Monty Don’s Grow Your Own fruit trees

ThERE was a time when every garden had a treasured apple or pear tree, or perhaps a plum, and its harvest was celebrated and treasured.

But now the vast majority of our fruit is imported and eaten out of season. This is a shame for a number of reasons. For a start, the taste of homegrown fruit is superior because you will pick it only when it is ripe and eat it at its very best.

you will not be deterred by slight blemishes or irregularities in shape, whereas commercial fruit is invariably selected for its uniformity and its ability to travel and be stored, which takes priority over taste or nutrition.

If it looks good on the supermarket shelf, then it has achieved all that is asked of it.

But anyone with some outside space can vault free of that marketing nonsense.

As I’ll show you in today’s special Grow your own pullout, growing fruit trees is easy, beautiful and gives you the real thing: ripe fruit in its season.

That does not stop you buying whatever you like all the year round or fruit that you are unable to grow, but it is a yardstick that everything else can be set against.

you do not need a lot of space, either. If you have a small garden, there are small trees that will fruit just as well as large ones. And if you are very limited for space or want to try a number of different varieties, then you can easily train fruit trees to grow in a range of ways against a wall, fence or trellis, as I’ll show you over the page.

I know that some people are confused by talk of rootstocks and pollinating groups, or think that great expertise is needed to prune, but planting and caring for a fruit tree is really very straightforward.

Much fruit is extremely easy to grow. Apples, pears, plums, damsons, quinces, crab apples — these are all fruits that more or less look after themselves.

Even some of the more particular fruits such as oranges, peaches and apricots are no more trouble than tomatoes or cabbages. Finally, fruit trees are quite beautiful. Apples, pears, cherries and quince trees have magnificent blossom, and when hung with ripe fruit are as decorative as anything you can find in the garden.