Maintaining a Healthy Young Tree Making sure that your fruit tree stays healthy is very important, but not as hard as some might think. There are several vital things you need to do: don't harvest all of the fruit on the tree at the same time; make sure the soil is healthy; watch out for pests; plant it correctly; be sure it is protected when it is young. If you direct the tree and get it started off on the right foot, you ll save yourself a lot of pruning time later. Usually, training occurs during the summer. Rather than just cut off all the branches that aren t going in the right way, you try to redirect them. The mechanisms you use can be thought of as orthodontic braces for your fruit tree. Just take 3 stakes and tie each one separately near the base of the trunk. If you use some sort of tether to prevent rope burn on your tree, that would be an even better solution. These can be purchased at any gardening shop, and are designed to be friendly to the bark of the tree. It is much better to stick with these instead of bare rope, to minimize the amount of friction the tree endures. I didn t want to sacrifice this gorgeous view, so I grew my trees up as bush trees. Cordons are a type of tree that you might not be familiar with. It consists of one stem with no branches. It is planted at an angle so that it arches up over the ground. Through the course of its growth, all branches are removed. You should never plant so many trees that you are going to be overwhelmed, though. Only plant what you can handle. Generally if you are getting started on a large amount of trees, you will want them to all be the same type. If they all require the same amount of water and nutrients, you won t have to spend as much time catering individually to the different types of tree. There are two main groups that cherries can fall under. It is either a wild cherry or a sour cherry. Wild cherries are generally used for plain eating, and originated in Europe or western Asia. Usually if you buy a bag of cherries from the store, you can guess that they are wild cherries. The other type, sour cherries, also originated in Europe and western Asia.