If you are a person who has always been curious about growing your own produce, then perhaps you’ve wondered the same thing about fruit trees, like a Peach Tree perhaps?
The good news is that Peach Trees really can be grown indoors, and they may even grow well indoors with the right care and attention!
Whether you are a person that has had experience with keeping your own indoor plants such as tomatoes or even an indoor herb garden, or someone completing something like this for the first time, this article will have everything you need to help you get started.
Required Space
An element you have likely thought about is how much space you will need to grow.
When growing indoors, the point of limitation in what you can grow is almost always going to be the amount of space you have available.
When you grow outdoors, it’s unlimited (literally), when growing indoors there is a lot more to figure out.
Not only are you going to need to have a sufficient flat surface area to use, however, you also have to think about the ceiling.
Usually, you are dealing with around 7ft to work with indoors; most ceilings will go only to about this height, so it makes sense to find a plant that is just under this height~ at around 6 ft max height for example.
Of course, if you have ceilings that will allow for a larger tree, then you can seek to find one that can go a little higher, but for the sake of managing your tree, it could ultimately just be easier to go with one of around 6ft height.
The Right Variety
Selecting the best varieties of peach trees will have the largest impact on what you can accomplish with your tree care.
As you might notice when you look outside, a typical peach tree is very likely going to be too large to grow inside of your home.
It may be acceptable if it was outside, but inside of the walls of your house, you would find it immediately unsuitable.
Dwarf Peach Trees
To grow inside the home, a dwarf peach tree will be perfect.
There are many varieties of dwarf peach trees, and some have very fun names, including:
- Honey Babe and
- Golden Glory.
A dwarf peach tree will grow to about 6ft or below, which is easily manageable while enabling someone to grow full-size peaches in a small space.
Good Enough: Dwarf peach trees won’t produce as much fruit as a normal peach tree, but you will have a good amount.
Pollination
You may also want to take into account the fact you either want a tree that can cross-pollinate, or you want a self-pollinating tree.
This will mostly depend on how many trees you want to have.
If you plan on having one tree, then you will want a self -pollination peach tree.
This will ensure that your peach tree will continuously be pollinated, and can provide fruit for years.
If you feel like you have room for more than one, or for more than one dwarf peach tree, then you can consider a cross-pollination peach tree.
Then again, you may want to go with self-pollination just to keep it simple.
Sunlight & Climate
To cultivate a thriving plant, you should always consider the amount of sunlight they will need as well as the plant’s suitability to your environment, especially the weather.
Although the climate will play a relatively small role in growing an indoor peach tree compared to one grown outside, you will still want to consider it.
Peach trees specify that they can require 450+ chilled hours but can go down to around 300, so you will want to choose a variety that is on the lower end of the scale for warmer climates.
If you are on the colder side of the spectrum, then you are better off choosing a variety that is a little on the higher chill hours.
Sunlight is another important factor to consider when growing any type of plant, and peach trees are no different. Ideally, the peach tree should be seeing around 6 hours of sunlight each day for it to be at its best.
You can slightly dip below this but in an ideal world, you would like to try and keep the 6 hours of sunshine a day.
If you know for a fact that the area you live in tends to have less sunlight, at least you can try and make sure your peach tree is positioned somewhere to soak up most of the sunlight available to it.
This is likely by a larger window that has the potentials of letting a lot of sunlight in.
Housing and Nutrients
The kind of container you decide to grow your peach tree in is going to be one of the more effective ways in which you can control the size and overall maintenance of your peach tree.
The size of the container you use directly relates to the size of the tree.
This is because your tree will only have so much room to seriously create its root system, in addition to constricting the total nutrients it will be able to uptake, thus capping the total size.
For a dwarf peach tree your looking around the height of 6ft or below, your container size will want to be around 5 gallons in volume.
If you are looking to try and grow a tree that is smaller than that, you will just need to cut the container size down even further:
- Using a loam-based soil is also a great way to help increase to overall nutrient intake of your tree. This kind of soil will simply hold more nutrients than other soil varieties.
- Also, you will need to make sure that you are watering the soil in your container more than you might for one planted outdoors.
This is because a tree’s potting soil will dry out much quicker than the soil of a tree outdoors.
In addition, you will want to fertilize a tree indoors more so than a tree outdoors – this is because it will not have access to natural fertilizers that occur outdoors.
Good Idea: Ensuring the use of a fertilizer that promotes the growth of flowers and fruit will also help.
Final Thoughts
In summary, growing peach trees inside a home is easier than it may first appear.
As long as your plant is a reasonable size, it is getting sufficient light, and it is able to absorb sufficient nutrients, then you should have a beautiful peach tree that you will enjoy for a long time.
I hope that this article has served as a helpful guide to some great tips for growing your perfect indoor peach tree, and enjoying some of the best fruit you’ll have ever eaten.