A Pear Of Money Spinners?

Are you the proud owner of a few apple or pear trees, or even a large orchard. If so, what are your options if you have more fruit than you need, and can you boost your bank account with the excess or by adding value? Charlotte Cooper gets to the core of the conundrum

- Charlotte Cooper

There are few sights and sounds that evoke spring more completely than blossom time in the orchard. The short finger-like branches of apple and pear trees are covered in delicate pink and white flowers and they hum with bees. In a few weeks that blossom falls like confetti to make way for the burgeoning fruit and, by summer’s end, those old trees will be laden with fruits with the most outlandish names — from Slack-ma-Girdle and Winter Banana to Bloody Ploughman.

A standard apple tree will produce around 450lb of fruit each season — so it is incredibly easy to become overwhelmed with all that produce.

PEAR APPEAL

When Country Smallholding reader Edwin Bannock bought five acres of land near Whitstable in Kent, it included a very overgrown orchard of Comice and Conference pear trees. Two years later and his orchard has been tamed and is fruiting nicely — but what are his options for dealing with all that fruit?

“We bought our place about two-and-a-half years ago with some unloved paddocks and an orchard,” Mr Bannock told Country Smallholding. “The orchard has roughly 700 pear trees in it and was in a woeful state. The land was so overgrown that you couldn’t walk between the rows of trees, with thickets of brambles and wild roses that were all interlocked. The trees themselves were in a dreadful state and didn’t look like they had ever been pruned. In many cases, the root stock had sprouted as trees that were bigger than the fruit trees themselves.