I'm looking at planting a number of fruit trees yet this fall or early spring in Wisconsin.

Right now I'm considering apple and pear trees. I'm still in the process of doing my researching and asking questions, but does anyone have any specific recommendations to planting apple or pears trees in Wisconsin? Is there a specific variety I should focus on? Ideally they would drop/hold fruit from the end of August through late fall.

Any other trees I should be looking at besides apples and pears?

Thanks in advance!

I tend to look around and see what everybody else has planted and watch how it is doing. It seems most every locality has a different variety of Apple, almost down to a couple of square miles. It pays to ask the local Garden club, the large retailers sell consumer friendly trees which may not work out well in the long term.

At least around here the green or tart Apples seem to be later Apples. Many of the half wild varieties are the healthiest and most prolific, even if the Apples are a little small. Apple trees are a lot of ladder work, I need to trim mine at least twice a year.

Pear trees grow slow and are prone to disease. I've seen very few large, or healthy Pear trees this far north. Even the very old ones are small.

Plums are fast growers, the European varieties are pretty much bullet proof and tolerate the cold well.

I found a sweet Apricot tree that did well in the cold, my darned dog decided he liked the bark, ringed it and killed it. Really tasty Apricots and I'm not a big Apricot fan. I wish I could find another, it was likely a hybrid, the Apricots off of that tree were almost as sweet as Peaches.

Pollination is a big deal with fruit trees, you have to plant them in pairs and dissimilar pairs often pollinate better than two cloned trees. Whole studies done on what pollinates what the best. When you plant dissimilar pairs they need to flower at around the same time for best pollination. Some trees flower early, some a month or more later. Finding non cloned pairs that flower at the same time can be interesting.

My neighbor was a big Apple tree grower (died at 96), he had many trees grafted so they produce two kinds of apples on the same tree and could cross pollinate themselves. A single tree produced a whole bunch of Apples.

American Plum makes good wildlife habitat.

https://www.qdma.com/articles/know-y...-american-plum

Thanks Mudder! I also appreciate the link to QDMA.

I planted apple trees from North Forty apples trees out of Florence, WI. These are not trees for making pies, they are for feeding wildlife. I bought from a place in WI seeing as the winters can get pretty brutal. I don't recommend buying from some box store, they get apple trees in from down south ( Tennesee, Kentucky, ETC ) and they wont survive the winters up here. I bought 15 trees, the 24-36" transplants, stuck them in the Plantra tree tubes, 100% success, I did have 2 that looked iffy and bad the first 2 months. They are mint now. I mulched around every tree seeing as I'm not up to my place as much as I would like to water. I have some trees as of Sept. 15 that are now 6' tall, just about out of the 7' tree tubes, the tree tubes protect the tree from animals and force the tree to use it's energy to promote vertical growth for a stronger trunk, then branch out. I will be buying 30 more this year from them. Property I planted on is Tomahawk, WI. I bought trees from further north, near the UP border.
Hope this helps, Once again, these are not pie making trees. they are for feeding wildlife.

A couple of my favorite apple varieties i found that work good in WI are Cortland and Whitney crabapple. The Whitney is a large sweet crabapple and it ripens early, and the Cortland ripens later and is good till after frost. They pollinate each other also, the more varieties the better. I agree on the Plums also, the deer love them. I never had success with pears, or apricots, the tree grows great but never produces much of anything.