I'm in a somewhat easier area to grow fruit and ordered my first trees from Starks 25 years ago (first trees I tried growing outside CA that is). Not a single one worked for my region and nothing in the catalog gave a clue. Their inventory is tilted to the mid-west. Some of their varieties will work where you are but the odds aren't good if you don't double check here first and get feedback from growers in your area.

The alarm went off when you said Wilson Delicious apricot. Who the hell grows that variety? You probably should be planting Tomcot and in the east apricots are apparently not reliably self-fruitful. In such a limited orchard you should probably begin with peaches if you enjoy them. Much more consistent croppers.

Pink Lady is probably a good choice, but I don't know about Honeycrisp- it is hard enough to grow here. I think the first six trees should be selected based a lot on the reliability of the cultivar. Whatever you grow will probably knock your socks off when you taste it off the tree.

Since you have a small orchard, cut down on the types of trees and grow fewer types of trees. For each type, you'll need at least 2-3 trees together for better pollination. Say, two apple trees, should flower and ripen at similar time. And not all trees will pollinate all others.

Still plenty of time to do your research and order in time for spring planting.

You can Internet search for info and discover your area.
http://www.davewilsonforums.com/index.php/showpost.php?p=18629&postcount=6

But the above is by no means complete: What is the soil like in your yard, drainage, shadows throughout the year, prevailing winds (windrose), overhead and underground utilities, fencing other structures, appropriate rootstocks, known pests and disease, last freeze, last avg. freeze date???? And other questions. People who live there have the answers.

You are lucky you are getting good advice from your cooperative extension- it can be hit or miss depending on the knowledge of the horticulturist in charge. Their info base is mostly from research about commercial fruit production which is helpful but must always be taken with a grain of salt. Commercial growers need to produce pristine fruit while at the same time growing so many trees that pests will likely find their orchards.

Incidentally, are there may squirrels in your neighborhood?

Washington - where I live - is a huge commercial fruit producing state. But most of the commercial production is grown east of the Cascades whereas the bulk of the population lives west of the Cascades. Vastly different climates between the two and what grows in E.WA. generally is not at all appropriate for W. WA. No red or golden Delicious grown here!!

But the W. WA extension service has done a series of trials (from 1965 to 2009) on fruit varieties that thrive in our mild, wet winters (short chill periods) and cool summers (low heat units) and published numerous booklets outlining these varieties and their care. These are intended primarily for home growers, not commercial orchards. They are an invaluable resource for anyone wanting to start a home orchard or just grow a few fruit trees and some berries. They've also developed a number of fruit varieties specifically for the local market.

You might want to e-mail Scott Smitth directly for some guidance here since he has surprisingly not chipped in yet. He is successfully growing many, many varieties in your state. His perspective is much different than mine in that he seems to gravitate strongly to unusual varieties while I appreciate mainstream varieties if they taste at least almost as good and are much more productive and easier to grow.

That isn't to say he doesn't take into account those traits, but maybe not with the same emphasis since he's growing so much more fruit than he probably needs for personal use.

Your time spent reading here and elsewhere online will serve you far better. Don't be surprised if you find out that your contact person doesn't even have an agricultural or horticultural degree. Our local agent didn't. He knew exactly nothing and couldn't care less about any of it. If you contact them to get a publication they are totally lost...none of them (at least in our county) seem to have any grasp of what their role or function is even supposed to be. Tremendous waste of taxpayer dollars...plain and simple.

Even if you have a bad apple you should be able to use the extension to get help from the university itself.

My office has had two employees with degrees in horticulture, one is now retiring. They do not have a lot of experience with fruit trees but communicate with the gurus at Cornell when they need help. I use them primarily for identifying pest or pest damage and have found them extremely helpful in this regard.

Of course you can't rely on them for all the information needed regarding home orchards, that is not a subject of national, economic importance anymore. They are dealing with ever shrinking funding but still do a fantastic job.

If you want to talk about a waste of money, let me tell you about my corporate health insurance co.

If they are shrinking Maryland's funding then good...it should be shrank to a level of comparative value, which in this case would be zero.

For apple rootstock, just avoid M26 and M9. Bud9 and M7 are both good, any Geneva root is better but they can be hard to source. But I think the top variety is far more important than the rootstock for fireblight avoidance. Get easy to grow apples, either modern or heirloom ones. Pink Lady is pretty easy but barely ripens in time. If you are in southern Maryland it should be OK. Skip Honeycrisp, its hard to grow.

For the pears, you will need two asians and two euros if they are to get pollinated. I find OH333 or quince to be good dwarfing stocks and have not had much fireblight problem on either. Seckel is a relatively easy European pear; small but one of the most tasty of all. Also the Harrow series is good. Seckel is supposed to be self-fruitful.

For the stone fruits, avoid nectarines. For apricots I would only recommend Tomcot, most apricots do not do well. Most peaches do OK if from an eastern nursery.

There is no reason you have to order from the same place, its not too hard to make online orders from a couple places. Some good southern/eastern nurseries to look at are Johnson Nursery, Adams County Nursery, Cummins Nursery, etc. Raintree isn't an eastern nursery but they have many selections that do well. Fruittreefarm.com has really good prices and particularly nice peaches -- try e.g. Winblo and Carolina Gold, two highly disease resistant ones they sell.

My suggestion is look at these and other nurseries and come up with a revised list.

Scott

Hiker might be interested in doing business with one place to avoid additive shipping charges that can end up being more than a significant percentage of total cost.
For example if hiker was to purchase just the Winblo peach you mentioned from fruittreefarm as you mentioned he'd have to pay just $8.50 for the tree, but then $25.00 for shipping. Not to mention they generally all show up at the same time when ordering from just one source.
Given his situation and what he's trying to accomplish he should be able to order from one source...I know I would at least try to.

I strongly recommend if you get 2 Euro pears to include Harrow Sweet, It produces very young and is a wonderful, disease resistant pear that ripens late for a pear and holds well in refrigeration. I would try to grow it even if it was more difficult. To me it is the Goldrush of pears for the home grower- in a class of its own. Korean Giant, AKA Olympic is my favorite Asian- but then, I'm not crazy about Asian pears in general and they are stinkbug magnets which is an ever increasing problem here and where you are.

An apple I'd recommend is Zestar as an early one for Sept and Oct eating while you wait for Goldrush to ripen. I'm harvesting my Goldrush in a couple days to beat the polar vortex. Not all in the tree are quite as ripe as I'd like them.

Both of these apples fruit young and can be grown on relatively vigorous rootstocks and still be kept in a small space.

For peaches, Scotts already provided you with a couple of good suggestions, although I don't know what diseases they are supposed to be particularly resistant to- I hope its brown rot. Almost all the mainstream eastern varieties are resistant to bacterial spot- a key thing to look for.

For peaches, the home grower with room for just a couple or few trees should consider the time and length of bearing, so your crop is staggered and arrives when you will be around to pick it, yellow or white (I prefer the rich taste of yellows but this is entirely subjective). You also need to decide if you like the taste of sub-acid fruit, which I hate but many like.

For J. plums, I would start with Satsuma and Ruby Queen.

I would see what Adams County Nursery still has available if you are trying to order from a single site.

If you can't get everything you want this season in the ground because certain things are sold out, you can either order the next best thing and consider taking up grafting later or just wait one more year to fill out your orchard. The main thing is to get started.

Thumbs up on the bacterial spot resistance.

I would see what Adams County Nursery still has available if you are trying to order from a single site.

Ditto.

I took a quick look and it doesn't seem written with the confidence and clarity that can only be derived from actual experience.

For me, I have a couple of nurseries I like. I just picked a few well tested and good taste varieties from the catalog. I still leave a couple spots for the ones I did not get this fall. I do not want to wait too long and miss the fall planting season.

Well you made a smart move. Here we have experience, and I find even university info lacking or way outdated. Plus I have seen where two of us read the same article and come away with different opinions. It was an extremely smart move to post here.

In general here is some more advice. First plant known cultivars that will work in your area. This will give you good yields or the best chance of good yields. Determining what is good for your area may be a challenge, as you have found out! Anyway after that you can try cultivars that should work in your area, but have not really been tested in your area, after you have some experience under your belt. Then you can move to experimentals to test your new found skill and see what is possible and to learn from success and failure. If you start with experimentals or what should work you can become frustrated at failure. So following this model with give you good results and yields, yet keep your interest. Good luck! Keep us updated on progress.

The best way again, is go get some books to read, to get ideas as to what stone fruits, or freestone are. Then read the growing guides from your local agriculture extension, like Maryland, Virginia, and Pen State. The best step is to visit a well established U-pick yard to see what they grow, how they grow and talk to the folks there.

If you still have questions, then you can ask here.

There are many many different ways to decide on how to lay out the fruit trees, choose the varieties, space them, prune and train them. This is like building a house. You need to ask yourself what you want. You have to decide, and do not let others decide for you.

My last words, some of the info, from all all the above sources, may not be correct for your situation. You need to absorb all the info and make a decision, for 5 years, or 25 years.... You will get bumps down the road. You may not like some of the fruits, some trees may get diseases and may die. Some may not fruit in certain years, etc, etc..... There is no perfect world that you can get all the free perfect taste fruits forever....

Been there done that. Local commercial growers know how to grow pristine fruit on large orchards and that is the same realm of expertise available from your cooperative extension, if you're lucky.

That neither can give good advice on best pesticides to use for the home grower is just one example where they will likely fall short. Commercial growers also tend to be extremely conservative on the range of varieties they grow.

I started growing fruit in the northeast 25 years ago and initially only had those sources for information- the varieties they suggested and the methods of managing them didn't really fit with the needs of a home grower.

It took me years and years to sort it out, and I wish I had a resource like this forum when I started. I still get more useful information from this forum than I do from publications like Good Fruit Grower and dispatches from Cornell.

There are also no books that actually do a great job of covering the territory in themselves. NAFEX has a free library that I made liberal use of in my first years of orcharding here. I found a lot of useful info this way- especially from the older books, but nothing that trumps what can be acquired from this forum.

My point is, use them all, not them first and this forum second.

I do agree with you that taste is subjective and a home grower shouldn't be inordinately persuaded by the suggestions of other folks on the subject of what delicious is. That is where tasting locally grown fruit, fresh off the tree can be very useful- if there is a local grower experimental enough to grow more than the 5 most common apples.

So again this forum can lead you to places to find yet more good info.

My problem with Lee as a fruit guru is his lack of interaction with home growers beyond offering them advice. The only people he appears to rely on for information have graduate degrees in agriculture related to commercial fruit growing and most of his information about common fruits seems to be derived from these sources.

I remember his being surprised that I thin plums, which is something he'd never heard of, but common in the world of home orcharding. It used to be common for commercial growers also, before most of the plums grown around here were used for processing into juice or drying.

Writing and peddling books is a full time job. He's very good at what he does.