Wow! You guys really put thought into your town I've just been placing where it looks aesthetically pleasing

Artful placement takes more thought than putting an orchard 53 thousand miles from your house. I'm just sayin'.

Interesting how people are setting up their fruit/veggies. I never ever pick the fruit from the trees - once in a blue moon, I'll sell an apple. I did plant lots of extra apple trees on the home side of the river, all random spots Now that I'm further in the game, I'm planting veggies wherever I dig a hole to find treasure, no matter where it is. I never pull the veggies either. I just leave them.

My town tells me that to get the next person to move in, I will need to have seven types of food. It does not appear that this is possible. I already have apple, pear, orange, potato, carrot, and tomato plants. This is all that I see anyone mention having. What would be the seventh food source?

The game is telling you that you need seven sources of food, meaning that you need to have at least seven mature fruits or veggies in your town. Each veggie plant counts as a source of food, and each fruit lying on the ground is one source of food, as well. You don't need seven types of food, since (as you have already seen) there aren't that many different types of food in the game.

That's fine on the veggies. The peeps will eat them on their own, about one veggie/peep/day. When you have a lot of peeps, make sure they don't eat all the veggies when you're not looking! Of course, there's a quick 90 minute fix for that - plant more veggies.

As for fruits, look at the life cycle of an apple. It starts as a flower on the apple tree, matures to an attached fruit, falls to the ground, and finally disappears. Each of these stages takes about a day. Note in particular that fruit on the ground disappears the next day.

Fruit on the ground counts toward total available food, visible in the Food Status (tap on the Cornucopia). The apple will become unavailable as food in one of three ways: if a peep eats it, if the mayor collects it (i.e. you pick it up), or if a new day starts. When the fruit is in the mayor's inventory or storage, it disappears from the total in Food Status. But when you SELL the fruit to the store, it reappears in Food Status and counts toward available food. AND, you have 25 coins more to spend.

Good info!! Thank you! I'll be selling lots of apples now ~I planted a bunch all around the housing area!!! Figured peeps would love apple trees as much as I do!! (at least they don't have to pick up the fallen fruit if they don't want to!! hahaha)

Has anyone noticed that the trees grow fruits faster on specific areas? In the botanic garden, straight next to the fence, they seem to grow more slow, first flowers after 24hr. And I planted another one in the middle of a normal field outside, and it has flowers in it after an hour...

I'm not sure it's the location. I have an orchard of 12 apple trees, 3 groups of 4 that I planned to have fruit on different days, thus providing 12 edible apples a day less any golden apples. When I planted the first four, I got one tree that was huge and three little ones. The huge one had flowers by the end of the day while the other three didn't flower until they were big, 24 hours later. It was a bit of a pain replacing that one tree until I had all four in sync, but I did.

So I think it's that the apple trees from the store are in different stages of development when you buy them.