u/sjkirch

Struggling to ID the two trees in the backyard of the home I bought last year. My neighbor, who has lived here for several decades and knew the previous owner, has claimed it’s an “apple”.

I’m a landscape architect with 10 years of experience. While I’m embarrassed by my inability to ID this tree (granted our profession does not generally teach much about fruit trees in school and I work on civic projects almost exclusively (i.e. NEVER residential)), but I doubt this tree is an apple tree, since we bought it in February of 2025, it has never produced fruit.

Admittedly I’ve asked AI, but it doesn’t really seem to have the nuance required here. My best guess is a European Plum, but I’m still unsure because as I mentioned, it has not produced any fruit since we moved in.

Any idea what these might be? They’re currently about 15’ tall. For whatever it’s worth, the guy that used to live here seems to have bought everything (irrigation equipment, pavers, plants, edging, mulch etc) from big box stores like Lowe’s and HD, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all if these were random fruit trees that a big box would sell.

I bought an old school house in CO with all irrigation zones dedicated to spray. I’m not a lawn guy, and would prefer some native grasses and perennials (plus drought of course), so I’m converting 2 of the zones I mapped out to drip.

The original valve box is suuuuper tight and I’ve found 1” poly to be pretty unforgiving, so I’m thinking it might just be easier if I install the pressure reducers/filters in a separate box a bit downstream. I’ll be working with the existing 1” poly upstream, which is all about 6-12” below grade, and I’m thinking I’ll just switch to 3/4” and run it all above grade after this box. That will give me ultimate flexibility to add risers wherever I want down the road.

Here’s my setup. I’ve got a couple adapters at the end, and I’ll plan to use clamps at least upstream as well. I’ll also use teflon for all screw-in connections. I haven’t used a pvc swivel like this, but it seemed like a good way to give me flexibility inside the box to ensure I don’t accidentally install the filters upside down.

Anything glaringly wrong here? It feels like I’m speaking a foreign language when I bring up drip at the hardware store, so this was the best I could come up with on the spot.