Cordon Apple Tree Update – Autumn 2025 Edition

When it comes to growing apple trees in a garden or on an allotment plot, I am a huge fan of the cordon-trained form – small, single- or double-stem trees, often grown to around two metres tall – for all sorts of reasons.

Cordon-trained trees are compact, so you can fit six or seven into a one-by-three metre space; easy to manage, so although they will need some sort of support structure, pruning them is a breeze, and picking is simplicity itself; and when they’re mature, and in a good year, which 20025 most certainly has been for many different kinds of soft- and top-fruit, they can be highly productive, easily providing between a dozen and two dozen apples per tree, or more of course, if your cordons are particularly long.

This might not sound like much in comparison to the crop from a standard, or even a bush-form tree. But if you are able to plant six, or maybe twelve, or even twenty four different varieties, and can harvest a dozen or so apples from each, that’s going to be plenty of fruit to keep you going. And with careful variety selection you can fully extend the fruiting season, so you could potentially be picking a regularly changing roster of fresh apples from early August through to November, December, or even the new year.

Compared to having one or two larger trees producing a single variety each, having to deal with the inevitable gluts of apples and masses of windfalls in a good year, and the trickier pruning requirements of larger trees, and cordon-trained trees really are a great option for a smaller space.

Case in point, productivity-wise: the image at the top of this post is of a row of six cordon trees on my allotment plot. They were planted in February 2021, so they’re not quite five years in the ground. One of them, a graft from a local seedling tree, has had to be re-started a couple of times due to canker infections and is still too small to bear fruit, and one other, a ‘Wareham Russet’ dropped its fruit in the heat of summer, before this phot was taken in mid-September, but as you can see, the other four have done rather well. That’s the good news, and there’s more details below. The not-so-good news comes at the end of the post…¹Drama! Suspense! Jeopardy!

‘Delbard Jubile’ (?)

I don’t have a definite i.d. for this apple, hence the (?) – it was supplied as ‘Greensleeves‘, which it most definitely isn’t – but after a bit of detective work via the usual apple identification methods I came up with the 1960s French variety ‘Delbard Jubile‘ (a.k.a. ‘Jubile’ or ‘Delbard Jubilee’), which looks like a pretty good match to me.

It’s now a month since the photo above was taken, and the majority of the eighteen or nineteen apples on this single-stem cordon tree are still hanging firm, and they have quite a bit more red colour on them now:

It’s a decent cropper – at least a dozen good-sized apples this year – and hopefully those fruits will stay on the tree until the end of October and should keep well into November, maybe even December.

‘Rajka’

‘Rajka‘ is a fairly modern Czech variety that’s meant to be disease-resistant, and produces good-sized, super-shiny, bright red apples that with supermarket looks and a rather supermarket flavour.²Let’s just say it gives off distinct ‘Braeburn’ vibes. Which is fine, of course, if you like that sort of thing, and in the middle of March or April, with nothing much else around, then it’s better than nothing. But at this time of year, with so many other varieties offering much better flavour? Meh.

This single-stem cordon tree has produced seven apples this year, and they were nearly all still hanging firm a month after the photos above were taken. Another useful late-ish variety, if you’re just looking for something averagely crisp, juicy and sweet.

‘Duke of Devonshire’

We’re in heritage territory with ‘Duke of Devonshire‘, a classic cooking variety first raised at Holker Hall up in the Lake District, back in 1835. It produces small-medium-sized fruits rather than Bramley-sized big ‘uns, making them ideal for quickly coring and roasting or baking, maybe stuffed with oatmeal and chopped dates³That’s the fate that most of mine have in store, and a delicious fate it will surely be..

This single-stem cordon produced around two dozen apples this year. Most of them dropped when Storm Amy whipped through a couple of weekends ago, and I picked the rest shortly afterwards.

‘Winter Gem’

I have, in the past, been guilty of apple snobbery⁴Who am I kidding, I’m still an apple snob. But these days I’m a much more refined apple snob, so that’s okay… in the form of the assumption that heritage apples are generally better than more modern ones, and that anything bred and raised after WWII must have been done so purely to meet the aesthetic and/or cold-storage demands of the supermarkets.

‘Winter Gem‘ is the apple variety that changed my mind. A 1970s introduction, when fully ripe and ready – which in our neck of the woods is definitely mid-October – they’re aromatic, deeply flavourful and, in short, an absolute joy to eat. There, I’ve said it. A modern(ish) apple that stands well above quite a few heritage-types in my estimation.

This single-stem cordon produced about sixteen medium-large apples that survived Storm Amy but were falling from the tree this week under the influence of no discernible breeze whatsoever, so I picked the remaining few before they dropped and bruised.

The Not-So-Good News

As I mentioned in last year’s cordon update, one of the major perils of growing apple trees on an allotment site is the near-impossibility of avoiding apple canker infections.

Wherever there are un-tended apple trees on un-tenanted allotment plots there are almost always going to be canker lesions spreading their airborne and/or waterborne spores around. If your tree becomes vulnerable to infection due to any sort of wound, even a broken off bud in spring, then there’s a chance that canker could take hold. Then, depending on where canker takes hold and how bad the infection is, there’s a chance that it could spell the end for a cordon-trained tree.

Which, very sadly, is exactly what’s happened with both the ‘Rajka’ and the ‘Delbard Jubile’ shown above. The ‘Rajka’ tree is in the worst shape, with the main stem almost completely girdled by the canker:

I think, given the amount of damage that the tree has sustained and the position of th infection just above the graft union, that this is definitely going to prove fatal for the ‘Rajka’. I’m not particularly upset though, given my lack of enthusiasm for the quality of the fruit, so I won’t be too sad to cut my losses, replant the space with something else, and hope that another infection doesn’t occur.

The ‘Delbard Jubile’ is in slightly better shape, but I suspect not for long:

It looks pretty bad from the first angle, and whilst from the other – which was taken at a later date, after I’d done some emergency re-propping to prevent the tree toppling over under the weight of the fruit – you can see that there’s still some intact wood at the moment, but you can also make out a reddish-brownish stain under the bark. I don’t think it will be too long before this stem is girdled as well and, as this apple isn’t one of my favourites, flavour-wise, I won’t mind cutting my losses and replacing it with something tastier.

The Best of the Rest

I do have a fair few more cordon apple trees on my plot – thirty-seven in total at the moment, with more to be planted out next year, and more to be grafted as well – but most of them are still to young to produce much fruit. The two oldest cordons on the plot – a ‘Keswick Codlin’ and a ‘Tydeman’s Early Worcester’, both of which were planted in 2019 and both of which have grown into double-cordon trees – produced well this year, but they are early-ripening varieties, so their fruit has been and gone by late August. I also enjoyed a few apples from our ‘Saint Edmund’s Pippin’, and ‘Pitmaston Pine Apple’ trees, and several very flavourful ‘Tupp’s Favourite’.

And there are still seven or eight fruits on the ‘Knobby Russet’, which are meant to be ready round about now, but show no signs of wanting to detach from the tree just yet. Everything else either produced one or two fruits, or nothing at all, which is fine, as they’re mostly still very much at the early development stage.

How about you? Do you grow cordon apple trees? Do you prefer them to larger, bush or standard trees? What do you find are the main benefits and drawbacks? And how well have they fruited this year? Do let me know, via the comments.

Footnotes

• 1
  Drama! Suspense! Jeopardy! ↩︎
• 2
  Let’s just say it gives off distinct ‘Braeburn’ vibes. Which is fine, of course, if you like that sort of thing, and in the middle of March or April, with nothing much else around, then it’s better than nothing. But at this time of year, with so many other varieties offering much better flavour? Meh. ↩︎
• 3
  That’s the fate that most of mine have in store, and a delicious fate it will surely be. ↩︎
• 4
  Who am I kidding, I’m still an apple snob. But these days I’m a much more refined apple snob, so that’s okay… ↩︎