Following the renovations to our kitchen garden we have new lengths of east facing and north facing fence. Boundary walls or fences are ideal for planting trained fruit, providing a harvest whilst taking up little space. If walls are available they offer further advantages, warming up during the day and slowly releasing stored heat during… Continue reading Planting stone fruits for fan training
Tag: cherries
UFO training of sweet cherries
Cherries are typically rather vigorous trees with an upright growth habit. They can therefore be challenging to develop in restricted forms suitable for the kitchen garden. A sour cherry is naturally more dwarfing than a sweet cherry and may make a reasonable fan against a wall or fence of some six feet in height. A… Continue reading UFO training of sweet cherries
Busy bees
Our bees have been busy working on the spring blossom, first the pears, which flower early in the warmest part of the garden, and then the cherries, and soon the apple blossom. Temperatures last week were high enough to allow a brief inspection of the hives. Of the four that went through the winter, three… Continue reading Busy bees
Tidying up the fruit
Over the last couple of weeks we have been tidying up some of the fruit in the kitchen garden. Whilst our orchard trees will be grown as bushes or half standards, along with full sized specimens of chestnut, walnut, and mulberry, all of the fruit in the kitchen garden is trained in some sort of… Continue reading Tidying up the fruit
Flowering cherry
I know the weather has been a bit odd of late, but I was more than a little surprised to find a handful of flowers on one of our cherry trees. These were planted a couple of years ago along the boundary fence of the fruit cage, where the netting would keep the birds from… Continue reading Flowering cherry
Cordon training of plums
Apples and pears are ideal candidates for cordon training. Oblique cordons were commonly planted along the walls of the traditional walled kitchen garden. Stone fruits, including plums, are more likely to be grown as fans. There exists, amongst some contemporary authors, the notion that stone fruits are not suited for cordon training and will bear… Continue reading Cordon training of plums