Grow Your Own Fruit:
Apple Trees
by: Chris Moorhouse
The taste of a supermarket apples will never come close to that of freshly picked apples grown on a tree you planted and nurtured in your own garden. With a little effort and a little knowledge, most people can grow enough fruit to keep themselves happy for the year. The most popular fruit tree is the apple. This is of course mostly because of its fruit but apple trees have the bonus of their blossoms in spring and their beautifully coloured leaves in autumn.
Where can you grow your own apple trees? If you have any outdoor space from a square meter upwards, you can grow an apple tree. If you do not have a large garden you can grow it in a pot. It will not grow as big as one grown in the ground, but it can be just as exciting when they bloom and begin to bear fruit. It is even possible to grow your own on a small balcony, but great care should be exercised in case the apples or any other bits fall on people below.
When choosing where you will put your apple tree you may decide to have an orchard or position the tree for decorative reasons. You can even grow it trained against a wall or trellis and prune it into shape. Common shapes would be the standard and half-standard. But there are many including the pyramid, bush, cordon, espalier and fan with variations of all. Trained apple trees are often grown for decorative reasons in a small section cut into the middle of a lawn.
People often miss the opportunity to grow their own fruit because they did not think of training the tree against a wall, which saves a huge amount of space in a small garden. Just try to use a wall that gets lots of sunshine in the summer. The more sunshine you get the better the fruit from your apple tree will taste. If you do everything right and your apple tree still produced little or no fruit it may be because cold weather during the flowering discouraged the pollinators like bees from flying and therefore your blossoms were not fertilised. Bees seldom leave the hive in winter and if your tree flowers early in spring, they may not yet be active.
Apple trees do not like bad drainage or chalky soil but most other soil conditions can be dealt with by the use of fertilisers and minerals etc. If you are adding to the soil I would recommend that you include manganese, iron, and potash especially on chalky soils. Apple trees do not use too much nitrogen but I always like to give them a little anyway. An annual dose of rotted manure or compost will make a huge difference to the health of your apple tree. If you can not get them a dressing of sulphate of potash, peat and sulphate of ammonia will have to do.
When you buy your apple tree, it is usually two or three years old and already pruned to shape. If you are wondering how it got as big as that so quickly. It was not grown from seed. The trees you buy are basically branches grafted onto the roots of another tree. This is done to join the strain of tree that produces a good root with the variety that produces the fruit you want.
If planting standard or half-standard apple trees, the most popular form, they should be set about thirty to forty feet apart. Apple trees do not all flower and fruit at the same time of the year. When buying your tree give some thought to when you want it to be in fruit, bearing in mind the orientation of your garden and when it gets the best of the sun etc., as well as when it would be convenient for you to pick it, store it and use it.
If your tree has a bumper crop it may be necessary to thin out the apples so that the tree is able to feed all its fruit. If there is too much fruit the quality of the apples may suffer. The ones you picked early can be used to make apple pies.
Another important thing to consider is pollination. The tree will very likely not be self-pollinating. This means that you will need to have a variety of tree that will flower at the same time and be able to pollinate it somewhere in the area. If the variety of apple tree you buy is popular in your area or if it is a variety that has many pollinators you may not need to buy a second tree.
Growing apple trees in your garden gives you freedom that commercial growers do not have. You can choose your variety for its taste not its yield and ease of management etc. There is a huge variety of apple trees to choose from today and the information here is very general. Talk to your nurseryman to get the best advice on which variety is suitable for you and how to care for its particular needs.
About the Author
Chris also writes articles for Articles Galore, urArticles and SellWriteNow.
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