Fresh fruit for beginners
Home grown fruit is a delicious and cheap way to get your vitamins, says Peter Worsp.
Hardly a day goes by without reading in magazines and news articles how essential it is to eat fresh fruit for our health and wellbeing. How lucky are we that something so readily available and delicious can be so good for us?
If you want the ultimate in a deliciously healthy fruit regime, grow fresh fruit right at your back door and know exactly where it’s come from, and how it’s been grown.
How about your own mini orchard at home? It really is easy. Modern varieties of fruit trees are bred to give high production with minimal problems, and with modern grafting onto dwarf or semi-dwarf stock, space is not an issue. There are even patio dwarf fruit trees that grow to one metre but still produce bountifully.
Beginners, don’t be baffled by the need for pollination at flowering time. Apples, pears, and plums need another tree to pollinate them but there’s an easy way round this – grow a double-grafted tree (this will have the right combination of matched varieties to pollinate each other, on the same space-saving tree).
Apricots, peaches, nectarines, cherries, and quinces are mostly selffertile. Compact Stellar Cherry is one of our best sellers with its self-fertility and compact habit.
Trees are essential for cool shade in summer and what could be better than a plum tree with its spreading, shade-giving habit coupled with the bonus of delicious fruit in summer for eating fresh, freezing, bottling, jammaking or chutney-making?
So how to get started? Decide what you’d like to grow and where you want to grow it. Fruit trees are attractive and don’t have to be tucked away at the back of the section. They also make an excellent screen against neighbouring fences.
Get expert advice from your supplier when choosing a tree and check out the ultimate height, any pollination needs and correct pruning. In a sunny area, dig a hole larger than the roots of the tree, mix in some compost, plant the tree, and hose trickling steadily for 20 minutes takes water down to the important root area. Feeding with a controlledrelease food like Burnetts Gold Fruit & Citrus is suitable for containers and open ground, providing good potash levels for flowering followed by fruiting.
Pruning doesn’t have to baffle beginners, either. Basically you’re aiming for an open vase shape to allow for air movement and sunlight penetration for improved tree health. Winter pruning will increase growth and crop size, and summer pruning will keep the tree size under control. Planting into a large root-constriction bag in the ground is another way of limiting the ultimate size.
Delicious healthy fruit doesn’t just come on trees with lots of easy options for the home gardener – strawberries, blueberries, currants, gooseberries, and of course citrus, are loaded with goodness. The general rule is that, like vegetables, the stronger the colour the more beneficial anti-oxidants and flavonoids the fruit contains.