How to have a year of apples, lemons and avocados
With a little planning, you can have a rolling harvest of apples, avocados, oranges and lemons to pick every day of the year, says JACKIE FRENCH
While commercial orchardists aim to have the whole crop ripe, picked and sold within a few weeks, home gardeners need a backyard that provides the staples of delicious eating every day of the year.
There are three tricks to growing exactly the right amount of fruit – just enough and not too much – for the entire year. Firstly, you need to choose both early and late-maturing varieties. Secondly, choose fruit that mature over a long period of time. Thirdly, pick often, as soon as the first is almost ready to harvest. An ‘all at once’ picking seems to trigger a tree’s fruit into all maturing together, while daily picking encourages random flowering and a crop over a far longer period.
Not much space? Go for dwarf varieties instead and hedge them. A hedge of 6–12 apple trees, for example, will give you fruit all year round, as will a hedge of oranges, lemons and avocados grown against a sunny wall in cooler climates, or grown as a privacy screen in frost-free areas.
With apples, try an early-season Beauty of Bath for a dwarf apple hedge and red and crunchy dwarf-munching in December, followed by Gravenstein to eat in January. Now choose your two or three favourite mid-season varieties, then follow them with a dwarf Granny Smith (excellent for pollination) or a white-fleshed Democrat for eating from May onwards. Heritage nurseries will sell you the old-fashioned Sturmer Pippin apple, which ripens about August. Sturmer Pippins, Lady Williams and Democrats can be stored, wrapped in old magazine pages, until December – so you’ll eat your last stored apple when your first new apples are ready. Adapt varieties to suit your climate, such as tropical apples in hot climates, and adjust picking times, as they can vary by a month or even more.
a seasonal spread
Early apples need to be eaten soon after they are picked, or they become soft, floury and tasteless. Later apples keep their flavour and texture, and store well. Some people (including me) think late varieties are at their sweetest and best a month or two after they’ve been picked. They may look a little faded and wrinkled but are delicious in a salad with beetroot, walnuts, olive oil and lemon juice.
Having avocados all year is even easier in any climate that doesn’t have heavy frost. Avocados don’t soften until they’re picked, so they can hang on the tree for 18 months – as long as the birds don’t get them. Try Hass or Reed for summer eating, with a Fuerte for winter, and any other favourite of yours that can fit in your garden, pruned hard if necessary to fit in more varieties. In cooler climates, grow avocados in a plastic shelter until they are about eight years old and more resilient to cold.
Oranges also hang on the tree for months after they ripen, although the orange peel and pith get puffier and thicker the longer they stay there, and the fruit less juicy.
Even so, we pick our Navel oranges from early winter through to late spring, and they are still wonderful. Follow the first Navel crop with Valencia oranges and a Lane’s Late Navel or another late variety, and your oranges should see you through.
Lemon trees adapt well to being picked irregularly. We grow Eureka lemons, which are cold and heat hardy. Although their main cropping period is supposed to be winter, we only ever pick half a dozen at a time and there are always a few ripening mid-season lemons for us to pick every day, even in midsummer. We end up using a lot of lemons – the grandkids love homemade lemonade, and for that we need at least two lemon trees, or one lemon, one dwarf lemonade tree and a Tahitian lime.
If you follow this approach you’ll have created your own living larder, a garden where you can pick the fruit you need when you need it, and a magic place for kids (and adults) to discover the generosity of just one backyard.