Country Landowner

It’s fairly easy to plant a small orchard and produce fresh-grown fruit each year.

I’ve created two orchards on my land in the last few years and each one has given enjoyment and reward.

As well as fresh fruit, an orchard can also improve your land by providing a natural screen between one area and another, and giving an attractive sight to look at, especially in Spring when the trees are in blossom.

At the start, it does require some work to plant the trees and get them established.

In the first year or two, you have to control grass and weeds around the trees and make sure they receive enough water through rain or irrigation.

But in later years, there’s not too much to do. It’s mainly pruning and picking the fruit, plus perhaps some spraying to control insect pests, although you may choose not to do this.

An orchard doesn’t have to be big. As few as ten trees will give you plenty of apples for your own use.

Of course, if you want to sell your apples in local shops and farmers’ markets, or turn them into a product like apple juice, then you’ll probably want a greater number of trees.

Selecting the best variety and type of trees is important.

Apple trees consist of two parts grafted together. At the bottom is the Rootstock - this controls the growth and eventual size of the tree. At the top, is the Scion - this is the part that produces the branches that bear the fruit.

I’ve found that local commercial suppliers of fruit trees are very helpful and willing to advise, even if you’re buying only a small number of trees. They’re also knowledgable about local growing conditions.

In discussion with your supplier, you’ll want to consider several factors including:

* Your intended use for the fruit
* Desired eventual size of tree
* Local climate, soil and need for disease resistance
* Polination
* Seasonality

Use for your fruit

Do you want desert apples (like gala or cox) to eat raw, or cooking apples (like bramley) to make, for example, pies or chutneys? If you are going to produce juice, then a combination of sweet and tart varieties is usually good.

Size of tree

The eventual size of tree is largely determined by the rootstock. Smaller trees are preferred by growers as they are easier to prune and pick.

Rootstocks are identified by “M” numbers and range from extreme dwarf (M27), through dwarf (M9 and M26) to semi-dwarf (M7 and M106). The smaller varieties require longterm support from stakes or wires.

Local factors

Soil conditions and local climates vary from area to area. Some rootstocks tolerate wet or dry soils and cold winter conditions, better than others.

There’s also a number of common apple tree diseases, and their prevalence varies according to local conditions, especially whether the local climate tends to be wetter or drier.

Different tree varieties and rootstocks show different susceptability to diseases.

Polination

Some varieties are better at self-polination than others. It’s usually recommended to have 2-3 complementary varieties in an orchard to encourage polination.

Seasonality

Some varieties produce their fruit earlier in the season than others. I have some Discovery trees that can be picked in June/July whereas my Saturn trees are not ready until Late September or October.

In another article, I wrote about the attractions of a small orchard and the things to consider when selecting suitable varieties of apple tree.

Let’s now look at how to actually plant the trees. I’ll explain what I did when I started my orchards.

Receiving the trees

Assuming you buy from a commercial supplier like I did, your trees will be bare-rooted, not growing in pots as a garden centre would sell them. They will be around 1.2-1.5 m tall and probably tied together in bunches of about 10.

If the trees have significant branches, these will be gently bent and tied-in, so the bunch is not bulky. A bunch of ten such bare-rooted trees, is light to carry, and several bunches can quite easy to fit in an estate car or small van.

Whether you collect your trees yourself, or have them delivered, you will need to store them carefully, if you’re not ready to plant immediately.

The delicate bare roots must be kept moist and be protected from frost. You can wrap the roots in plastic and keep them damp, or you can carefully and temporarily plant the trees in a sand pit, if you have one.

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Preparing to plant

When you’re getting ready to plant, it’s good to soak the roots in water for several hours beforehand, so they are moist and supple.

What you do, will depend on whether you do the planting yourself, or whether you decide it’s too much work and engage a contractor.

I’ve done it both ways.

Planting them yourself

For each tree, you’ll need a wooden post to support it, a tie to secure it to the post and a guard around the base of the trunk to protect it from rabbits and mice.

So you’ll need to obtain sufficient supplies:

* Posts are around £1 each plus delivery (and they are heavy)
* Tree tie is a special rubber tubing that comes on a big roll for the equivalent of around 10 pence per tree
* Plastic tree guard material (and cable ties to fasten it), also comes on a big roll for around 50 pence per tree.

The planting process I then used was:

* Cut the grass short where the tree will go (you may want to apply a herbicide to kill the grass, well in advance of any planting)
* Lay out a straight line as a guide
* Bang in a post
* To the side of the post, dig a hole a little wider than the spread diameter of the tree roots and deep enough so when filled-in, the finished soil level will come up to 10-15 cm BELOW the joint between rootstock and scion (this is quite easy to see)
* Put a few litres of water into the hole
* Position the tree with the scion joint scar facing away from the prevailing winds (usually facing North-ish in the UK)
* Fill-in the hole
* Tie the tree to the post with a length of tree-tie tubing
* Cut about 0.5m of tree guard mesh and clip it together, around the base of the trunk with cable ties
* Water in well
* Move on to the next tree. I reckoned on about 10mins per tree and it’s much easier with two people

I did three hundred trees like this, for my most recent orchard.

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Employing a planting contractor

For my first orchard, I used a local contractor.

He arrived on the day with three men and the biggest tractor I had ever seen.

The tractor had a hydraulic post rammer attached and it just smoothly pushed each wooden post into the ground in seconds.

The men then planted the trees, using much the same process as I descibed above, but with that remarkable speed that only comes from doing a job professionally.

Again, it was three hundred trees. But this time, just four hours later they were all in.

The cost was not much over £3 per tree, including posts and other materials, so it was pretty good value, although this was a few years ago.

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