How to Grow Fruit in Small Gardens | Easy, Space-Saving Ideas

Growing your own fruit is one of life's greatest pleasures and you can have fruit trees and bushes in your garden no matter how large or small it is. Here's my guide to growing fruit in a small garden. When you say the words apple tree most of us have an image of that great big bramley seedling that granny used to make apple pies out of. It had a swing hanging from it and it took over most of the garden and in today's small gardens, socking great apple trees like that, romantic though they are, can't really fit in. So we need to look at trees that take up less room and there are two ways of getting them to do that. One is to make sure they're grafted onto a dwarfing rootstock which will keep them small and the other is to train them. This is a You can see the fruit already swelling and it's trained as a fan. All the branches are spread out and trained into this bamboo framework like the spokes of a fan. You can also train them into what's called an espalier and there branches are taken in horizontal layers and they're great for training up against a sunny south or west facing wall and the wall itself will help to righten the The trick is to prune them in summer, taking off growths like this and training in the ones you want and tying them in. When the leaves are all lost in winter you can tidy them up a bit. And for a small garden here you're using vertical space but on a flat plane it's taking up very little room but giving you a nice crop of fruit. On the edge of my veg beds here I have single tier espaliers, one stem taken out to the right, one to the left, only a foot off the ground. You can see why they're called step over apples. They're decorative, lovely when the blossoms out and they carry a half decent crop of fruit, not enough to see you through the winter but certainly enough for a treat and you can get them as apples or as pears. One side have got apples the other side If you like crab apple jelly then a crab apple like everest, malus everest, has glorious white blossom. It's a cracking tree not only to make crab apple jelly from but also because it doesn't grow too big in a small garden, three or four meters high and perhaps two to three meters across but on a clear stem you can still plant plenty of things underneath it because it doesn't cast too much shade. The white blossom turns into red and yellow fruits. At the moment they're green, they're not fully ripe. They look great on the tree if you just don't want to eat them, though the birds probably will, but if you harvest them they make fabulous crab apple jelly. So an eating apple, cox's orange pippin, a crab apple. What about pears? Apart from growing them as stepovers you can be a bit cunning here too. You can get what's called a duo variety of pears. This is grafted onto a rootstock at the bottom but it's two distinct varieties. Here you've got conference, the classic long narrow pear, sometimes a bit hard, and on the right, two pears for the price of one tree, again cramming quite a lot into your small space. And that's another tree which could be grown against a sunny wall or fence, taking up very little space but giving you enormous pleasure. But what if you have virtually no room at all and you're desperate for a plum tree? It can be yours. This one here is a little poppet, it's called opal, it's on a very dwarfing rootstock. I'm sitting down because if this were planted in the ground that's about as tall as it gets, six or seven feet, carrying plums in late summer and there's nothing I like more than plucking a sun-warmed plum when it's ripe and eating it in the garden. So those are the tree fruits, or as they're known in the trade, top fruit. What about soft fruit, the kind you get off bushes? Now you can fit those into any garden as well. The one disadvantage with soft fruits is that birds like them every bit as much as we do, so you've either got to pick the fruit very very quickly before the birds get to it, or if you've got the space, put up a fruit cage and that way you can keep the birds off and you go in through the door and gather the fruits when you want them. Raspberries in particular are a favourite fruit of mine, they crop so well they're really easy to grow, naturally a woodland plant so they can cope with a bit of shade in your garden. You'll find them in pots in the garden centre, they'll be described as summer fruiters or autumn fruiters. The summer fruiters start fruiting in June, the autumn fruiters a couple of months later, they don't wait until October. I grow a row of each if you've got the space and enjoy them right the way through the summer. Gooseberries are an acquired taste and the big disadvantage with gooseberry bushes is they're very thorny, so picking the fruits is quite tricky, but if you like, as I do, gooseberry full, gosh gooseberries are fab. They grow generally speaking as a bush rather than as a cane which is what you get from the raspberries, so you can space these a couple of feet apart and perhaps three or four bushes will do you for gooseberries. When it comes to currant bushes, you've got red currants, white currants and this one, a black currant. They really are heavy croppers, a black currant bush can come out that far and that high, you may only need one if you've got much more space, of course you can have more, but one bush will do for most families who just want a few black currants to go on the breakfast cereal. But the one soft fruit that will fit in any garden and even in a pot on your doorstep is the strawberry and if you get one like this, this is called summer breeze, you get red flowers, they're normally white and the berries develop always from the centre of the bloom there. A large pot with three or four strawberry plants in, in a sunny spot on a patio or terrace or as I say even a doorstep, you'll look forward to these coming and just make sure with all of these as I say that you get there before the birds do, they recognise a good thing when they see it. I hope I've encouraged you to have a go with fruit, don't be frightened of them, just check that they're on a dwarfing rootstock if they're trees and if you haven't got a lot of space at all, grow them flat against a wall or fence, then they take up no room whatsoever and they give you a lovely crop to look forward to, there's nothing to be frightened of in growing fruit. If you want more gardening advice and inspiration like this, then why not subscribe to my channel, I'm posting new videos every week.