Read the Site Before You Buy a Tree

Fruit trees are long-lived, so an hour spent assessing the plot saves years of disappointment. Walk the ground in winter when the structure of the land is obvious. Apples, pears, plums and cherries all detest standing water, and a site that floods or sits wet until April will kill roots long before the trees look sickly above ground. If your only available spot is heavy clay, either plant on a slight mound of improved soil or consider a raised bed at least 40cm deep.

Check the aspect and the frost pattern. Most top fruit flowers in April and May, and a hollow at the bottom of a slope collects cold air that can strip a crop in a single night. A gentle slope, even a modest one, drains that cold air away. South and south-west facing ground ripens fruit best, but a slightly shaded site will still crop if it is sheltered from strong wind. Dig a few spade-deep holes to check depth of topsoil and whether a pan of compacted subsoil sits beneath it.

Rootstocks: The Decision That Sizes Your Orchard

The rootstock controls the vigour of the tree far more than the variety does. Choose this first and everything else follows. For a small plot, dwarfing and semi-dwarfing rootstocks let you grow several trees, or a single tree trained flat against a fence, without the plot becoming a wood.

• M27 and M9 — very dwarfing and dwarfing apples. M27 suits containers and stepovers but needs permanent staking and good soil. M9 is the reliable choice for a small garden, cropping within three or four years.
• M26 — a useful middle ground, about 3m tall, good on poorer soils where M9 sulks.
• MM106 — semi-vigorous, 4–5m. Excellent for heavier soils and for a traditional half-standard, but too large for a tiny plot.
• MM111 and M25 — vigorous and drought-tolerant, suited to clay, exposed sites and grazing, but only for larger holdings.
• Quince A and Quince C — for pears. Quince C keeps trees modest; pears on quince need well-drained, fertile ground.
• St Julian A for plums and damsons, Colt for cherries, Gisela 5 for a dwarfing sweet cherry.

Spacing, Layout and Training Forms

Give each tree the room its rootstock demands, or you will be pruning constantly to keep peace between neighbours. As a rough guide: M27 at 1.5–2m, M9 at 2.5–3m, M26 at 3–3.5m, MM106 at 4–5m. Pears on Quince C at 2.5–3m, plums on St Julian A at 4m.

If space is tight, train trees rather than planting fewer of them. A cordon is a single stem at 45 degrees, spaced just 60–75cm apart, and a row of six along a fence gives six varieties in the space of one bush. Espaliers need 2–3m between tiers and 3–4m between trees, and stepovers — a single horizontal tier about 45cm off the ground — can edge a path at 1.5m spacing. All of these crop heavily and are easy to pick and net. Plant in rows running north to south so both sides of the tree get light.

Choosing Varieties That Suit Your Soil and Climate

Pollination trips up more new orchardists than anything else. Except for a handful of self-fertile types, apples and pears need a partner that flowers at the same time, so check flowering groups before ordering. Remember that triploids such as Bramley and Jonagold cannot pollinate anything, including each other, so they need two compatible partners nearby.

• Apples: Discovery and Katy for early eating, James Grieve, Egremont Russet, Sunset and Ashmead's Kernel for flavour and storage.
• Pears: Conference is partly self-fertile and dependable; Concorde and Beth are good partners.
• Plums: Victoria is partially self-fertile and forgiving; Czar and Marjorie's Seedling crop well in cooler districts.
• Cherries: Morello is self-fertile and ideal for a north wall; sweet cherries need a pollinator and netting against birds.
• Disease resistance: in damp western areas, favour scab-resistant apples such as Ashmead's Kernel and Keswick Codlin over Cox's Orange Pippin.

Planting and the First Few Years

Bare-root trees planted between November and March establish far better than potted stock and cost less. Clear perennial weeds in a metre-wide circle, fork in well-rotted manure or compost, and plant with the graft union 10–15cm above soil level. Stake dwarfing trees for their lifetime and semi-vigorous ones for five years. Mulch to 8cm deep, keeping it clear of the trunk, and water through the first two summers in dry spells.

Prune lightly at planting — remove broken or crossing branches and shorten the leader on a bush tree — then leave it alone for a season. Formative pruning to build the framework happens in the winters that follow, and summer pruning of trained forms keeps them compact and encourages fruit buds.

Keeping the Cropping Reliable

Reliability comes from steady attention rather than heroic effort. Thin heavy crops in late June, leaving a hand's width between apples, so fruit sizes well and the tree doesn't slip into biennial bearing. Feed in late winter with a balanced fertiliser or a mulch of compost, but go easy on nitrogen near the trunk, which pushes leafy growth at the expense of fruit. Watch for codling moth with pheromone traps, fit grease bands in October, and net against birds as fruit colours.

Finally, stagger your harvest. Two early varieties, two keepers and a cooker will give you fruit from August to March, and a few soft fruit bushes beneath the trees fills the gaps. Plant more than you think you need, share the surplus, and the orchard will earn its space many times over.