Rethinking the fruit trees

 I was in the paddock the other day and, yet again, got annoyed that all of the massive apple trees in there are all the same variety of Bramley-type cooking apple. There are about six of these massive trees, and there's only so much I can do with a tiny fraction of them. The apples don't keep for very long so storing for longer than a couple months doesn't work. They are no good for making cider as they are too dry and sour. Apples for cider either need to be a combination of 90% eating/10% cooking or proper cider apples to give the right bittersweet taste.

Then there's other fruit - a couple each of damsons and Mirabelle plum trees, two cherries, one very small normal plum and a huge conference pear that hardly produces much and what is there is so high we can't gather anything unless it drops to the ground. So I end up buying apples, pears and plums! Ridiculous!

So, we have hatched a plan to plant more fruit trees.

We don't want to plant proper standard trees because a) that will cut down the amount of available good grazing for the sheep due to the lack of light as the tree's leaves grow or b) the sheep will chew the new trees to nubbins, even with tree guards. So, we've decided to do cordons against the barn walls and then use electric fencing to keep the sheep off. It never dawned on me today just how much space we have against the barns.

Cordons are fruit trees that have been restricted to grow on a single stem so they can be grown against a wall or be trained into an edible hedge. The real beauty of them though is that the planting distance is 2.5ft between each one, which means you can get a lot of different varieties of fruit in a small space. In fact, you could probably get a different eating apple for a good six months of the year. We intend to grow them at a 45 degree angle so we can reach the top of the fruiting stem.

I started cutting back the nettles in the paddock (yet again!) the other day to begin prepping the area for the new plants and realised that I had never really noticed there were a few very thick wooden posts.

Closer inspection revealed these had previously had wires running across them, probably for soft fruit. A great find! All we need is the wires attached to them and we're pretty much good to go.

I have three bare-rooted apple tree cordons to plant right now that I bought a while ago, but they are label-less and they could be anything so this morning I ordered new four fruit trees - three 1-year plants for training and one trained cordon - for delivery at the end of November:

Apple: Scrumptious
Pear: Packham's Triumph
Gage: Oullins Golden (which is what we had at the old house)
Plum: Victoria

At the same time I ordered the wire and fittings so by next weekend I'm aiming to have the wires in place ready to plant up the three mystery apples.

Then every year from now on we will buy a couple of different varieties of fruit and expand the harvesting window.

I'm getting quite excited by the new project!