Maintaining your home orchard

While supermarkets offer perhaps four or five apple varieties throughout the year, the home gardener can choose from hundreds of different apples.

Many have a flavour far more sophisticated and superior to the standard varieties, which have been bred for transport and cold storage. As with our heirloom vegetable varieties, heirloom fruit represents centuries of human culture, breeding, selecting and growing. Modern industrial farming, for all its
efficiencies and achievements, risks losing our heritage varieties. Heirloom fruit embodies many generations of orchard wisdom with the pursuit of flavour, quality and beauty. Modern breeding on the other hand sacrifices the quality and subtleties of our fruit in its quest for standardisation, efficiency and homogenisation of products.

Many of our commonly grown fruit trees produce for decades, or even centuries, if properly maintained. Unlike the vegetable garden where results are comparatively fast, keeping a small orchard is an undertaking likely to last many years. This requires patience, planning and faith that the love and care we put into our trees now will come to fruition in years to come.

As a 15-year-old I was inspired by a local permaculture farm and planted two apples, a selection of plum trees and two kiwi fruit on my family’s farm. Despite the haphazard planting and a degree of neglect over the years, I’m delighted that over 20 years later I still pick baskets of fruit every year and watch my son climb the tree to reach apples when they are ripe.

Feeding your fruit

As with all gardens, a healthy home orchard begins with the soil. Ideally a well drained, fertile garden soil with plenty of organic matter grows the best fruit.
Prior to planting, compost or green manure can be used to improve the soil. Organic fertilisers and animal manures can be used in small amounts, but care should be taken not to overfeed the trees. Fruit trees develop large root systems that reach deep into the soil for nutrients and water. Over fertilising can be counter-productive, encouraging shallow root systems and excessive leaf growth.

In established orchards, a yearly application of compost around the drip line of the tree helps keep the soil healthy and provides essential nutrients to the tree.

Benefits of mulching

Mulch can also be used to help prevent weed competition, feed the soil life and conserve water. Pea straw, lucerne or any mulch that feeds the soil as it decomposes is preferred.

In some cases a ‘living mulch’ can be used to protect the soil around trees, build fertility or provide the benefits of companion planting. Comfrey, clovers and other legumes can be underplanted around fruit trees to add nitrogen, organic matter and other nutrients to the soil. Occasional slashing of the living mulch yields a generous amount of green material which breaks down and helps feed the soil and trees.

Other herbs and flowers can be useful planted under the orchard to attract bees and other beneficial insects or deter pests and diseases. Sweet alyssum is known to repel codling moth when planted under apple trees and garlic helps to keep aphids at bay. Choosing beautiful flowers whose flowering coincides with blossom time ensures plenty of bees to pollinate the fruit.

To prune or not to prune

Maintaining healthy fruiting wood is another consideration when growing fruit. Too often gardeners prune trees just for the sake of pruning, because they feel it is a job that must be done. Often more harm than good is achieved. Judicious, purposeful pruning works with the tree. Formative winter pruning when the tree is young encourages vigour and directs the growth into a desired and manageable shape. Sometimes older, neglected trees require the same treatment and a hard winter prune is required to bring the tree back to health. In general, winter pruning encourages growth and vigour while summer pruning encourages fruit.

Pruning of new growth in summer is appropriate where the tree is established and a good shape has been created. Carefully removing the new growth at pencil width directs the tree’s energies into fruit production (rather than leaves and branches) and, if done regularly, maintains the tree at the desired size and eliminates the need for an annual winter hacking of uncontrolled growth.