Fruit trees, I'm learning.

A couple of years ago I took on an allotment, which meant that I no longer needed to give over space in the garden for fruit and veg. Unfortunately, I am not permitted to grow fruit trees on the plot other than in pots. So, crammed into my overfull garden are five trees, a plum and four apples.

The plum is Victoria, a half standard on St Julian A stock. It is tucked against the northern boundary so I can let it grow without creating any more shade, but I don’t want it to get very big because it becomes difficult to pick and I have no need of massive numbers of plums. For the last two years I have cut it back hard in April, shortening all new growths to an inch or so and thinning out the centre of the tree. This year I had a massive crop which I should have thinned but didn’t. So I had quantity but not quality; good for jam and stewing, not so good for eating whole. Hopefully next year I will get it right.

Too many plums.

The apple trees are a mixed bunch. The best of them is Suntan, a bush tree on MM106. It’s a great variety in that it is very healthy and produces good dessert apples that keep well. I have spur pruned it, cutting all the new growths back to one leaf above the basal cluster in the third week of August. This means that I can keep it at roughly the same size indefinitely without losing my crop. This spring it was a beautiful sight, producing a flower display to compare with any ornamental variety. But then came disappointment, a very mediocre crop of apples. As the season progressed, many of the fruits that had set dropped. I put this down to it flowering late, after my other apples have finished, so not getting pollinated. I need to plant another late flowering variety and have in mind ‘Lane’s Prince Albert’ or ‘Newton Wonder’.



   

Suntan with a rather poor crop of apples and showing pruning.

Almost all commercial orchards are grown using M9 as a rootstock. It gets into cropping very quickly and produces fruits of good size. They are generally grown as spindle trees, supported on wires and planted about a meter apart in the row. I can see no reason why they wouldn’t suit most home gardeners to a tee. Small trees utilising upright space, so several varieties can be grown in a small area, giving good pollination and no glut of any one variety. The pruning is different, but not difficult and, this being the 21st century, is well explained in film clips on You Tube.

Convinced I needed to give it a whirl, I planted Red Windsor as a knip tree on M9. That is to say, a well feathered maiden tree. I tied down the laterals to just below horizontal and left the leader as it was. It has cropped well, but like so many varieties described as having good disease resistance, has not proved to be a match for the Cornish climate. Scab has spoiled the fruits and severely impacted the vigour of the tree. I should also have shortened the leader as my second tier of laterals is separated from the first by a long length of bare stem.

At the same time as I planted Suntan, I also planted Elstar. I now see that orangepippin.com are describing its disease resistance as poor. In Cornwall it is hopeless. After its first awful season I thought I would try grafting other varieties onto it. Holstein Cox is a variety that an ex work colleague was growing on her allotment very successfully and she furnished me with some scions. I also grafted Red Windsor and Meridian at the same time. This was done with whip grafts in January. I can claim no vast amount of experience of doing this but all of them took, which means it can’t be very difficult! The key is a nice clean cut; a sharp knife and a bit of practice on unwanted twigs first, the cut must be made in one go.

Whip graft tied with rubber strip and covered with Buddy tape.

Graft after tie removed, already flowering.

Three years on, the graft union is hard to see.

The Holstein had a couple of fruits in the first year, the scions having produced flowers only two or three months after grafting. It has grown strongly but is very weeping, perhaps due to the weight of fruit.

Grafted March 2012, the branch is now heavy with fruit.

Red Windsor has fared no better than the M9 tree, being too prone to scab to really succeed. Meridian has grown strongly upright and appears fairly healthy but has not fruited. A lot of the tree is still Elstar so I may try and get hold of some more varieties this winter and replace the original all together.

The last of my trees is Holstein again, a maiden tree on MM106 that I chip budded. It’s still very small. My intention is to treat it like Suntan. It'll probably have other ideas.