pollination partners – Not a Horticulturist

Apple trees

21st Feb 202021st Feb 20202 Comments

Short version:

Grow apples as they are great trees for adding structure to a garden and for under planting. They taste far better than shop bought, you can grow a variety not available in the shops, trees are cheap and popular in urban areas (providing you with access to pollination partners), it’s environmentally friendly and they can be trained into fun shapes.

An apple tree is a great addition to your garden because:

Apples are perennial trees

Once a tree starts producing fruit you can get a harvest for years. Trees are great for adding height and structure to the garden. Wildlife such as digging rodents, rabbits, cats or foxes don’t worry an established tree. You can also plant around the base with companion plants such as nasturtiums, mint, dill, fennel and basil – all of which are edible and can help deter pests or attract pollinators. With my small garden I find it hard to dedicate a patch to something like mint, that grows well but isn’t often used. I feel like the space above the mint is no longer wasted, and the mint is happy in some shade.

Summer of 2017, newly planted and tied into the support.

They taste great (with a proviso)

The apples you pick off your tree will be fresh, naturally ripened and juicy. The proviso is that for your apple to also be sweet and tasty, you do need to have started with a sweet and tasty variety. If you grow a crab apple you can’t expect huge sweet fruit. Anything that is called a cooking apple will not taste great for eating straight off a tree.

I can with total honesty say that I have never tasted an apple that was as good as the Jonagold we picked from our tree early autumn last year. So many fabulous varieties are unavailable in the shops, but even a Golden Delicious apple picked from your own tree tastes nothing like a Golden Delicious from the shops. When you are picking your own, off your own tree, in small quantities, you have the luxury of picking individual apples as they ripen. If an apple is ripe you also have the luxury of leaving it on the tree a few days until you’re ready to eat it. You don’t have to worry about having to pick thousands of apples off hundreds of trees as they ripen together. Consider labour intensive fruit picking. Is the commercial picker really going to inspect each apple for perfect ripeness or are they just going to harvest absolutely everything that looks remotely ripe? If they are harvested by machine everything is collected off the tree at once. Leaving apples too long to ripen fully comes with the danger of apples going bad. The apples have to be picked before they are ripe in order to give them time to get to shops and to have a decent shelf life. Most are then put into long term refrigeration, allowing apples to be available all year round (source). I’m appreciative of this method as it means I can buy an apple any time of year, but it’s no wonder that a shop bought apple just can’t compete with a home grown one.

They can be grafted

You are unlikely to get a tasty variety from seed. Apple flowers can be pollinated by the open flowers of any other apple tree in the local vicinity. This means that the seeds of an apple that you like will probably not produce a tree that produces apples that taste like the original. In addition, it takes several years before you get any fruit from a tree grown from seed, so a graft gets your tree fruiting sooner.

An amazing 2 variety tree that we pass on the school run.

In order to get a specific variety, a cutting is taken from the chosen variety and grafted onto a rootstock (a young apple tree with strong roots). Basically, all Golden Delicious are grown from trees that are clones of the original Golden Delicious. You can read more about why seeds don’t always produce plants that are the same variety as the parents in ‘Pollination, fertilisation and variation’
Another great thing about the grafting means that you can have more than one variety grafted onto the same rootstock. You get to have more variety without needing to use the space of two (or more) trees.

Dwarfing root stock is great for small spaces

With the small size of city gardens, it can be quite hard to fit much in. Most fruit trees suitable for the garden have a dwarfing rootstock. This rootstock determines the eventual height of the tree, which will be somewhere between 1m to 4m depending on how dwarfing the rootstock is. This means you can choose something that won’t become a nuisance in the space. The rootstock may also provide better disease resistance, hardiness or sturdiness.

There are plenty of pollination partners

Apple trees are very popular in domestic gardens. There is often a plethora of crab apple trees growing in urban areas too. This means that if you only have one tree you are still likely to have a suitable pollination partner in the vicinity. There are a few apple varieties that are self-fertile (can pollinate itself) but most need another apple tree of a different variety in order to set fruit. The ones that are self-fertile tend to have better harvests when cross pollination can occur. Apple trees that are grafted with more than one variety will usually have varieties that will pollinate each other.

Apple trees are suitable for training in forms

If you are short on space or want a living screen, you can prune the apple tree to make a productive and attractive feature.

This kind of espalier training will take 4 years to get the 3 tiers and needs some maintenance. This makes a great screen or hedge.

Cheap and easy

Bare root trees (usually available late autumn until very early spring) are great as they are cheap and easy to transport. If like me, you are trying to do up a garden on a budget it makes it easier on the mind to buy fruit trees bare root. I have even found a bare root with 2 varieties grafted onto it here. I can’t however give you any experience of this website as I haven’t bought any fruit trees from here.

It may take a couple of years to get productive, but apples are generally reliable as trees that do well in English weather and pay for themselves in produce over time.

Growing your own is environmentally friendly

Having a tree in your garden will capture carbon whilst providing you with more oxygen as the tree photosynthesises. In addition, your apples have zero food miles and packaging. As well as food miles, the time spent by store bought apples in storage will have a carbon footprint attached. They are kept in a low temperature, low oxygen environment to keep the apples fresh. Basically, an apple, bought just before the harvesting season begins will be an apple that has been stored for almost a year.

My apple tree

Despite extolling the virtues of growing a bare root tree, my apple tree was a potted one I bought in the summer of 2017. This is because of the timing of the creation of the garden which you can see here and also because I really wanted this crazy 5 variety tree from here.

You can see the different sizes and colour of the apples

It was expensive but is unusual to have that many varieties on one tree and this website was the only place I could find it. Even in the winter this particular tree is not available as a bare root. It has a very dwarfing rootstock and so is only expected to grow to 6-8ft. I get to have a small-ish tree with a variety of flavours that pollinate each other.

Summer 2018 there were a couple of apples of 2 varieties growing, but by the end of summer they all dropped off without growing much. Autumn 2019 there were 4 varieties that we harvested. Unfortunately, we are still not entirely sure which variety is which, which is part of the fun! We do know that we absolutely love the Jonagold – that is, if we identified it correctly. These are the varieties that we have on our tree:

Cox – striped red and yellow apple with crisp sweet flesh
Elstar – a marbled golden yellow with some deep red and crunchy white flesh. Sweet with some balanced acidity.
Golden delicious – golden green small apples that are sweet when ripe.
Jonagold – huge lovely yellow apples with red flushes. They are sweet with some balanced acidity.
Red Boskoop – lumpy dull red with russeting sharp cooking apple.

With different varieties on the one tree I will need to be careful to ensure via pruning that one variety doesn’t become too dominant. Another drawback of the many varieties grafted onto one tree is that if my tree’s trunk is damaged then I can kiss goodbye to all my varieties.

Fruit trees

7th Dec 2019Leave a Comment

Short version:

The winter is a great time to plant perennial cheaper ‘bare root’ fruit trees. Planting 2 of each type of fruit can help increase yields. With the new hardier and more disease resistant varieties out there, we are no longer restricted to the usual apple, pear, cherry and plum trees that the generations before us were. There are now figs, grapes, peaches and mulberries that can be grown outdoors. For the adventurous there are also kiwi, passion fruit and certain types of guavas. Also don’t forget the berry bushes, like blueberry and raspberry, which also come much cheaper as bare root.

When the trees are dormant, they are sold more cheaply as bare root. This means that storing and transport is cheaper so winter is a great time to populate the garden with fruit trees. Fruit trees are perennial. You can plant them once and keep harvesting off them during their lifespan. Keep in mind though, that they can take several years to begin bearing fruit. These are for the long game.

Most fruit trees suitable for the garden starts with a dwarfing root stock. This is basically the lower half of the tree – the roots and the trunk. This rootstock determines the eventual height of the tree, which will be somewhere between 1m to 4m depending on how dwarfing the rootstock is. The rootstock may also provide better disease resistance, hardiness or sturdiness.

This is where the branch has been grafted on. When I received the tree (via post) the graft had come away. Luckily after I tied it back together the branch survived.

Another reason for a rootstock is that you can’t grow a fruit variety from seed. For example, all Granny Smith apple trees are clones of the original Granny Smith. Basically, someone somewhere discovered or bred this variety with a taste they like. They then named it (and probably patented it too). From then onwards if you want to have a tree that grows apples that taste like Granny Smiths you get a branch from a Granny Smith and graft it onto your rootstock. It probably won’t be the original tree but a clone of the original, which is basically the same thing. You can read more about why seeds don’t always produce plants that are the same variety as the parents in ‘Pollination, fertilisation and variation’

And…. Another fab thing about grafting is that you get fruit sooner as you are not growing from seed. And… wouldn’t you know there’s even more to love. One of the great things about grafting fruit trees is that you can get a single tree with more than one variety on it.

This fab apple tree round the corner from us has 2 different varieties of apple growing on it. Even the leaves are a slightly different shade. There are plenty of very green/yellow apples on the right, but if you look carefully, you can see the red/yellow ones on the left.

I absolutely love my fruit trees. I have an apple, a pear and a cherry tree. Each one of these have 5 varieties grafted onto them. Yup! That’s not a typo. Each tree has 5 varieties. This may not turn out to be such a great thing in the long run, but I love the novelty of it. I was amazed to find these trees, and then even more amazed to find that they have survived and have grown well. Even more important than the novelty of more than one variety on a fruit tree, is that with fruit, a pollination partner is important. Some trees won’t pollinate themselves. This also includes 2 different trees of the same variety as they will be clones. You’ll have some varieties (self-sterile) that won’t grow any fruit if there isn’t another tree of the same species but of different variety nearby. I.e. it has to be the same type (apple with apple, pear with pear) of fruit, but cannot be the same variety. There is then an added complication of apple trees that open their flowers at different times. This means that there are specific pollination partners within pollination groups. There are some varieties that are self fertile (they can pollinate themselves), but these will bear more fruit when there is a pollination partner.

Apples and pears don’t tend to have problems, especially in high population, suburban areas, as often there are other people in the local area with an apple or pear. If you do find a tree with a couple of varieties grafted onto the same trunk, they are often pollination partners.

Cherry tree. You can only see 2 varieties here.

I didn’t buy these as bare root though. I was doing up the garden in the early summer and was far too impatient. The first summer in the garden there was no fruit as expected as they had only been in there about 2 months or so. The second year (only really 14/15months) the apple had a couple of fruit that dropped before they were ripe, the pear produced 2 varieties and the cherry produced 3 varieties. The following year we managed to get 4 varieties of apple, 2 varieties of pear (though weirdly, it was 2 different varieties to the previous year) and 3 varieties of cherry (I’m not sure if it was the same 3 varieties as the previous year). With different varieties you need to be careful to ensure via pruning that one variety doesn’t become too dominant. Another drawback of the many varieties on one tree is that if a tree dies, then you are losing all of your different varieties.

This is where I bought these trees:

https://www.gardeningexpress.co.uk/multi-variety-fruit-tree-apple-5-varieties-on-one-tree

https://www.gardeningexpress.co.uk/multi-variety-fruit-tree-pear-5-varieties-on-one-tree

https://www.gardeningexpress.co.uk/multi-variety-fruit-tree-cherry-5-varieties-on-one-tree

Because it is unusual to have that many varieties on one tree there are more limited options for buying. These are pot grown and according to the website, no other nurseries do that many varieties so your only choice is the pot grown. These ones are also on very dwarfing rootstock and so the trees are only expected to grow to 6-8ft.

If you’d rather not have the expense of pot grown, you can still get a bare rooted twin tree. Here is a website, but I’ve not bought any fruit trees from here. These ones here are on less dwarfing rootstock:

https://www.marshalls-seeds.co.uk/twin-fruit-trees-cid292.html

The biggest problem with city gardens and fruit trees is the lack of space. You can do things like fan train, espalier or just tie and prune to ensure that your tree doesn’t take up too much of your garden. You can use a tree to make a living fence or screen.

The following photos were taken on a visit to The Lost Gardens of Heligan:

This espalier pear forms an effective screen. It also allows for better air circulation and the branches don’t shade each other.

Unfortunately we don’t have space for a tunnel like this. Instead we have:

Seedless dessert grapes being trained over a pergola to provide shade over this bench.

In addition to the common English garden varieties, there are now more options. There are more hardy and disease resistant varieties that can now be grown. It is not necessary to have a green house as there are hardy varieties of things like figs, grapes, kiwis, passionfruit, and mulberries that grow in our garden. We don’t have a peach or medlar tree but I have heard that these are possible too. When you select a tree make sure you check details on how they taste, pollination partners, how hardy it is and if that variety is known to fruit in your climate. It’s a long list but there’s no point growing a fruit tree that survives the winter if the fruit doesn’t ripen in your climes, or if the fruit does ripen but tastes pants. Slightly less important, but still worth considering, is what is the final height of the tree and also how long it takes before it begins to produce fruit.

Our fig had 2 ripe fruit in the first year, nothing at all the second and 6 figs that didn’t ripen this year.

There are also plenty of berry bushes that do brilliantly in the UK. Our blueberries, raspberries, Chilean guava, blackberries, gooseberries and physallis seem to thrive. I’ve also seen goji berries at my parents and blackcurrants in some random nearby garden doing brilliantly.