How to use the Fruitfool Website

We aim to help you get the most from your urban garden or small orchard by helping you choose the right varieties. Fruit trees and shrubs are expensive investments, not just in initial purchase, but also in terms of garden space, maintenance and time until maturity. You want to be getting it right first time!

Searching the site

There are a couple of ways to search the site we've listed their pros and cons (or limitatations) below.

WIDEST SEARCH: Use the Selector Tools: Fruit, Nuts, or Berries & Vines., These tools allow you to filter on Harvest Months for instance, and may help you give you inspiration for things that are fruit bearing in say 'June' where you have a gap in your harvest. You can also filter on 'Climate' (see more on climate) to see what will work best for your area. The table has some basic infomration to help you quickly narrow down, for instance whether the tree is self-fertile or whether it produces fruit that is known to be good for preserving/baking etc. The best part about these tools is that they can help you compare between different fruit types, but sometimes the group can be so broad that you'll have hundreds to look through and the filtering may not be enough so that you have hundreds of rows of fruit to look through.
NARROWED SEARCH: Use the tables and filtering on the 'Fruit type' specific pages i.e. Apple, Lemon, Feijoa or Blueberry for instance to get a narrowed search, as you are only looking at one fruit type at a time. There is some additional filtering here of 'General Availability', Which means you can search for 'Common' if you expect to be able to find it at most local gardening stores or, alternatively set it to 'Rare' if you're a bit of a collector and on the hunt for a more unusual species to round out your garden. The limitation with this search is of course that you can't compare between different fruit types i.e. compare a Mandarin with an Orange, where you may wish to compare their harvest times for instance.
SITEWIDE SEARCH: Use the sitewide Search functionality magnifying icon at the top right of all pages on the site to perform a sitewide search. This will bring up all results, both from the fruit pages but also any other pages of relevance. If you are looking for a specific variety to see if we have got it on the site, or are very specific on what information you're looking for it may be a good way to search, but may not be the easiest way if you're just in a browsing mood.

Using the Wishlist

SAVE VARIETIES YOU ARE THINKING OF PURCHASING: Part of the inpiration in creating this site, was because we kept forgetting the varieties that we were considering for our garden. YOu go to a lot of effort to find out good information, either from the web, a book or from your local nursery only to forget 3 months down the track when you go to buy it what the darn variety was you were looking at. Even more confusing if you were weighing up getting a pollinator etc and then if you're looking at buying multiple trees of different types, from multiple places.... and what if you wrote it all down diligently at home and then happen upon a sale at your local nursery and need to make a quick decision.... much handier to have that all saved in your profile here at Fruitfool for easy reference where you can always access it quickly on your phone.
SAVE VARIETIES YOU"VE ALREADY GOT: Now, that our garden is filling up, I've used the Wishlist to also record what varieties I already have in our garden - it makes it really easy now to look at when my harvest times are, when I'll have gaps and helps to inform my future decisions. We're hoping to add more functionality as we go to the Wishlist.

The Wishlist is free to use, it's only for your use and the information does not get used elsewhere (with the exception that from time to time we may look at what the 'most popular apple' is in wishlists across all users etc. You do need to become a member of the site, and will need to create a login, but we will never share or sell your information or email address with any 3rd party (with the exception of conforming to any applicable New Zealand laws).