14 February 2025   in orchard, winter, pruning by Kate Stewart

A beginner learns to take sole charge of a young and slightly random orchard

My Mum was a keen self taught Horticulturalist who always wanted to do more but like many of us, never found the time. She never really set out to make an orchard, but always sighed with envy at the productive garden belonging to my great aunt and uncle in Austwick, North Yorkshire. Imagine being able to make do with a few essentials from the local post office and being otherwise self sufficient? The soil there was thin and acidic from all the limestone, the aspect harsh and north facing and sheep regular visitors. So how much more might mum be able to do with her rich, loamy, south facing acre of field? Primarily concerned with ornamental gardening, she always aspired to open her garden for the National Garden Scheme, once she'd retired from her demanding role as a head teacher.

The two James Grieve apple trees were a gift - ironically enough - for teaching. We decided, fairly randomly, to plant them on a slight raised mound towards the damper foot of the garden, only for it later to become apparent that owing to the placement of the hedges, this was a frost pocket. Despite that, the trees thrived and cropped heavily and reliably year after year. Twelve years later, they would tower far above my head, although that was long before any of my family knew about dwarfing rootstocks, or understood anything by M25 other than a motorway. In selecting a relatively self fertile Scottish market variety that doubles up as both cooker and (somewhat tangy) eater, little did the governors of Patterdale school realise they'd made a fortunate choice.

Fast forward three years and the collection at Skelton had expanded by ten trees, and my rather bemused father was issued with orders not to mow the lawn short around the youthful little arboretum's roots. It took two years of getting my hands dirty as a volunteer at Acorn Bank garden for me to appreciate a little more the magic of reaching for secateurs on a morning of hard frost and bright sun, while the kettle comes to boil. I lost myself amongst the graceful arches of Acorn Bank's bee noisy orchard; felt the moss and lichen on their trunks, watched the Irish Peaches fall, followed by the Egremont Russets and then Ashmead's Kernel. I felt keenly the enchantment of laying apples to bed in boxes in the old stone dovecote where they smelled of autumn. And so fairly at random, I selected a handful of the varieties I had come to know and love, with only a token nod to whether the trees could pollinate one another, or whether we'd have apples throughout the year.

Lemon Square's thin branches almost collapsed with the weight of its fruit, whilst Forty Shilling was rosy and reliable almost from the word go, and Keswick Codlin, for some reason, fought for breath amongst the cocoons of ermine moth.

So here I am, two years later, and this orchard has become effectually my own to care for, at least in terms of having the knowledge and the will for it to thrive. The James Grieve trees have become knotty and problematic in their comparative maturity, frothy spur tips framing the sky's blue. In Horticulture college I learned the following: if the branches rub, that can cause black rot or bacterial canker, in the same way you shouldn't tighten a tree's support too much. You strangle it, and wood likes to breathe. If the branches have fungi erupting from them, or they're grey and powdered, or covered in growth, then you should cut them out too. If somebody has walked past and accidentally snagged or snapped it, then you should cut it off cleanly, just like a horse's hoof that splinters.

These rough rules I knew. Later on, I learned that apple trees like to be kept cool and clean, to see sunlight and to breathe, just like we do. So for that reason, you open it up. I later learned about somebody called Henry Noblett - a founding father of that college Horticulture course and also, incidentally, of NCOG - liking to throw his hat through an apple tree and catch it on the other side.

Then in the same way you'd take care of how you dressed a cut or wound, there are certain ways of cutting that encourage a tree to heal once it wakes up and its buds erupt. And there are certain ways that are messy and almost cruel, and allow water to lap away at the wood's xylem and phloem and cambium, making it rotten. Loppers are useful for levelling away dead leaves, but they chew healthy white wood in a way that is almost painful. For the larger branches, reach for the pruning saw. And if dealing with new growth or the old fruiting spurs that turn into woody knuckles and crumble to powder, secateurs will do. But both tools have to be scrupulously sharpened and cleaned. In some ways, an apple tree pruner feels almost like a surgeon.

Tip or spur bearing? Where is the difference? As the name suggests, a tip bearing tree requires more delicate handling - almost like you tip toe around it, because only a small, new part of the branch bears fruit. Spur bearing - a more robust thing altogether, with older wood bearing fruit in more directions, so which was I dealing with here? A huge clue is that you get these whippy lateral shoots, the bumpy television ariels of darker young wood that reach towards the sky. James Grieve seems to me to be a fine example, so now, in the months where your hands are on fire with cold, before the buds become more than just tiny knots in the branches, I take this enthusiastic young growth back by a third or more. In my mind, this allows the tree to focus on the more refined production of petals and stamens and fruit with pips, rather than that whippy wood that gets everywhere and snags on clothes.

I took a few pictures this year: an example of a branch that's sprouted up randomly in the middle of a healthy trunk, and is only going to mean the tree breathes less; two branches that are clearly rubbing against one another in a way that can't be comfortable; the clean cut of Mum's old red Felcos through young wood with greenish rings, straight, with no splinters, above an outward facing bud and slanted in a way that means rain will just slide off it, and not sit there; also, the too-vigorous young growth of this spur bearer that needs taming (it does, however, make excellent scion wood if grafting is on the agenda).