|
Home grown fruit – still one of the gardeners’ biggest pleasures by Sally GregsonAmidst all the fashionable flurry of growing your own veggies, it’s easy to overlook the delights of home-grown fruit.
 From rhubarb, raspberry canes and bushes laden with gooseberries, to apples and apricots, you could make a serious dent in the family shopping bills. Even in a small garden a gooseberry bush or a rhubarb plant could be found a place among the flowers and vegetables; ‘step-over’ apple cordons take up very little space; and a small apricot tree is just as decorative as any ornamental cherry.
A clump of Rhubarb growing in a sunny corner just needs a goodly dollop of garden compost or well-rotted manure in autumn for it to produce fleshy pink shoots in spring that are just asking to be made into crumble. If you pop a deep bucket with no bottom, or a smart pottery rhubarb forcer, over the crown just as the buds begin to push up from the ground in late winter, the young stems will be palest pink and meltingly delicious poached with a little orange juice and sugar. Thereafter the forcer can be removed and the stems cut sparingly throughout the spring.
 Red fruit is especially attractive to birds, and for this reason owners of large gardens grow raspberries, loganberries and gooseberries in a fruit cage. However autumn-fruiting raspberries seem to be more or less ignored by the birds. Perhaps their palates are a bit jaded at the end of the summer. So if you have no room for a cage you could perhaps find a shady corner of the garden suitable for a row of autumn raspberry canes.
Improve the soil with lots of organic matter and plant them about 40-45cm (15-18ins) apart in a row. Cut back the top growth on the canes to about 15cm (6ins) from the ground now and tie in the new growth as it appears to wires stretched between two stout posts. Then every February cut out the fruited canes and tie in the next new canes to the wires.
Loganberries are just as easy to grow providing the soil is fertile and drains well. Just one plant can be fan-trained against a sunny wall, and provided plenty of organic matter is added at planting time and each winter, it will produce enough fat juicy fruit to freeze for the rest of the year.
After planting, the top growth should be pruned back to a strong bud about 30cm (12ins) above the soil and the new growth trained in to form a fan. They should start to produce fruit the following summer when the old fruited canes are cut out and the new ones trained in.
Gooseberries are susceptible to hungry birds not just when their fruit starts to ripen, but when the bushes are dormant. Bullfinches in particular can disbud a gooseberry bush at any time from November to late spring, so Grandma’s old net curtains need to be draped over the bushes for quite some time. That said, they are easy to grow in the border provided the soil is well drained and its neighbours do not overcrowd the bushes. They can also be fan-trained against a wall and pruned each winter to shape, bearing in mind that they fruit on the shoots that grew the previous season. Apply tomato fertiliser or lightly sprinkle bonfire ash around the plant in spring to encourage fruiting and mulch the roots each spring with garden compost to keep the bush healthy.
 Fruit trees are best planted bare-root during the winter too. ‘Step-over’ apples are ideal for a small garden. They are trained horizontally just 30cm (12ins) from the ground and with the correct pruning will produce plenty of fruit. A specialist nursery will supply 2-3 year old ‘step-overs’ already trained to shape. All they need is planting well with lots of organic matter in the planting hole.
Apricot trees are ever more successful in UK gardens as our climate warms up, so long as they are planted in draining, fertile soil and not cold, wet clay. Left to their own devices apricot trees are quite large (about 3m, (10ft) in all directions), but if there’s not enough room, they could be grown as espaliers along a sunny wall or on a trellis, although pruning them every year may cause disease through the open wounds. Apricots are mostly self-fertile, producing fruit on the older wood, and after two or three years you can look forward to about 20 honey-soft fruits fresh from the bough.
HARDY APRICOT VARIETIES
- The Hungarian variety ‘Hargrand’ is very hardy and resistant to peach leaf curl. St Julien ‘A’ rootstock would keep it lower (2-2.5m/6-8ft).
- ‘Avalon Pride’ is a heavy-fruiting variety that would be suitable for warmer areas of the country, but is susceptible to late spring frosts. It’s resistant to peach leaf curl.
- There are some new self-fertile varieties from the US. Look out for ‘Tomcot’, and ‘Flavourcot’ that produce hundreds of delicious fruit on very hardy trees. The latest Torinel rootstock ensures heavy fruiting on a 3m tree.
TOPICAL TIPS- Check over the apples you have stored for the winter; discard the duds and eat the bruisers.
- Make sure the fruit-tree ties are not so loose that the tree will rock, nor too tight that it’s strangled.
- Apply one of the new ‘winter washes’ based on plant oils to your woody fruit. It helps to control over-wintering pests in the bark.
|
|
|
|
<< Start < Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Next > End >>
|
|
Page 1 of 8 |
