restoring old apple trees part 3

Continuing a morning's work in a friend's back garden orchard. As discussed, there are 2 main reasons for growing an apple tree in your garden, fruit production and beauty. Ideally the 2 things can be combined.

In our commercial orchard, we are out for maximum production. I know that even higher production is achieved from modern high input hedgerow orchards, but I won't go that far, not our scene. we grow apples on open centre and delayed open centre dwarf bushes no taller than 7 feet, maybe 8 feet tall, so that all the apples can be thinned, picked etc from ground level. This is fine for orchard production but maybe less than ideal where you have a tree or three in the back garden and want them as 'architectural' features, e.g. to sit under their shade in the summer or for them to break up the skyline and shield your field of vision from something angular or disagreeable. Maybe the view of the tree from the bathroom or bedroom window is a main reason for growing it, and that's fine. The principles which govern teh growth of the tree are the same but one pruning plan does not fit all.

The trees in this set of videos are all standards. Nobody grows these commercially any more, but they may be the ideal choice for a garden, providing you are not too worried aboutmaximising the apple crop. Standards typically have a 6 foot (2 metre) trunk with the branches coming out at this level or higher. GREAT for sitting under in the good old sumertime, EXCELLENT for visual beauty-and remember your neighours too, city dwellers get great joy from the sight of other people's fruit trees over their garden fences. Your trees may be admired by people you have never met!

However, with tall standards you need to get up a ladder to do a lot of the tree care, and this may be a problem. You cannot manage standard trees as intensively as dwarf trees which you can reach every part of from the ground. Its also near impossible to spray tall trees, apart from anything else you would get spray drifting over into your neighbour's garden, which is unacceptable. So standard trees may be a good choice, probably it would be a good idea to invest in a pole pruner and some sort of device like a small net on a string to pick the apples

Our plan here was to preserve the effect so that our friends could sit at a table in summertime and enjoy food and company surrounded by tall standard apple trees. Converting the trees to more productive bush forms would not have achieved this aim, and would likely have killed these particular trees, so would have been wrong.

What we did was completely remove 2 grossly overcrowded trees, neither of which was growing really well and one of which was quite diseased, and we thinned out the other 2 by removing overcrowded branches up to about 30% of the total.

The overall shape and outline of the 2 trees was preserved and they should both cast shade, provide a pleasant view and blossom and fruit in 2009. Both will hopefully grow strongly in summer 2009 to fill the space vacated by the trees we removed.

I sometimes see trees like this butchered by cutting all the main branches back hard. This is horribly ugly, and will achieve NEITHER better fruiting NOR preserve the tree's natural beauty. So called professional gardeners sometimes to this. DON'T LET THEM!!!!!!!!

Category:

Education

Tags:

• apple
• orchard
• garden
• prune
• pruning
• restore
• restoration
• fruitwise
• stephen
• hayes

[therealvicar]

Well done stephen

Great help with the trees in my new Rectory!

Thanks

Phil

[ThePetra11]

Great videos,just the info im looking for,thanks

[MadBadVoodo]

Five Stars!