Last year she and her boyfriend bought an old house in the Silverlake section of Los Angeles with a 6,500-square-foot lot. Much of it is concrete, but she has taken advantage of the available space to plant a lime tree, two apple trees (an Arkansas Black and a Fuji), a plum, two peaches, a nectarine and a Cara Cara orange. A Meyer lemon is growing in a pot.

“Right now it’s covered in buds and I’m so excited,” Ms. Hall said. “I put the pot outside my bedroom window so the smell will waft in.”

The backyard orchard makes sense, given the growing popularity of the local-food movement. Nothing is more local than the backyard, after all, and home orcharding, as the practice is sometimes called, guarantees freshness and cuts the energy costs for transportation to nil. Anxieties about food safety  sparked by events like last year’s E. coli outbreak in spinach  may also be contributing to the trend. Ed Laivo, the Dave Wilson Nusery’s sales director, is a longtime advocate of dense tree planting, and wrote a how-to pamphlet called “Backyard Orchard Culture” in the early 1990s. He advises customers to choose varieties that will ripen at different times to spread out the harvest, a strategy increasingly being adopted by those wanting to eat fresh. “People are planting so that they have apples for four or five months straight,” he said, “rather than having one tree dump on them in September and then have to quickly make their pies and sauces.”

With a little planning, he added, you can eat fresh apples for months, in California from the beginning of July until December. In many other parts of the country, he said, you could, if you planted carefully, extend the harvest season late into the fall.

Image Credit... Ethan Pines for The New York Times

Small-scale home orchards were common before World War II, according to Karen Tillou, who manages the demonstration orchard of the Home Orchard Society, a group in Portland, Ore., that promotes growing fruit at home. “If you drive around the old, historically ethnic areas of Portland, especially Italian neighborhoods, there are old plum, fig and quince trees on every block,” Ms. Tillou said. “But then there was a postwar generation gap where people said, oh, my, we can buy fruit from supermarkets.”

Ms. Tillou said that when she joined the society’s staff five years ago, she mainly fielded questions from retirees or “people with large rural lots who had the time and money to putter as a hobby.” But she is now beginning to hear from young urbanites turning away from frozen and shipped produce. “I see it most in my peer group  early 30s, young couples with their first home and kids, in tune with the concept of eating more locally,” she said. Not long ago, she got a call from one such couple in Portland, who bought a house with six old fruit trees in the backyard. “It was one of the draws of the property for them,” Ms. Tillou said, “but they didn’t know how to take care of the trees.”