Fruit - Apple

Apple trees have attractive blossom, and are good shaped trees. They also produce apples! But buying a tree is are expensive compared with other plants.

You need to be careful what type of apple tree you buy. Some apple trees can grow very large! Not only can this take up too much room in your garden, some of the apples will be out of reach. A large tree can be tricky to prune as well. It is possible to buy apple trees with dwarf root stock. Apple trees are all grafted. This means that the root belongs to one tree, and the trunk, branches and so belong to another, and they get joined together when the tree is small. (This seems weird, but plants don't behave like animals! They don't seem to mind this at all). It's the top half which provides the type of fruit, and the root which gives the vigour. So if you have a dwarf root stock, you will get a dwarf tree. This will still grow bigger than you are, but at least the top of the tree is within your reach.

However, you also have to prune it. Apples grow on last year's wood, so you can cut off new wood (or this year's growth) wthout spoiling the next crop. Pruning produces a bushier tree, and keeps it small. I give it a dose of fertiliser after pruing. You're supposed to prune in the autumn or winter, but I've pruned in the summer sometimes, when the tree has put out a lot of growth, and I think it ought to be concentrating on growing the fruit!

I delight in "silly" types of apple tree. One of my trees is a family apple tree. I have mentioned above that a grafted tree grafts one tree top half onto another root. However, you can graft several different trees onto the same root stock, and that is a family tree. The trunk is one species (which tends to be the dominant one) and the others are branches off that. It looks very weird, as the different tree types have different coloured fruit, and blossoms, and they happen at different times of the year, and this all happens on the same tree! Quite apart from its oddity (which I enjoy) there are advantages. You get more than one apple variety from the same tree, which is useful if you have a small garden. But also the different apple species can pollinate each other. Cross-polination (where a tree is polinated from a different tree) produces more fruit. Normally your neighbours' apple trees will probably pollination your tree, but a family tree can cross-pollinate itself!

Another silly tree are my ballerinas. This is not caused by grafting - it is a particular type of apple tree, which instead of making a proper tree, just has a trunk, with fruit growing directly from it. Again - weird! But again, there is a serious point. These trees take up very little room, so you can grow several together, all different species again.

My last silly tree is a cordon, and this is a recent experiment, so I don't know if it works! This is a normal tree, grown against a wall or fence. It is heavily pruned, to encourage a couple of long sideways branches on each side, and very short branches growing from that. The variety of my cordon is a Bramley.

Apple trees can fall into an odd tendency to produce a decent harvest every other year. Of course, if you have enough apple trees you hope they don't all choose the same "off" year. In a decent year, apple trees produce a lot more fruitlets than actually become apples. They do what is called a "June drop" where a lot of them fall off the tree then. You can encourage that, by picking off fruitlets so as to only have one or two in a bunch. That leaves less apples in a good year, so hopefully more apples in a bad year. But I haven't been able to do this convincingly.

Apples are ready to harvest when they are big enough, and a simple twist means they drop of the tree. Quite frankly, most of mine are wind-falls! It doesn't seem to matter. If the pips inside are white, then they are definitely not ripe.

Some apples are cookers and some are eaters. Cooker are sourer, although there is quite a range of taste within eating apples. I prefer a bit of acidity in an apple apple - I find sweet apples to be bland. Some apples go fluffy when cooked, and some stay quite solid (although softer, of course). Apples usually get cooked in puddings, but I've found that you can add them to stews and curries. And of course you can eat them raw!

Family tree:

Ballerina:

Cordon:

On the whole, I haven't had pests on my apple trees, except for white fuffy stuff on the family tree. I don't know whether it's a fungus or a bug or what. It started on the branch at the back, which I thought had died, but leaves eventually grew on it. There were no apples that year, but next year, there seem to be some. But the white stuff is still there.

Click on photos for large version.

© Jo Edkins 2021 - Return to Garden index