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~ A Life in Wellies

wellywoman

Tag Archives: Espaliered apple

Weaving, Winding and Snipping

05 Wednesday Dec 2012

Posted by wellywoman in Fruit, In the Garden, On the plot

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Charles Dowding, Espaliered apple, Japanese wineberry, RHS, tayberry

Whether it’s an allotment or garden, most of us don’t have a lot of growing space and have ambitions greater than room will allow. There are ways of maximising space though. Fruit bushes and even trees can be trained in all sorts of ways making it possible to fit quite a selection into a small area. With careful planning and some nifty work with the secateurs it’s surprising just how much you can grow.

Training my tayberry

Training my tayberry

My tayberry is a perfect example. A cross between a raspberry and a blackberry its growth habits are certainly more blackberry than raspberry. The canes it sends out are long, really long, up to 9ft. It’s also a biennial cropper which means that it sends out canes one year which then flower and fruit the next. The idea when I first planted it was to train it into a panel of wire fencing with one year’s canes which would be bearing the fruit trained in one direction and then the fresh canes it sent up during that growing season trained the other. That was the plan anyway. I just didn’t give the plant enough space or metal fencing for this method to actually work. Instead, I ended up weaving and winding the canes around the metal support in a snake-like fashion. The problem came when the new canes started to grow from the base during the summer. It’s important to keep the two different years’ growth separate so that when you come to prune out the canes that have fruited you don’t mistake any of next year’s growth. If you do you’ll have no fruit the following year. In the end, I ended up allowing these stems to simply grow out along the ground. By August, the tayberry had stopped fruiting and I pruned those canes out at the base and removed all the growth that was on the metal support. The task then was to wrestle with the new growth. Fortunately, the canes remain really pliable and apart from the vicious thorns (you can buy a thorn-free variety) it isn’t too difficult a job to wind these stems in and out of the fence support, snaking them around just as the others had been. It is a bit of a faff but doing it this way means my tayberry only takes up a space of about 4ft. Ideally, each year’s worth of growth would have a space of about 6ft so that’s a space of 12ft in total but I’m not sure many of us could devote that to one plant.

A fellow allotmenteer has employed the same strategy successfully with a hybrid blackberry and Naomi at Out of my Shed recently wrote about training her Japanese wineberry which has very similar sprawling growth. Her ideas are much more aesthetic than mine! This summer I visited the kitchen garden of a local restaurant and I loved the idea they had had of growing a thorn free variety of blackberry up one side of an arch and on the other an apple was being trained to form an apple and blackberry crumble archway.

A blackberry being trained up an archway

A blackberry being trained up an archway

I dream of having my own orchard but at the moment it certainly isn’t a possibility but I did manage to squeeze in an espalier apple tree into the garden last spring. I was impatient and so bought one that came already trained into 2 tiers but when I pruned it in July I spotted two branches that looked like the beginnings of a third level. With the posts and wire in place for the tree already Wellyman added another line of wire and I tied some twine around the 2 stems to the wire to start training the branches down into a horizontal position. We only got 6 fruit from the tree this year but I’m hopeful as the tree gets older that we should get a good supply.

I have toyed with the idea of adding some stepover apples to one of my beds at the allotment. These are the type that grow to about 1ft in height before the branches are trained out horizontally. I really like the idea that I could get several varieties running down the edge of one of my beds with space to grow salad crops which would not make great demands on the soil. Charles Dowding successfully grows crops like this at the base of his larger apple trees. Pruning of fruit trees grown in this way might seem quite daunting but armed with my RHS encyclopaedia it wasn’t actually that difficult. It is mainly about keeping the shape of the trained tree and encouraging fruiting wood by keeping the stems short and stubby. One of the great advantages of all this pruning and contorting is that it actually encourages the plants to produce more fruit, a bonus in a small space.

Pears, cherries and nectarines can be trained to fit smaller spaces and gooseberries can be made into beautiful standards giving your kitchen garden or allotment a sophisticated air. Currants can also be trained and look beautiful up against a wall dripping in glistening fruit. By concentrating growth to fewer stems and opening up the plant more light can get to the wood to ripen it, important for fruit production. It also means fruit will ripen more quickly and air flow around the plant is improved, leading to fewer problems with fungal diseases.

I’d love to see any of your own examples of growing fruit in small spaces.

Garden Centre Splurge

23 Friday Mar 2012

Posted by wellywoman in Fruit, In the Garden, Ponds

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

Discovery Apple, Espaliered apple, garden pond, mycchorizal fungi, Puddle Plants

Espalier Apple Tree

Our new apple tree

Last weekend must have been the weekend for impulse buying for the garden. Both Jo at The Good Life and Caro at Urban Veg Patch succumbed to the charms of their local garden centre and they weren’t alone. I only popped in to have a look at climbing plants and came out with 2 pots of cottage pinks, a pond liner and an espaliered apple tree. Oh dear, where did my willpower go?

We had been thinking about a pond and an apple tree for a while but had procrastinated and managed to find plenty of reasons not to buy them; we should be saving up, too many bills to pay, how long are we going to stay in this house, all those sorts of things. Then I read a post at The Garden Smallholder by Karen, about her own pond and it got me thinking all over again. I started eyeing up potential spots, we don’t have much room so it would really depend on whether we could get the right size liner and that they weren’t too expensive. So I mentioned it to Wellyman and he said he was keen too. In the case of the apple, well we had the perfect spot for an espalier but thought we had left it too late to find one.

Scroll forward several days to the garden centre. We headed straight for the aquatic section where there was a liner that looked about the right size. Not ones to be totally impulsive, we took the measurments and decided we’d check first at home that it would fit without looking ridiculous and then maybe pop back on Sunday.

We then found the climbers and I had pretty much decided to go for a Trachelospermum jasminoides to go by our front door when I got distracted by some cottage pinks, which I love. There were really lovely specimens with plenty of cuttings potential and then Wellyman, who had wandered off somewhere reappeared declaring he had found the perfect apple tree and it was a good price. He was right, it was exactly the right size for it’s potential home, a two tiered Discovery apple. There followed much humming and hawing, the purchase of the cottage pinks and a trip home to do said measurements. An hour later we were back at the garden centre handing over the credit card. Ouch!

Garden Pond

The pond looking a little bare at the moment

So we’re now the proud owners of a pond and an apple tree. The bank balance has taken a bit of a hit. There are of course all the other costs involved, pond plants, stones for around the edge, plants for around the edge of the pond to give it that, well pondy feel. As for the apple, there are posts and hooks and wire and mycchorizal fungi. We spent another hour or so at the garden centre yesterday buying all that stuff. Even so, I’m sure we’ll get a huge amount of pleasure from both. I’m hoping we’ll attract some frogs, I could do with some help on the slug front and I’m looking forward to the blossom on the apple tree and then eating our own fruit in the autumn. Both will add different elements to the garden and I’ll have to learn how to prune an espalier properly, which is good because I like a new challenge.

Hopefully, with a dry weekend Wellyman should get the posts and wires in place for the apple so we can get rid of the temporary supports and then I need to hit the books to find some plants to put around the pond so it doesn’t look so bare. Although I don’t like makeover, instant gardens I never like the stage of a garden where you’re waiting for everything to fill out and there’s just a bit too much soil on display. It’s for this reason I tend to buy to many plants and then realise that it doesn’t actually take them too long to fill a space. So I will have to be more restrained this time.

This morning I made a small boggy area around the pond, digging out some soil and placing some black liner in the hole. I made sure there were plenty of holes in the liner and added some grit to the bottom, so that the soil doesn’t clog up the holes and then backfilled and planted up some Iris sibirica and a couple of ragged robin plants, both of which like damp soil. Hopefully it won’t be long before we’ve attracted some wildlife.

I’d just like to give a quick mention to Puddle Plants. One of the things that had put me off about establishing our own pond in the past had been the price of pond plants. The typical cost at our local garden centres was £6 a plant but at Puddle Plants they are around £2 to £3 and although there is a delivery charge they still worked out cheaper. They are based in Suffolk and have a great website and from ordering on Monday I had the plants by Thursday, so I would definitely recommend them.

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My latest book – The Crafted Garden

My latest book - The Crafted Garden

My latest book - The Crafted Garden

My Book – The Cut Flower Patch

My Book - The Cut Flower Patch. Available to buy from the RHS online bookshop.

The Cut Flower Patch – Garden Media Guild Practical Book 2014

The Cut Flower Patch - Garden Media Guild Practical Book 2014
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