Pick fruit trees wisely

Now’s the time to plant fruit trees – but choose your varieties well to ensure happy harvests, says Bob

- Bob Flowerdew

ONE advantage of vegetables or bedding is that we can dispose of our mistakes at the end of each year. However, when we plant trees and shrubs it can take several years to know whether we chose wisely. If we haven’t made the right choice, we continue to stare at our errors year after year. Not that I’d discourage planting trees: there are a huge number of reasons we should do so, including climate change. But we ought to be very careful about which varieties we plant.

It’s not so much that they may get too big – most are now available on dwarfing rootstocks, so they stay compact and need much less pruning. No, it’s planting the wrong variety that’s so dispiriting. You wait for a couple of years to discover that a ‘Cox’ almost invariably produces only a few miserable fruits, while a ‘Bramley’ does too well –yet ‘Bramley’ apples are available everywhere, anyway. So you need to select carefully.