How to Grow Your Own Micro-Orchard

Most people think that to have an orchard you need acres of land, but even the smallest garden can accommodate five, ten or more fruit trees, and once they're planted they will fruit for years to come. Today I'm at one of the world's most prestigious fruit tree suppliers to learn how to create a micro orchard for any space. Steph, we've come at the right time haven't we? What a beautiful day and what a beautiful time of year to be here. Now it's true isn't it, there are literally fruit trees for any shape or size of garden. Absolutely, and it's a common misconception that fruit trees have to be big. We've got a huge range of naturally small ones, we can also grow them in lots of different ways to make them compact, and even you can grow them in pots, so they're great for any size of garden, rural, urban, big and small, we've definitely got a fruit tree for any size. And I've seen them on little balconies, it's possible literally anywhere. Yeah absolutely, most fruit trees are really happy actually to grow in pots as long as you pick the right one, so they're great pot growing subjects. And how do you keep them small? It's different sort of ways of training them I guess. Yeah, so there's a number of different ways we can do that. So by pruning, by picking a naturally small dwarf or columnar, which is upright variety, or by using and selecting a dwarf rootstock, we'll talk about that later. Fantastic. Okay, so this is a really interesting variety, I'll give you one to try. It's a great colour isn't it, look at that. It is, take a bite and tell me what you think. Oh wow, look at that, it's incredible, it's such a strong colour. It is, yeah, it is, it just shows the diversity of apples that you can get out there, white fleshed, red fleshed, different flavours, different colours, different sizes. What's this one called then? It's called Tickled Pink. How many varieties of apple are there? Well just generally, like hundreds I'm guessing. Oh gosh, no thousands. I think there's at least 7,000, I mean even just in this one orchard here we have over a thousand different varieties. Wow, incredible. So I've brought you here to show you a classic example of a trained fruit tree. Now when we talk about trained trees, we're not teaching them to do tricks, it's not like go fetch and that kind of thing, it is training them into different shapes. Okay. So this is called an espalier, but there are also different shapes available and you can do anything you like with them really. So fan trains is something you classically see, also stepovers and cordons, they're all really classic examples. You might find them in ward gardens, that kind of place. We went to a garden last summer, Steph, where it's a very small, ordinary sort of size garden, but he had these stepover apples, there's almost like an edging to his veg garden, and it was just such a beautiful, it's inspiration for doing this video actually, just sort of packing all of these fruits in. And this kind of shape is, because it's on a single plane, it's great for growing against walls and fences I guess. Absolutely, so brilliant for small spaces, also where you want to be a bit more inventive, you can create partitions in gardens with this kind of thing, grow them up against a fence, and as you're they don't encroach too much, so they're not taking up too much space, and it's a really, as you can see, productive way of growing fruit. So a lot of fruit on here in the spring, it's filled with blossom and it looks really decorative too. And you imagine bagging all this up, you get quite a lot of fruit from just this one plant. What sort of yields can you expect? I know it's sort of how long is a piece of string, but from something like this that's reached its sort of final size, you can get quite a lot, can't you? You can, you know, you could get almost like a ton off this kind of thing, I mean eventually when they're fully grown, but it depends very much on the soil, the site, how much pruning you do, but yeah, very productive. And this is a stunning variety, look at it, it almost looks like sort of oranges from a distance. Do you want to try one? Oh do It's called Surprise, this variety, but yeah, orange on the outside and pink in the middle. There's all sorts of surprises here today, this is fantastic. Yeah, but it's this variety is, we, I mean, I love this, it's one of my favourites, it's got real tropical, like, pineapple flavours. I'm picking it up now, yeah. So varieties that you find, you know, in the supermarket sometimes are not quite as flavourful as the varieties you can grow at home, and also just picking a variety, picking an apple from your own tree. And I guess they've got to think about shelf life and transit here, growing at home, pick it and eat it, you don't need to worry about any of that. Yeah, that's exactly right, yeah. Steph, you've told me these are conference pears and there's two of us and we're having a chat, a conference pear. Oh, I love it, I've not heard that one before actually. I'm sure there must be lots of puns with fruit, but anyway, definitely use it again. Tell me what's going on here, so this is, you said this is 20 years old, it seems, wow, it's quite hard to believe because it's so small. That's it, so a great way to keep trees smaller, fruit trees, if you want to, is by doing a bit of pruning and it's something that you should not be afraid of doing. I think a lot of people are worried about it. A bit of a dark heart kind of feel about it, isn't there, but it shouldn't be intimidated. Not at all, no, certainly apples and pears, they're really easy subjects, they love a good prune actually, winter pruning and you can do summer pruning as well, don't be afraid, have a go, you probably won't kill it, in fact you won't kill it, you won't kill it, but this, yeah, 15, 20 years old and we have pruned these very hard because we're actually looking for propagation material, but as you can see, it's kept the tree at a really nice size, we've still got lots of fruit on it. No step ladder needed to harvest these guys. Exactly, yeah, that's great. Steph, I know there's a relatively big amount to consider when pruning, but can you give us like a potted kind of in a nutshell approach to it? Yeah, so some very simple rules to stick to is take out any diseased branches, take out any branches that are crossing into the tree because the more wind and air movement we can get through, it's really helpful. Make sure you pick a nice dry day to do and clean your equipment, so if you're using secateurs or anything, just give them a wipe with some anti-back wipe in between and if you've got stone fruit, now stone fruit is anything with a stone in, so cherries, plums, gauges, damsons, apricots, peaches, etc, only prune those during the summer months, so June and July will be perfect, don't touch them in the winter, they don't enjoy it and it can just increase disease. Or December, January if you're following us down under. Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely, yeah, apples and pears, they really can be pruned January, February and also in the summertime as well and if you are doing training with your fruit trees, exactly, then what's really important is that you do summer prune those and that's apples and pears and that way you don't get such vigorous growth and you can maintain the really nice shapes that you see with those forms. So this is another great way of growing fruit in a small area and these are cordons, so these are called traditional cordons, they're at 45 degrees but you can grow them upright, they would be called upright cordons and they're a really great way of getting quite a lot of varieties in a small area. Yeah, I was going to say, because looking at them they look about 80 to 90, so like three foot apart, 90 centimeters. Yeah, absolutely and you can go closer if you want to and all of this extension growth is just very simply pruned back, so cut them off in the winter, on the summer and down to about sort of three or four inches coming off from the stem and you end up with this wonderful collection of your fruit all along the bough here, so nice and productive, keeping your trees really small, so a great way to grow in a smaller area. That's the definition of productivity here, it's like literally crammed all the way along, it's insane. That's it, absolutely, so brilliant on a back fence maybe, something like that, yeah, really good. And for most fruits that are against a fence, are we wanting to face the kind of midday or afternoon sun, is that the best? Ideally, yeah, you can grow apples on north-facing fence or maybe like a morello cherry, but really full sun or semi-shade, which would be either afternoon or morning. I see, yeah. That's quite something, isn't it? Yeah, gorgeous tiny. We're crouched down, Steph, these can't be much more than what three foot tall, these are remarkable. What have we got here? So this is a variety called ballerina samba and it is a naturally dwarf tree, so we're not growing on any special roots or anything, it is just straight up, the same plant. So not only is it small, it is also very very narrow for an apple tree, so it just shows that you don't need a lot of space, so these can be grown in any size of garden and they're going to be not needing any pruning, they're just really going to stay small and they're really great subjects for growing in pots, so you can grow these on a balcony and they're not going to get too weighty and they're not going to take up too much space, so there's so much choice. So ballerina is a type of apple, so there's actually quite a few different varieties of ballerina then, so you can have quite a little good mix then? Yeah, you can have a little collection. So we call this a columnar apple type tree, so you can also get columnar pear trees, for example obelisk is a really nice variety, you can get columnar cherry trees, so celeste would be a great variety, again they don't take up too much space, and you can get columnar crab apple trees as well, again nice and upright, so really nice features. Yeah lovely, and you really would have your own little orchard then of different types of fruits as well, a lovely collection. That's it, yeah. So these apples are really small, is this a crab apple? It is a crab apple, yes exactly, so it's in the apple family, but it is an ornamental apple rather than a fruiting apple, although some people do eat them, but they are very high in tannins, very astringent, they're good for jams and stuff, or jellies aren't they? Jams, jellies, some people pickle them, they're quite nice for pickle, you can also juice them, so make quite a tart juice, but quite a nice juice, and you know crab apples, they have so many different features, as do fruit trees, not only are they great natural bird feeders, so you don't need to buy any bird food, but they're fantastic in flower in the spring, and therefore brilliant for pollinators. So bees love them, most crab apples have a very simple flower, so it's very easy for the bee to get in, get the pollen, and they pollinate apples as well. I think that's a really good point you're making, like so much of the fruits, even if we didn't get any fruit, are still great for wildlife and just the general ecosystem. So another amazing attribute of fruit trees, and they're often only thought for fruit, so I think we need to think about them in other ways, they are lovely, some of them for autumn colour, I mean this is a pear tree, and most pears are really good for autumn colour, and this one's called Packham's Triumph, but just look at it, it's like glowing, it's absolutely glowing, and the juxtaposition of the pears with this sort of crimson foliage, it's just stunning. Fruit all starts with flowers of course, and different varieties bloom at different times, is there a bit of chicanery going on, trying to balance the things that flowering at the same time to get good fruit set? There is sometimes, yes, so we do need to make sure that when we're selecting fruit, we pick varieties that will pollinate other varieties. So most apples and pears and plums and cherries don't set fruit on their own, they need a little bit of help, so they need a pollination partner. So what we have on our website for example, and on other websites, is a simple guide to how to select those. So we categorise them into five groups, one, two, three, four, five, so if a variety pollinates in group three, then for example, then you would pick an either two, a three or a four. Okay, go either side slightly. Absolutely, so one either side or the same pollination group, or to make it simple, is we do have a range of self-pollinating varieties, so we call them self-fertile, and they don't need any other pollinating partners, they will set crop on their own, so we can just make it nice and simple. And could you have just one tree on its own, or do you need one, the same variety that is self-fertile, or do you just have the one tree and it would take care of itself? You just have the one tree, yeah, so one apple tree, a great variety for example would be scrumptious, pear conference, that's self-fertile, so that will set fruit on its own. A lot of people have plum victoria, again that's self-fertile, so it'll be cropping all on its own, it doesn't need any help at all. That's a really good tip if you're starting out, just go for the self-fertiles. Yeah, absolutely, keep it simple. And I guess in a sort of more dense urban area, there'd be trees potentially dotted around in different gardens, so you could in some cases get away with a sort of, if there's one in the next door's garden I guess. It's very likely in an urban setting. You wouldn't necessarily know which group that is. Yeah, no, but in an urban setting there's usually enough pollen around, so you probably don't need one, and they should just set a crop on their own, so it should be absolutely fine. So we looked at different ways of training fruits and different sizes and this here you're saying is the other way of keeping trees kind of smaller for like a micro orchard. So yeah, what have we got here then? So all of our fruit trees are grown on rootstocks, different rootstocks, so this is the union here, this is the rootstock part of it, and this is the variety. And we put them together with a very simple carpentry called grafting or budding, and it means that we can vegetatively produce so that we know we're producing the right variety. So the variety that we produce in the nursery, the trees are exactly the same as the mother material. Okay. Yeah, and the rootstock is very important because it means that we can control the size of the tree, so we can grow a variety on a rootstock that will get very very tall, maybe sort of six, seven meters tall, right down as a huge spectrum to an apple tree on say for example an M27 rootstock that would only get to a maximum of two meters tall. And so you could have the same variety that you're going to eat but grafted onto different rootstocks and it'll give a, excuse me, a completely different tree in the way it's it grows and it's bigger. Completely different size. Amazing, that's incredible isn't it? Yeah, and it just means that there's so much choice, so if you want a small tree you can have a dwarf rootstock, if you want a medium-sized tree there's a rootstock for that, 106 would be fantastic. If you want to keep trees in pots, so then you would select a dwarf rootstock, so for apples M27 would be best, for cherries Gisella 5, for plums they're not so happy on dwarf rootstocks but then for pears Quincy or Quincylene, but there's a great choice. Amazing, trees seem alive with all the fruits coming down at that time of year. Now what we've just seen are grafted fruit trees and you're saying these are budded, is there actually a difference? There is a difference, it's a very similar principle, effectively we're taking one part of a mother tree and putting it on a rootstock, so grafting is done generally in the winter with a large piece of mother material and budding, which we do here on the nursery, it's done during the summertime but we're doing the same thing. So here are our rootstocks, we planted them back in the springtime and in the summer we come along and we put a bud, a single vegetative bud from the mother stock or an apple variety, for example a bramley it might be, and we put it on with some carpentry, very clever knife work, that then stays on tied with a piece of biodegradable tape for six weeks and you can see it forms a callus here and then afterwards we take the material, tie material away. In the winter we chop the top of this rootstock off and that's next year that bud will just grow away into a tree. That's fantastic and it's an incredibly small piece of material there, as you say there must be some serious knife work there to get that just so. It's very clever, so the cambium has to match up absolutely perfectly. The cambium is the inside of the wood that the xylem and phloem, but nature's incredible, I mean it's so clever to be able to effectively heal one plant with another and grow into something completely different. So while we're here, these are quite interesting actually, this is a perfect example of a naturally small plant, so these are peaches and nectarines and they are tiny, tiny, tiny trees and they only really get up to about here and they still produce peaches and nectarines so that they are nice naturally dwarf trees. And these could live in a container for their life. Absolutely yeah, they'll be really happy in patio pots. So here we've got something quite interesting, this is what we call a family tree, so it's where we get three different varieties of apple and we do it with pears as well and we put them on one stem, so you've got three varieties, different varieties on one tree. So here we've got a James Greave, a Cox and a Katy tree and we graft them all together, so if you're short on space or you just want to have lots of different varieties on one tree, you can have as many as you like. That's really impressive, I love the fact three varieties on one tree, do you have to be careful about what you're selecting so that they're either flowering at the same time or one doesn't take over? Yeah and that's really important actually and we do that on the nursery for you, so you don't have to be too worried. We select a variety for, so they all pollinate each other, so they're pollinating at the same time, but also and most importantly that they're all of the same vigor, because otherwise if you put any varieties on with any, some will grow a bit more or a bit more vigorously than others and then they can take over the tree, so we try and match them as much as possible so you get a nice even tree and also a spread of picking, so you get some, so for example on this one the Katie would crop first in early September, then you'd get James Greave which would be sort of mid-September and then a little later on you'd get Coxwood be ready, so it's such a good idea because sometimes you don't want hundreds of one variety, you just want 10 or something and you're spreading it out, it's a great idea, it really is. Now it's probably quite advanced fruit growing, but you could try this at home if you do a little bit of research and you could play around with it, it could be quite fun I guess, but you need to have that knowledge of the vigor, I guess it's most important that they're not going to take over and so on. Yeah, yeah, but do, I mean have a go. Grafting and budding, they can be quite fun to try, you can buy rootstocks out there, you can get a hold of some material yourself or you might have it in the garden, there's lots of YouTube videos available to learn and just have a go. Give us an idea for our next video actually. Ah okay, well yeah, might be seeing you soon. Wow, there's a few fruits here. There certainly is, we've actually got an apple festival this weekend, we've got 300 varieties. Timed our visit perfectly. Yeah you have, yeah. Well thank you so much for having us today, I'm really inspired to do more with my little orchard ambitions and get planting and I know lots of people who have watched this will be really inspired to give it a go, so thank you so much Steph. You're welcome. Well I have to say that was a truly inspirational visit. All of that luxuriant fruit just dripping off those trees, magnificent. We hope to do a return visit at some point to show you how to actually plant those trees, but if you just can't wait and want to get on and plant now, well check out this video next. I'll catch you next time.