One of my New Years resolutions for the vegetable garden was to have fruit trees. We have had previous successes with blueberry bushes and growing strawberries so we wanted to up our gain with the fruit to some apple trees.

Who doesn’t love apple pie, apple crumble, apple sauce on porridge etc, there are so many uses, that we wanted to start growing our own apples.

Firstly we had to think of what sort of trees we wanted.

• Low Maintenance, not needing pruning often,
• Small trees in height, so our little one could help pick the apples and so that the trees wouldn’t create a shadow over the vegetable plots as these are the sunniest spots in the garden.
• Trees that could be planted within a metre of one another.
• Trees that could be put in pots and grow on if necessary in pots. So they could be moved to the best sunniest position.

The options are: fruit trees on a Dwarf M27 root stock or sometimes know as columnar trees which we have chosen that will grow no more than 2 meters in height.

We have bought the following fruit trees:

• Apple Empire
• Apple Golden Delicious
• Apple Lobo
• Pear Clapps Favourite
• Peach Inka
• Apricot Early Orange

The Peach and Apricot are currently in pots in the greenhouse as they are susceptible to frost and the cold weather than we have been having recently in the UK. They will be put outside in the Spring sunshine.

The 3 apples and a pear trees have been planted outside in the ground at the end of the vegetable beds with a fence behind them. The fence should provide some shelter from the wind and in summer keep the warmth for their growing. The ground has been covered with stones to create a mulch to help with retaining moisture and nutrients in the soil.

Bare Fruit trees can be bought and planted from October to March. Currently the supermarkets and stores like B&M and Home Bargains in the UK have bare fruit trees for a fraction of the price that online garden centres sell them for.

Update – 1 Year Growth.