difficult due to fungus issues.

You can get some fruit from trees grown in the shade but the quality suffers and yields can be very poor. Pears would probably be the worst choice because they probably wouldn't get up adequate sugar in the shade.

I manage a couple of Baldwin apples that only get about 2 or 3 hours of direct sun a day and they get some crop of decent apples- but they are shaded by deciduous trees and end up getting good sun just as fruit is ripening.

Cherries and European plums do OK in the shade, but cherries need early morning sun to stop them from cracking in humid areas and plums suffer from a disease called black knot- often uncontrollably, when denied morning sun to dry off the dew.

Paul,

While the tree gets 4 hours now.....if it grows say to 10 or 20 feet tall will that increase the amount of sun it will receive?

Sometimes planting in a shady spot works out fine as the tree grows it gets taller than the structures that shade it and end up with 6-8 hours of sun. Have you taken that in to account?

My Montmorency cherry gets about five hours a day and does quite well.

Thank you for the responses.

Shading in the morning is due to deciduous trees approx 75' high. Shading in the afternoon is from our houses which are tallish two stories. So an extra 10 or 20 feet will not improve the lighting situation much, our preference would be to keep the trees under 25' anyway.

Houses are approx 20 to 35 feet away from the desired location.

We live in Toronto which is considered humid. I know I always thought so, but google confirms it lol.

Harvestman, we had a plum in this spot previously and it suffered from black knot terribly - you know your craft - as I suspect you all do.

Edit: Pawpaw sounds great, found a TorStar article on those! I've also heard serviceberry and peach as options if there are thoughts on those.

This post was edited by PaulGTA on Sun, Jun 9, 13 at 13:53

If you choose pawpaw you'll need two different varieties or seedlings to get fruit. Or if you are able you could graft a limb or two to a 2nd variety.

I have serviceberry that I planted on a whim so it ended up in a more shady area and gets about 4 hrs of sun a day. Mine is like a shrub than a tree. I have mostly neglected it. It's a 3 yrs old skinny bush that's about 3-4 ft tall and has not flowered.

This year, it has something like aphids on some leaves and many leaves are discolored from some kind of disease. I need to pay more attention to it.

My friend planted the same variety in full sun. That tree's growth is healthier and more upright than mine.

Growing peach without much sun could invite more fungal and bacteria diseases. Generally speaking, peach has more "issues" than apple.

I don't have paw paw but have heard that it is for "acquired taste." You may want to try paw paw fruit to see if you like it before planting one.

Why don't you plant an apple tree and your neighbor plant something else? If there are crab apple trees in your neighborhood, you'll all set with cross pollination.

Unfortunately the neighbors don't like apple. I have an apple tree in another location and no luck after 4 years.

I've got a cherry tree that produces very well, and used to have a peach tree that did fairly well but the fruit was not sweet. Also the plum I mentioned above, it produced so much the branches broke, but plums were not sweet and black knot (as mentioned above) got out of control.

The entire backyard where these trees have been/are has the same light situation.

So maybe Serviceberry & pawpaw (2x for pollination) are the leading contenders?

This post was edited by PaulGTA on Mon, Jun 10, 13 at 10:29