Good fruit trees for my new property

Trying to pick out perennials for my new house (suburban sized yard).

I already have perennial onions (welsh onions, walking onions), caucasian mountain spinach, strawberries, raspberries, figs, yacon, passionflowers, lovage, sorrel, mint, oregano, thyme, sage, tarragon, chives and rhubarb, as well as some peppers that I overwinter.

I got seems I'm starting for perennial shallots, earth chestnut, asparagus, skirret and perennial longleaf ground cherry. I also have some pawpaws I grew from seed in containers that I'll plant this year. Also gonna try growing culinary mushrooms in woodchip mulch and in logs.

I'm planning on buying hardy kiwi, American persimmon, haskap and currants from the local nursery. Maybe concord grapes too.

I'm also thinking of stone fruits or pears (American or Asian), but not sure how they'd fare against plum cucurlio, late frosts and pesky squirrels and birds. From what I've read apricots are rather fussy about late frosts. My neighbours have a sweet cherry tree, but squirrels ate all the fruit, although they didn't do a good job of sealing the bird netting around the bottom of the tree. I've heard others had success with peaches in my area. Anyone have experience with any of these in the Great Lakes/Northeast (I'm in southern Ontario zone 5)?

Would you consider any kind of apple? Here at Wheaton Labs (Zone 5-5b, cold arid continental) apples have done great, along with pear. We're trying some fruit berry bushes this year, but I can't speak to them just yet.

I was in Ontario, 5b, near Stratford. Pears were great, once I got a pollination trio. Summercrisp is not the most exciting pear but it's early, reliable, decent to eat and cooks well. The Luscious lived up to its name but was a lousy pollinator. A Chojuro ( Asian) gave great, tasty fruit very quickly and solved the pollen shortage.
Sour cherries were a surprise win for us. I had a Saskatoon next to it and that pretty much distracted the birds from the cherries. It helps that they are not sweet. Great for cooking, jams and preserving. They help a ton of other fruits flavour and dishes all year. I'm putting in 4-6 in our new place! ( Montmorancy taste is worth the space for us)
Black raspberries were another easy to use, low effort and high production fruit. No bird pressure on ours but they do have thorns and need multiple, regular picking.

Plums and apricots failed mostly but the Italian plum was a winner, even with fighting against the curculio.
Goji grew moderately well but the fruit was unpleasant. Haskap I like but we did have to net them. Pineberries were the only strawberries we would ever get. Kiwi also grew well and are delicious but not super productive. Bunny pressure on them didn't help and several died. Hazelnuts also were hit by buns but were just starting to fruit when we moved.
Concord grapes and a related type were easy, good and produced but either a raccoon or opossum would clean me out of the sweeter cross the last 2 years. Still got great jelly from only 2 vines.

Stephen B. Thomas wrote:Would you consider any kind of apple? Here at Wheaton Labs (Zone 5-5b, cold arid continental) apples have done great, along with pear. We're trying some fruit berry bushes this year, but I can't speak to them just yet.

I have no doubt they'd do well so if the other fruits fail I might replace them with that, but they're very easy to obtain fruits from local orchards, there's even a lot of abandoned trees on public land where I can collect fruits for free. Persimmon, haskap, pawpaw are much harder to obtain, hence why I wanted to try those.

Dian Green wrote:I was in Ontario, 5b, near Stratford. Pears were great, once I got a pollination trio. Summercrisp is not the most exciting pear but it's early, reliable, decent to eat and cooks well. The Luscious lived up to its name but was a lousy pollinator. A Chojuro ( Asian) gave great, tasty fruit very quickly and solved the pollen shortage.
Sour cherries were a surprise win for us. I had a Saskatoon next to it and that pretty much distracted the birds from the cherries. It helps that they are not sweet. Great for cooking, jams and preserving. They help a ton of other fruits flavour and dishes all year. I'm putting in 4-6 in our new place! ( Montmorancy taste is worth the space for us)
Black raspberries were another easy to use, low effort and high production fruit. No bird pressure on ours but they do have thorns and need multiple, regular picking.

Plums and apricots failed mostly but the Italian plum was a winner, even with fighting against the curculio.
Goji grew moderately well but the fruit was unpleasant. Haskap I like but we did have to net them. Pineberries were the only strawberries we would ever get. Kiwi also grew well and are delicious but not super productive. Bunny pressure on them didn't help and several died. Hazelnuts also were hit by buns but were just starting to fruit when we moved.
Concord grapes and a related type were easy, good and produced but either a raccoon or opossum would clean me out of the sweeter cross the last 2 years. Still got great jelly from only 2 vines.

We do have rabbits here, they've damaged our cedars, euonymus, burning bush, hydrangea and sage this winter... So I'll have to get guards for everything. We have voles as well. But no deer, at least not in our yard, houses are too close together/too many fences between us and the nearby countryside.

Wound up going with NC-1 & Shenandoah pawpaws, Magenta & Somerset grape, kolomikta kiwis (1 male, 1 female), a couple haskaps, white, red & black currant, and Reliance peach.

My neighbour has a sweet cherry tree, but it looks like she didn't tie the bird netting at the bottom properly because some squirrels got in and ate everything. So squirrels might be more of a problem than birds when it comes to sweet cherries. I haven't seen raccoons or opossums so far, and we have a couple dogs which I'm hoping would deter them somewhat (not the greatest hunters and sleep inside, but hoping their odour would help).

Have you tried goumi berries? Anyways, I'll see how much space there is in the yard once everything is planted, and maybe next year I'll squeeze a few more things in, like a cherry/dwarf mulberry or cherry/saskatoon combo, or pears, and I still want an American Persimmon (maybe Prok?) but whiffletree sold out so that will have to wait until next year. If I can eliminate the reeds I have growing, maybe I can plant blackberry or pineberry there too.

I found the kiwi to be super easy to propagate. Just sticks in dirt works! You can have lots of females for each male. I'd encourage you to do at least a small group of both since I found the males much more fragile than the females. (I had 2 males, 12 females)
My pawpaws were just producing when we moved. 3rd year for the Shenandoah and 1st for the Susquehanna. That was 8 years after planting, both from Whiffletree.
Haven't tried goumi yet or jujube. ( we were just out of range for those so I might be able to try them now)
Friends have had success with peaches, but they are in line with my new zone, 6b.
I've got a bunch of things coming from Grimo. Persimmons, native red mulberries, sweet chestnut, pawpaws, more hazelnuts, low tannin oaks, and a couple more Saskatoon. They do tend to have a very limited ordering window however and I got lucky that we confirmed on our new place while it was still open.

Dian Green wrote:I found the kiwi to be super easy to propagate. Just sticks in dirt works! You can have lots of females for each male. I'd encourage you to do at least a small group of both since I found the males much more fragile than the females. (I had 2 males, 12 females)
My pawpaws were just producing when we moved. 3rd year for the Shenandoah and 1st for the Susquehanna. That was 8 years after planting, both from Whiffletree.
Haven't tried goumi yet or jujube. ( we were just out of range for those so I might be able to try them now)
Friends have had success with peaches, but they are in line with my new zone, 6b.
I've got a bunch of things coming from Grimo. Persimmons, native red mulberries, sweet chestnut, pawpaws, more hazelnuts, low tannin oaks, and a couple more Saskatoon. They do tend to have a very limited ordering window however and I got lucky that we confirmed on our new place while it was still open.

14 kiwi plants would take up a fair bit of space though no? I ordered kolomikta kiwis, which are smaller than Actinidia, but even kolomikta are supposed to be 6-10ft by 15-20ft from what I've read. That's why I went with only 1 male and 1 female to start. What are they fragile to in Ontario? Cold? Rodents? Disease?

Nicolas Derome wrote:
14 kiwi plants would take up a fair bit of space though no? I ordered kolomikta kiwis, which are smaller than Actinidia, but even kolomikta are supposed to be 6-10ft by 15-20ft from what I've read. That's why I went with only 1 male and 1 female to start. What are they fragile to in Ontario? Cold? Rodents? Disease?

I had mine on the north side of a south facing fence. It took years to get even several of them fully up the 7' fence and producing. The group of 14 covered about 40' of the run.
As for the males fragility, they were: harder to root, slower to grow, took more damage from late cold snaps and recovered more slowly from bun damage. I had no noticeable bug or disease issues with any of mine.

Update on how things are going.

Currants started to produce this year, mainly the black and pink one. The red currant was 1 year old when we got it (the black & pink were 2 year old) and just had one fruit cluster this year.

Haskaps, one started to produce a little, despite no other haskap blooming to pollinate it. It was 3 years old, the others are 2 years old and 1 year old, so hopefully the 2 year old one starts to produce a next year. I did net it the one fruiting haskap to protect it from birds.

Grapes. Planted in 2024 as 2 year old vines. They grew a little in 2024, and grew a lot in 2025, now they've covering most of the wall of my shed (technically on a frame with a gap between the shed so they don't latch onto the shed itself). They had a few fruit clusters this year, which ripened later than advertised, but maybe that's just because it's their first year of fruiting. They ripened in mid September to early October, and were supposed to ripen late August to early September. However, birds ate most of them while still under-ripe. I bagged the remaining ones and they tasted good. Next year, I'm hoping to get a lot more fruit given how much bigger the plants are.

Kiwis. They're growing alright, I have tree guards around them to protect them from rabbits which are quite voracious in that corner of the yard. For now, the rabbits are mostly pruning my raspberry canes... However, my initial kolomikta female died when I got it, and I had to wait until 2025 to replace it with two more females. One of them flowered a bit, along with the male that flowered a lot, but I pruned off the branch with the fruit without noticing there was one when I was thinning down the vine to one leader. I also got an Issai and another female arguta (unknown variety) from a plant swap - they were cuttings I rooted in 2024, and planted in 2025. Since they managed to survive, I'll probably buy a male to pollinate them since I don't think the male arguta will work.

Peaches. It took some pretty severe rabbit damage in winter 2024-2025, the snow was very deep and it seems like they were able to get over the tree guard. This winter, I have two tree guards stacked on top of each other. The peach did survive though, it wasn't quite girdled all the way around (but almost). I got a few fruit, but squirrels managed to eat half of them. Even with the netting... there was a fruit that fell into the netting and it seems the squirrel ate it through the netting? So I got 4/7 fruits. The leaves got some leaf curl in the spring, the last two weeks of May were exceptionally cool, cloudy and wet here (lots of 50-55F highs, 35-40F lows), but I removed the affected leaves and the rest of the leaves after that looked fine. The fruits were very fragrant, but maybe a little less sweet than ideal, not sure if it's the variety, age of tree, weather, or maybe the spot it's in is a bit too close to part-shade? It gets sun from about 9am to 2:30-3pm.

Pawpaws. The one I started from seed that I transplanted this spring grew a lot this year. I think it might catch up to the named varieties I got from the nursery as larger (3-4ft tall) trees within a couple years if it keeps growing this fast. They probably still have a few years before producing.

Prok Persimmon. Planted in spring 2025, it had flowers, but the flowers/fruits dropped while still at a very immature stage. I'm guessing the tree is not established enough to produce.

Container figs had their best year yet. Passiflora incarnata (Maypop) and passiflora inspiration did alright. I even got some fruit off my edulis passionfruit seedling, but only 1 from each plant. I'm thinking of getting a named variety to see if it produces more reliably. Tamarillo started to flower in October for the first time, that's too late to set fruit/produce fruit, but hopefully that means it reached maturity and will set fruit in late spring/early summer next year.

Next projects:
I'm considering trying to grow espallier quince on the SW wall of the house. Giant of Zagreb maybe? I'm also considering USask sour cherries (maybe with a Saskatoon berry to distract birds?). We're cutting down a maple since it's getting bigger and bigger and making more shade on the vegetable garden. That'll free up some space for some smaller trees, or an expanded vegetable garden.
At this point, I've got a lot of fruit that should come in in September-October, my figs, raspberries, grapes, maypops, cherry tomatoes, and eventually persimmon, pawpaws and kiwis. Not so much for June-August though, just peaches (late August), haskap, currants. That's why I'm considering the sour cherries. Maybe something else that's early-ish like Early Golden plums? The quince has a good shelf life, so it could be for the later part of fresh fruit eating season (November?). Maybe medlars could work for November-December consumption as well? I've heard they taste good but never had a chance to try them, not sure where you can find any for sale, but I saw a reddit post from someone by the Georgian Bay growing them successfully.
I'm a bit hesitant about mulberries, because we've allowed our lab to eat some at parks before and she has no self control and will eat several pounds until she throws up all of it. Since they're kind of messy and tend to drop loads of fruit on the ground, I guess I'd have to keep the tree small enough that between my picking and the wild animals (birds, squirrels, etc), there won't be an excessive surplus of them on the ground for the dog.

Isn't it funny how we sometimes come to decisions? Your poor lab not being able to self-regulate eating mulberries made me smile! What a loveable sounding pup.

I live in New York Zone 5B and I have become a little obsessed with growing peaches. I'm currently in a 'war' with our local squirrels because they engorge themselves on the fruit before it can reach a havestable state. I'm planning on planting some late flowering varieties to supplement my more standard flowering types. I'm hoping to use them as a shorter-lived fruit tree that can have something else eventually succession grow into the space.

Have you considered growing some kind of bush cherry? I have two young nanking cherries that have yet to produce fruit but have grown steadily in the climate. Fingers crossed I may see something this upcoming spring.