Pomegranates are one of those fruits that require a special form of patience to grow, testing even the most steady beginning gardener’s will. Plant it in spring; wait…and wait…and wait. And then you get to wait some more until those bright red jewels begin to appear.
But here’s the thing: Pomegranate trees puts down a lot of energy into their future, and not until years later do they really reward your investment with visible results aboveground. The root system does all its heavy lifting unseen and make modest increases in height early on (see the growth trajectory chart). Yes, it’s slow going, but worth the early wait when you know the time frame, since under good conditions, a pomegranate tree can lives to be more than a hundred years old.
Why Patience Is Key to Growing Pomegranates
Most people gets impatient with fruiting too early, which is realy the key period: the first few years when the tree are establishing itself. This is when the tree creates strong roots that can bears the weight of an enormous load of fruit and canopy. It’s no wonder the tree doesn’t produce much fruit until year five or six, when the tree has grown to about ten feet high (just look at the statistics). You’ll sometimes get flowers but they tend to fall off and never turn into fruit. It’s not because something is wrong with your tree; it’s just prioritizing its resources. Think of it as a savings account for future fruit harvests.
Don’t judge the tree based off what it produces immediately. Judge it instead on its strength and foliage during these early years.
In those first years, it’s all about how to prepare soil… Not when (or even if) to fertilize. Avoiding “wet feet” is a cardinal rule of pomegranate growing, and so making sure your soil drains properly is a must. Mixing the planting hole liberally with compost will help provide an airy, loose habitat for those roots (especially important if yours is a heavy-clay type). According to the chart, the best soil pH range is pretty wide, happily falling somewhere between 5.5 and 7.2, meaning you probably won’t have to mess with any soil-chemistry tweaking unless your soil is really, really acidic or alkaline. Give them good drainage and make their roots happy, and the rest, the top part, will take care of itself. Watering deeply but infrequently prompt the root system to grow downward instead of shallowly, which prevents roots from being too close to the heat and drying out.
After about five years or so (after establishing), the dynamic changes: it’s go time. At this point, you’ll begin reaping what you’ve sown in terms of care. Now the tree will begin putting more emphasis into developing its fruit rather than getting taller. A full-grown tree in warmer zones may produces between a hundred to two-hundred fruits in a year in a good growing season (which is a lot of fruit to hold up).
It’s important to prune properly at this stage so the tree opens up for air and sunlight; otherwise, the fruit won’t get enough sun to sweeten properley, and you also run the risk of fungi issues. Left unpruned, the tree will be all tangled up with crossed branches and suckering underneath, where energy isn’t being used well and fruit size decrease.
Here are a couple of interesting notes. These trees realy live long lives (some over two hundred years old in the Middle East), so again, while you’re growing a fast crop, you’re also growing a legacy. Depending on whether you allow them to grow as a multi-stem shrub or train one trunk, they will stabilize around fifteen to twenty feet tall. This means the rapid growth of the first few years give way to a very small amount of additional growth in the decades ahead. If proper care is followed, they will also provide continued strong fruit production. That’s what the chart captures (the long view), from the initial steep climb to settling in to a stable yet productive plateau that spans generations.
Gardening with trees is very much a long-game affair. As I stare out at my young saplings today, knowing they’ll one day become the ancestor of a tree still standing a hundred years from now, it shifts how you relate to them and how you tend to them. It should of not merely routine maintenance, but an exercise in stewardship.
It’s a long wait…but so is the history you’re creating.