Best five fruits for beginners
Apples
Apples are easy to grow and can be pruned in many ways so you can have a tree or a cordon against a wall. But choose carefully. Modern varieties combine the best taste with disease resistance so there's no point planting ‘Cox’, which is very difficult to grow without spraying. ‘Suntan’, ‘Kidd’s Orange Red’ and many others are excellent alternatives. Some supermarket apples just don’t do well in Britain, so don’t attempt 'Pink Lady' (‘Cripps Pink’) or ‘Braeburn’. Others such as ‘Katy’ and ‘Gala’ are good but why grow what you can buy in the shops? Remember that apples can ripen at any time from August right through to March in storage, so you may want more than one tree. Cordons allow you to grow an orchard in very little space. They’re young trees trained as single stems planted at 45 degrees. They’re usually planted against a sunny wall or fence, held up on horizontal wires, but can be used as an internal boundary in your garden. By planting them 1m (3¼ft) apart you can pack in a lot of apples. Virtually all apples require another variety to pollinate the flowers and ensure a crop. Apples are also grafted onto rootstocks that restrict growth and encourage early fruiting. M26 is the most common, producing a tree about 2.4m (8ft) high. Dwarfing M9 is sometimes available but these trees will need permanent staking and fertile soil to do well. Apples may try to fruit the year after planting but don’t let them. Let them grow and pick your first few apples the second year.
Strawberries
While apples will take a few years to start to fruit, you can get fresh strawberries within months of planting. Most strawberries are summer-fruiting, between late June and August, but perpetual kinds carry small crops through summer and autumn. They need a light, fertile soil but can easily be grown in pots or even growing bags. Each plant will crop well in the first year, best in the second year and then decline as it ages. After fruiting, plants produce new plants on long stems (runners) that should be cut off unless you want to propagate them to increase your stock.