also, i recently removed some trees that had canker. would i be able to plant right away, or should i wait for a period of time. if so, how long?

From Cornell's website:
New plantings:Because perennial canker generally limits the profitability and longevity of northeastern peach orchards, new plantings should always be established with the idea of minimizing disease risk and delaying its introduction. Thus, it is important that new orchards not be established next to old cankered blocks of peaches (or other stone fruit trees, if they are infected); experience shows that this is the best way to exclude the disease from new orchards. Similarly, any wild stone fruit trees with cankers should be removed from nearby hedgerows prior to planting. Choose planting sites with good air drainage and maximum protection against excessively cold temperatures, and plant only the hardier varieties recommended for local conditions.

Here is a link that might be useful: Perennial Canker

Seems like everybody but me has a fig tree around here. Various friends have peaches, pears, and apples. Muscadine grapes (a vine, not a tree) also.

Search for home garden fruit on www.caes.uga.edu and you'll get a bunch of articles on growing various fruit by the UGA extension service.

Johnson Nursery has been recommended by Walter Reeves and has good reviews on Dave's Garden.

Here is a link that might be useful: Johnson Nursery

Some questions that will help folks answer you:

- Are you willing to spray and prune your fruit trees/shrubs as part of regular maintenance and upkeep?

- What kind of sun exposure do you get, since sun is often important to fruit production?

- Are you willing to do "novelty" fruits that are fun in concept and certainly edible, but not necessarily "feasible" for anything more? (such as nanking cherries; small fruits with big seeds, but great bright taste and fun to eat a couple dozen, just not practical for jams, etc.)

Suggestions:

- Join the Atlanta_Fruits Yahoo group for some other fruit hobbyists with good advice.

- If you don't want to spray and have no interest in upkeep, don't bother with apples or stone fruits (peaches, plums, apricots, cherries, almonds).

- Again, if spraying and maintenance is out, you may want to consider something lower-maintenance like blueberries and figs.

- Be aware that some fruits have bad habits. For example, blackberries...spread into brambles if you don't put any effort into them. Each berry that drops can seed thousands of times, and it can take a decade to kill off all the new growths.

- Plant your fruit trees in fall when the tree or shrub is entering dormancy.

Good luck with your endeavors!

Ohhh, satellite, you are being a debbie downer!!!

I think that the nanking cherries can be used in MANY ways, you just need a cherry pitter!!! How about cherry sangria, cherry icecream, oh, so many ways. However, their best function may be to keep birds and other critters out of your other, more desired fruits!

wow, thank you all for the many replies. i posted this thread and forgot to check the box so that i may know if anyone responded. so i reposted thread with atlanta trees. hope it wasn't confusing. to answer your question satellitehead, low maintenance is always a plus. my backyard is south facing so i get plenty of sun. the idea of edible landscaping comes to mind. my wish is to combine desirable fruit trees that would compliment my now smaller, thinner pines without looking cluttered (i don't want much. :) i recently purchased a seedless green grape plant along with two different types of thornless blueberries yet, i have still plant them. my fear is that they may become invasive or worse yet, provide an open invitation to every unwanted insect or snakes for that matter in the vacinity. i accidently found an earlier thread from '07 where someone mentioned they had a starfruit tree. does anyone know if starfruit grows here. i've also read of some type of "ice cream" banana that is hardy up to zone 6 i believe. i also don't mind a fig tree. that might be interesting providing that it's one of the smaller trees. sorry about sounding conflicted. i'm just trying ground in the midst of my excitement.

GGG, hook me up with a cherry pitter that small! my DW and i spent 45 minutes hand-pitting about 500 cherries this year, only to hafta leave town and get back to find them starting to ferment already!!

i was going to have my neighbor (whom i think you know) make some ice cream out of them. then we were going to make jam with the leftovers.

both of my montmorency cherries died =( so these nankings won't be keeping anything away from them...

Sorry your montmorency cherries bit the dust! Did you ask Lostman about that? Does he know what happened? His stella is healthy (but no fruit this year, too rainy during polination time).

You guys didn't freeze the cherries? I throw them on baking sheets in the freezer (actually, plastic flexible cutting boards on baking sheets, which makes them much easier to pop off) to freeze and then throw them into bags. Works for strawberries too. ACE has a small cherry pitter. Do you just have one of those small hand held ones? We used to just pit and sit in front of the TV and pit away. MIL would then be in the kitchen taking everything for her fave cherry crumbles (she'd make about 50 and freeze them!!).
This was in DC - grandpa had a great cherry tree!

we were hand-pitting everything! talk about exhausting. the fruit-to-seed ratio kinda sucks on the nankings, not much fruit but lots of seed. we couldn't find a cherry pitter that was small enough to hold the fruit, but push through the seed. all the ones we saw were for larger cherries, like the kind you buy at the grocery store. nankings are the size of arbequina olives, only the seeds are larger (same poor meat vs. seed ratio on arbequinas as well!)