Gardening - Selecting an apple tree to suit your garden

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Written by Staff Reporter

Wednesday, 07 November 2007

Hopefully after reading last week's column you will have selected a location or two within you garden for some fruiting apple trees. Now let’s look at which varieties will suit you best. Before you rush to the garden centre, consider what height and spread of apple tree will sit within your garden space best.

The type of rootstock selected will dictate the apple tree’s yearly growth rate and its eventual size. Selecting the correct fruit tree rootstock for your situation can mean the difference between a good crop and a poor crop caused by over pruning whilst keeping the tree within bounds.

Rootstocks
For very small sites, or container growing, chose an apple tree with an M27 rootstock. This limits the growth to approx one metre in height with a similar spread in a bush-like shape. Moving up in size is the M26 rootstock, which gives you a slightly larger tree at two metres by two metres. Apple trees grown on these M27 and M26 rootstocks can be expected to produce a reasonable crop of fruit after three years.

The most commonly planted apple tree rootstock is the MM106, causing trees to grow to an eventual height and spread of four metres. This is a great rootstock for medium sized and larger gardens, producing up to 50lbs of fruit when mature. It takes longer to begin producing fruit, with a wait of five years common. But it’s well worth the wait.

Apple taste and texture
Once you have decided on your rootstock, you must then decide on the main body of the apple tree. This is known in the horticultural trade a ‘scion’, a graft onto the rootstock. With the rootstock controlling the growth, the grafted ‘scion’ controls the type of apple produced.

So, what type of apple do you wish your tree to produce? Is it to be a dessert apple (eater) or maybe you would like to grow some culinary apples, commonly known as cookers.

This all comes down to a matter of personal taste. It would be worth your while to sample different types of apples from your local fruit shop to ascertain which varieties of apple are for you. It can be very disappointing to wait four years for your first apple harvest, only to find your face contorts with the sourness of the first bite.

Try the following tree types if you prefer your dessert apples sweet and juicy: Cox's Orange Pippin, Fiesta, Fortune or Jonagold Jupiter. If you like less sweetness and more acidity in your eating apple, try one of these: Discovery, James Grieve or Greensleeves.

The culinary or cooking apples nearly all tend to be very acidic, such as Bramleys Seedling, Grenadier and Rev. W. Wilks. Altering the amount of sugar added when cooking these will bring them to your specific taste, albeit with slightly different textures.

Next week I will deal with the planting and pollination of your tree. So until then happy gardening and, remember, a weed is just a plant in the wrong place.

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