Steyning Community Orchard.
February may seem a quiet time in the garden, but for fruit orchards, it is one of the busiest. Established trees need pruning. Stakes, tree ties and labels need checking. It is also a good time to apply a manure mulch around the trees, and a possibly a winter insecticidal spray. (We don稚 do this for fear of killing beneficial insects as well as the pests.)It is also the ideal time to plant new trees whilst they are still in their winter dormancy. We have 14 more trees to plant in February/March. Eight apples will be planted in a new Community Orchard being developed at Bramber Brooks, which we are delighted to be assisting with. Five more apple trees will be planted on the 3rd March in the new Downland Orchard on the Steyning Downland Scheme’s Rifle Range. A replacement memorial tree is also being planted in our main Community Orchard on the 4th March. (See our Facebook page for more details)
How do you make an apple tree? Plant an apple pip, or possibly take a cutting, like you do for many other plants?
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. - planting a pip from a Cox apple will give you an apple tree in time, but the apples the tree produces will not be Coxes. Most will be inedible, rather like crab apples. But every now and then, from hundreds of pips sown, you might be lucky and produce an edible apple. Over hundreds of years, this is how most of our apple varieties have emerged. For example, Cox and Bramley were chance seedlings discovered nearly 200 years ago. - and unusually for woody plants, many fruit trees including apple, plum and pear are very difficult to root from stem cuttings. So this is not a reliable way of producing new trees either.
Grafting is the answer. The Greeks knew this, and from at least 500BC they developed the art of grafting. This involves taking a piece of stem or bud from the variety you want to keep, and splicing it onto a rootstock that is already growing. These rootstocks were originally wild growing crab apple trees. Once the graft has ‘taken’, only the newly grafted material is allowed to grow. Thus a tree can be rejuvenated in this way indefinitely. We still have a variety today called ‘Court Pendu Plat’ which the Romans brought to Britain. Today’s trees of this variety are genetically identical to those the Romans had, due to the repeated grafting that has taken place over the last 2,000 years.
Picture of a grafted apple, showing where the variety and rootstock have been spliced together.
Today we have multiple choices for rootstocks, each suited to a particular growing requirement. All 12 of our Sussex variety trees in the Community Orchard on the Memorial Playing Field are grafted onto MM111 rootstocks. good resistance to many soil borne diseases. It also produces a strong, deep root system that withstands gales. The downside is that it is slower to produce fruit and produces lower quality fruit than other rootstocks. So it is ideal for a grassed traditional orchard such as ours, but pretty useless commercially!
More information about us and our Orchards:
Email: steyningorchard@gmail.com
Facebook.com/steyningcommunityorchard
Twitter: @StCommOrchard
WebPage: steyningcommunityorchard.org