More Cordons! Again! This Year’s New Apple Trees Are In

Blimey, is it the end of April already? Where has the time gone? As far as I can tell, it’s mostly gone into a whole lot of groundwork down on the allotment¹Plus all the usual Springtime stuff: sowing seeds, pricking out seedlings, potting on plants, garden clearing and mulching… all the things., during the midst of which I managed to find time to plant out the best of last year’s grafted apple trees.

Last year I planted seven new trees on the plot. Mixed results, sadly: two of them had issues with canker, necessitating the replacement of one and the severe pruning of another, but they all seem to be leafing up nicely this year, so touch wood all’s now well²Although I did take a fresh look at the replacement ‘Striped Beefing’ tree this morning and it’s not looking great. Good job I’ve grafted two more this year...

This year I’ve planted nine new trees³I do still have a few more potted trees around the place though, so I might add in one or two those as well. I’m pondering options at the moment., which will all be grown and trained as oblique cordons. Apart from one ‘Egremont Russet’ that has replaced a tree of the same variety that died off last year – canker again, damn it – they’re all in a section of the plot that I’ve been re-working, by means of the addition of numerous tree stakes, to accommodate a lot more cordon trees in the future.

The pic at the top of the post is of three of those new cordons: ‘Ard Cairn Russet’, ‘D’Arcy Spice’ and another ‘Egremont Russet’. Another three trees, pictured below, have been planted in the same row: a ‘Merton Russet’, and ‘Wareham Russet’ times two. The latter is a quite rare and quite delicious cultivar which I’m keen to encourage, so I now have three cordons of that type on the plot. It was a popular choice of scion at the grafting workshop I ran back in early March as well, so with any luck there will be fair a few new ‘Wareham Russet’ trees in the world by the end of this growing season.

I’ve also added two more trees to a new row at the very back of the plot. One is a ‘Belle de Boskoop’ and the other a ‘Blenheim Orange’, both of which are scions from the pair of massively over-vigorous trees – note to self, and others: triploid cultivars on MM106-rootstock do not make for nicely controllable trained tree forms – that I had to remove a couple of years ago.

This time the pair of them have been grafted to M9 rootstock, and I’m planning to train the new trees⁴They could be said to be continuations of the trees that I removed, as the scions are genetically identical to the originals, but perhaps splicing them to a different rootstock is enough to qualify them as “new”? One for the pomological philosophers to ponder, perhaps? in a “tall spindle” form – vertical cordons, in other words – which will hopefully help to keep them under control. If it doesn’t work, I’ll have to remove them and try again with something a bit better behaved.

I’ve also transferred this year’s newly-grafted trees – which are all on M9 rootstock, and all grafted using the z-graft method – to the nursery bed, to grow on for the rest of the year and develop nice strong root systems, ready for transplanting to their final positions in 2026.

There are twenty four of them this time around, as follows:

• ‘Acklam Russet’ x2 (National Fruit Collection info)
• ‘Cornish Aromatic’ x1 (1813 – N.F.C. info)
• ‘Charles Ross’ x2 (1890 – N.F.C. info)
• ‘Golden Noble’ x2 (1974 – N.F.C. info)
• ‘Hundred Ha’Penny’ (??) x3
• ‘Merton Russet’ x2 (1921 – N.F.C. info)
• ‘Monty’s Surprise’ x1 (2000 – heritagefoodcrops.org.nz info)
• ‘Red(?) Ellison’s Orange’ x3 (1948 – N.F.C. info)
• ‘Reinette du Canada’ x2 (1771 – N.F.C. info)
• ‘Rosemary Russet’ x1 (1831 – N.F.C. info)
• ‘Royal Jubilee’ x1 (1888 – N.F.C. info)
• ‘Sops-in-Wine’ x2 (c.16th? – N.F.C. info)
• ‘Striped Beefing’ x2 (c.1850? – N.F.C. info)

There’s no info link for the ‘Hundred Ha’Penny’ because, well, I’m not sure that’s definitely what the apple in question is called, and I’ve been unable to trace any information on an apple that goes by that name. More on that story in another blog post, another time.

I’m hoping that these two dozen new grafts will all take well and I’ll be able to plant out at least a dozen new trees this time next year. That will leave me with another twenty four(ish) planting positions to fill in 2027, and maybe another 15 or so the year after that, if I decide to add some more posts in another section of the plot. I’m clearly going to have work on sourcing new cultivars, and up my grafting game, over the next couple of years.

I’ve not just been grafting and planting new trees, and ramming in tree stakes, for the whole of the past six weeks though. Fruit blossom production has been incredible this year – I suspect largely due to a combination of the unseasonably warm weather we’ve had in March and April, and a few well-timed cloud-bursts to keep moisture levels up in the soil – so I’ve been taking a lot of blossom photos. I’ll hopefully find time to gather them together into some sort of gallery post before too long.

How about you? Have you planted any new fruit trees this year? If so, what types and what varieties have you gone for? Do let me know, via the comments.

Footnotes

• 1
  Plus all the usual Springtime stuff: sowing seeds, pricking out seedlings, potting on plants, garden clearing and mulching… all the things. ↩︎
• 2
  Although I did take a fresh look at the replacement ‘Striped Beefing’ tree this morning and it’s not looking great. Good job I’ve grafted two more this year.. ↩︎
• 3
  I do still have a few more potted trees around the place though, so I might add in one or two those as well. I’m pondering options at the moment. ↩︎
• 4
  They could be said to be continuations of the trees that I removed, as the scions are genetically identical to the originals, but perhaps splicing them to a different rootstock is enough to qualify them as “new”? One for the pomological philosophers to ponder, perhaps? ↩︎