Pomegranates are best grown from cuttings to ensure the quality of the fruit produced. There are many varieties of pomegranate trees to choose from, including the ever-popular Wonderful, yummy pink Sweet, and unique non-staining Eversweet.
Select a location with full sun, and allow a 20 ft diameter space for your tree to grow into, unless you plan on keeping it smaller by pruning. If planting as a hedge, you can plant them as close as 10 feet apart. Learn more about shaping your pomegranate tree in this article.
Pomegranates are adaptable to many soil types, though they grow best in loamy soil with good drainage. The ideal climate is zone 7 to 12, with short, mild winters and low humidity. They may be grown in containers in colder places, and kept indoors or in a greenhouse over winter. If your tree’s trunk is damaged or killed by frost, it will typically grow new suckers that can be trained into a replacement trunk.
Caring for your tree
Pomegranates have relatively low water requirements, and can survive drought conditions for several years (although during that time, the harvest will be smaller). Too much or uneven amounts of water, either from irregular or over irrigating, heavy summer rains, or high humidity, can result in fruit cracking, decreased fruit production, and other problems.
It is not necessary to prune your pomegranate trees, but it can help with ease of harvest, better fruit, and for a shapelier tree. Pomegranates naturally grow in bush-form, and produce lots of suckers. This is ideal for hedges or living walls, but not for most other situations. When your tree is a year old, select one to six trunks to keep; prune the rest at the ground. Most professional orchardists prefer five or six, because they will produce fruit sooner, need less care, and recover quicker if damaged by frost.
When doing maintenance pruning as the tree grows, prune lightly, and never trim all the branches in the same year. Pomegranates fruit on short new shoots that come from wood that is more than one year old, so pruning all new growth back at once can result in nothing to harvest the following seasons. You should also prune back any new suckers that you don’t want to grow into trunks. For more on pruning your pomegranate