Garden
When to Plant
Which Fruit Grows in a Container: Ask Pollination Before Pot Size
Start with whether one plant can fruit on its own, because in a container you almost always have one. Seven of the 26 fruit crops we hold need a different variety nearby to set anything — apple, sweet cherry, European pear, honeyberry, mulberry, persimmon and kiwi. Plant one of those alone and it will flower every spring and give you nothing, in any size pot.
A container garden is a one-plant garden
That is the whole reason this page leads where it does. Nobody puts two apple trees on a balcony. You buy one thing, in one pot, and you find out three springs later whether it works.
Which makes pollination the first question and not a footnote. Seven of the 26 fruit crops we hold need a different variety nearby before they will set anything. One on its own will never set fruit on its own, and no pot size changes that. It blooms, the flowers drop, and it does that every year.
That failure is quiet and slow and it looks exactly like bad luck. Three years is a normal wait for a young tree, so nothing about the first three springs tells you anything is wrong.
The seven that will not do it alone
Every one of these carries a citation in our records — most of them several, from different extension services.
| Fruit | On its own | Who says |
|---|---|---|
| Apple | No fruit | Clemson, Michigan State, Minnesota, Utah State |
| Sweet cherry | No fruit | Iowa State, Minnesota, Utah State |
| European pear | No fruit | Illinois, NC State, Minnesota, New Hampshire |
| Persimmon | No fruit | Clemson, NC State, Texas A&M, Georgia |
| Kiwi | No fruit | Cornell, NC State, Ohio State, Penn State, Minnesota, Wisconsin |
| Honeyberry | No fruit | Missouri Botanical Garden, North Dakota State, Utah State, Wisconsin |
| Mulberry | No fruit | NC State, Florida IFAS |
Six more that will fruit alone, and better with company
Blueberry, pomegranate, currant, mandarin, plum and elderberry are partly self-fertile in our records. One plant gives you a crop. Two varieties give you a bigger one.
That is a genuine choice rather than a rule, and it is the one place where a second pot earns its space — the same money spent on a second variety of something partly self-fertile does more than a bigger pot for the first.
Why citrus is the container fruit, and it is not the pretty pot
The second question is winter cold, and it explains something people do without knowing why.
Fruit trees need a stretch of cold each winter before they will flower properly, counted in chill hours. Our sourced figures put lemon, lime, orange, mandarin and grapefruit at 0 to 100 hours — all five, from Mississippi State Extension. A peach wants 200 to 1,050. Sweet cherry and gooseberry want a thousand.
Here is our reading, and we are labeling it as ours rather than something the source says: the one thing a container does that the ground cannot is move. Move a citrus into a garage or a bright hallway for the winter and you have cost it almost nothing, because it barely needed the cold. Do the same to a peach and you have taken away most of what it was waiting for.
So citrus is not the classic patio fruit because it looks good in a pot. It is the classic patio fruit because it is the one you can carry indoors without paying for it.
One fruit fits an actual bucket
Of the 26 fruit crops we hold, exactly one has a cited container size at five gallons or under: the goji berry, at five gallons, from Florida IFAS Extension. It is self-fertile, our records put it at four to five feet across, and it fruits in about two years.
Everything else with a cited figure needs a real container: currant at 15 gallons, mandarin at 15, red raspberry at 20 to 30. Those are half-barrel numbers, not bucket numbers.
If a five-gallon bucket is what you have, what a bucket is exactly right for is vegetables rather than fruit, and what a bucket will not do covers why the trees are out on both volume and balance.
Where our numbers stop, again
Two fields carry this page and both are well sourced: pollination on 25 of our 26 fruit crops, chill hours on 21. Grapefruit is the one whose pollination we hold without a citation.
Container size is the weak one, and it is the field a page like this is expected to lead with. Four of the 26 carry a citation — goji, currant, mandarin and raspberry. The other 22 are filled from ordinary horticulture and marked that way. That is why the pot-size table is not here: it would have been 22 estimates wearing four citations, and you would have had no way to tell which was which.
Every value in the free plant database says which it is, one at a time. Check us rather than take our word for it.
Questions about fruit in containers
Can you grow an apple tree in a pot?
You can grow the tree, but one on its own will not fruit. Apple needs a different variety flowering nearby — Clemson, Michigan State, Minnesota and Utah State all say so. On a balcony with room for one pot that is a decision, not a detail. Some nurseries sell trees with two or three varieties grafted onto one trunk to solve exactly this, and that is the honest answer for a single-container apple. Size is the second problem: Maryland Extension puts a dwarf fruit tree at 25 to 30 gallons of potting mix.
What fruit grows best in containers for beginners?
Something self-fertile that fruits quickly. Strawberry is the easiest by a distance — self-fertile in our sourced records, and the one fruit Maryland Extension gives a container figure for directly, as a depth rather than a volume: eight inches. Goji is the only fruit whose cited container size fits a five-gallon bucket, is also self-fertile, and fruits in about two years. Figs and citrus are self-fertile too, and citrus has the extra advantage of needing almost no winter cold, so bringing it indoors costs you nothing.
Do I need two of everything to get fruit?
No — 13 of our 26 fruit crops are self-fertile, including strawberry, blackberry, raspberry, gooseberry, fig, grape, peach, apricot and all the citrus. Seven genuinely need a partner: apple, sweet cherry, European pear, persimmon, kiwi, honeyberry and mulberry. Six more are in between, where one plant fruits and two fruit better: blueberry, pomegranate, currant, mandarin, plum and elderberry.
Can I bring my potted fruit tree indoors for the winter?
It depends on how much cold the tree needs, and that is the number to check first. Citrus sits at 0 to 100 chill hours in our sourced records, so a winter indoors costs it very little. A peach at 200 to 1,050 or a sweet cherry at 1,000 is waiting on that cold to flower properly, and a warm garage takes it away. This is our reading of what chill hours mean rather than advice a source gives directly, so treat it as the reason to look up your own variety's figure.
How big a pot does a fruit tree need?
Bigger than most people expect, and we would rather point you at somebody else's number than our own here. Maryland Extension puts a dwarf fruit tree at 25 to 30 gallons of potting mix and a shrub at 25. Our own per-crop container figures for fruit are mostly estimates — only 4 of 26 carry a citation — so we do not print them as though they were measurements.
Why does my potted fruit tree flower but never fruit?
If it is an apple, sweet cherry, European pear, persimmon, kiwi, honeyberry or mulberry, and it is the only one you have, that is the answer and no amount of feeding or repotting will change it. It needs a different variety of the same fruit flowering at the same time nearby. If it is a self-fertile crop, look instead at whether it is old enough, whether it got enough winter cold, and whether a late frost caught the blossom.
Sources
Every planting date, depth, and temperature on this page traces to these university extension guides. Where they differ, the ranges above hold the whole spread.
- Mississippi State University Extension — Chilling-Hour Requirements of Fruit Crops (P3067)
- University of Maryland Extension, Home & Garden Information Center — Types of Containers for Growing Vegetables
- University of Florida IFAS Extension — Goji Berry — a Novel Nutraceutical Superfruit for Florida Master Gardeners (EDIS HS1391)
- Multiple US extension services — Pollination requirements, per crop — collected in the GardenTrack plant database
The question a container asks that the ground never does is whether one plant is enough on its own. For thirteen of our fruit crops it is. For seven it never will be, whatever you spend on the pot.
This is the last of four pages on growing in containers — potatoes in a bucket, what a bucket is right for, what it will not do, and fruit.