What Fruit Trees Can You Plant In USDA Zones 8 And 9

Delicious apples, peaches, pears, blueberries, grapes, citrus and a long list of other plants, some of them native, can grow quite well in milder temperate zones.

They’re great for canning, for jellies and jams, for cooking and for eating right off the tree.

I grew up in Zone 9. We raised a large variety of fruits, including Asian pears, pomegranates, blackberries, lemons, kumquats, oranges, satsumas, grapefruit, grapes, and others. After school in late fall, after the chickens, cows, and horses were fed, we kids would lie next to a satsuma tree, picking the sweet, easy to peel citrus and devouring them right there. The blackberries made wonderful blackberry cobbler and dumplings. The pears were preserved and served in a variety of ways.

The lemons were the large Ponderosa variety, and we needed a ladder to pick the grapefruit-size fruit from the 12-foot tree. We froze so much lemon juice from that one tree that it took up a quarter of space in our large chest freezer.

There were also muscadines (muscadine jelly), dewberries, maypops (passion fruit) and mayhaws which we gathered in the fields and woodlands. Cultivated varieties of all these fruits are now available from just about any reputable nursery.

All of the fruit plants I mentioned, including the wild ones, have been hybridized to produce better, more disease-resistant fruit by the many agricultural universities across all cold-hardiness zones.