A Few Notes on My Plans for 2026

So, here we are. It’s January 2026, the weather gods have spilled their icy breath across our neck of the woods and all is bright, cold and frozen. Which gives me a great excuse / opportunity to sit inside, enjoy a steaming mug of hot cocoa, and think thoughts about the orchard year ahead.

I’ll start by wishing you all a very happy new year. I do hope you enjoyed a restful winter holiday, however you celebrated it, and are looking forward to another year’s productive and fulfilling fruit-growing. It will be interesting to see whether here in the U.K. we end up enjoying anything like the repeat of 2025’s bumper harvest, or if the weather dumps us back in the 2023/24 doldrums, or if the trees that produced so bountifully end up taking a biennial year off instead. Time, as always, will tell.

At this stage of the year I like to put together some sort of a plan, or perhaps it would be a bit more realistic to say a wish list, of activity for the always busy winter season.

Winter Pruning

Depending on your preferences and local climate conditions, you might already have started, or even completed, your winter pruning. Or, like me, you might still be putting together your pruning plans for the next month or three.

I’ll be doing quite a bit of top-fruit pruning before the end of March. To begin with I have around thirty apple cordons, plus two stepovers and a few tall spindles, to assess and work on, down on our allotment plot, and I’ll hopefully be helping out with the orchard plot opposite as well. Then there are a few dozen apples and pears at work, which I’ll be working on with the help of my NT colleagues. I’m also starting to book in a few extra pruning jobs and/or volunteer sessions, including a return to the scene of my first ever professional gardening gig at Ordsall Hall, which I try to get to every year if I can, just to lend a hand.

I’ll hopefully be trying something new this year as well. I was given one of those highly portable action cameras for Christmas, so with any luck I’ll be able to pot together a few short winter pruning videos, time allowing. I’m not sure whether to make them explainers, or just keep them quiet, with the occasional caption. I suspect a lot will depend on how quickly, and how well, I can familiarise myself with the video editing software I’m planning to use. Wish me luck?

Fruit Tree Planting

Putting new fruit trees and bushes into the ground has to be one of the most satisfying jobs that any orchardist has on their to-do list, and I absolutely love adding more trees to my growing collection.

This year I have around a dozen new cordons to plant out on the allotment, most of which I grafted last year, and some of which will be replacing trees that will have to come out due to canker infections. There are another eight or nine 2025-grafted trees that took last year but didn’t grow on all that well. I’ll be potting those up into air-pots to see how they do for a year or so before I plant them out. Details to follow in due course.

I’m also going to be revisiting my support structures. The post-and-wire setup that I tried – as per the pic above – hasn’t turned out too well, mainly due to my inexpert installation skills, I’m sure. The posts have shifted, the wires have expanded in the heat and it’s been almost impossible to maintain adequate tension, so I’m having a bit of a re-think. Watch this space if you’re interested in that sort of thing, as I’ll hopefully be writing up whatever I end up trying next.

Apple Tree Grafting

Perhaps second only to planting, the grafting of new fruit trees is another of my absolute favourite orchard jobs, and I like to practice my grafting skills every year.

I’m pushing the boat out a bit in 2026. I’ve ordered forty M9 apple rootstocks, all of which I plan to graft to in late February or early March and I’ll be re-using the rootstocks from last year’s failed grafts (eight of those) as well. That’s more than twice what I’d normally aim for, but I’d like to plant up at least 24 trees next year to complete a planting plan, so I’m looking to graft around two dozen different varieties, two trees of each.

Talking and Teaching

Here are a few talks, events and public pruning session that I’ll be involved with over the next few weeks which, if you happen to live in the Greater Manchester area, or environs adjacent, might just be of interest.

• I’ve been asked to give a short talk on grafting apple trees to the very-local-to-me Whitefield Horticultural Society on Saturday February 7th. I think this one is for members only, but if you would like to attend then society membership is only £2 a year. Details on the website.
  
• I’ll be heading up to Holly Mount Community Orchard on Sunday February 8th, weather allowing, to help out with the annual winter pruning of their veteran fruit trees, and talk any new volunteers through the basics of winter pruning. The group is always keen to add more volunteers to their numbers, so if you’re in the area, please do feel free to check the website for directions – and possible cancellation if adverse weather persists – and come along on the day.

• I’ll be running an apple grafting workshop at my place of work, National Trust Quarry Bank, on Saturday February 28th. No more than 8 places will be available, and the price will be something like £40 for a few hours of direct tuition and the opportunity to graft three new apple trees. Details aren’t on the website just yet but as soon as they are, I’ll add a link.
  
• I’ll be running a winter pruning workshop, again at NT Quarry Bank, which due to limited numbers will most likely only be open to National Trust gardening colleagues from our fellow sites in the region. But if you do happen to be a colleague from an NT garden in the North West region (hello!) and would be interested in attending the session, then please do keep an eye out for details heading your way soon, or get in touch via my NT email address and I’ll make sure you’re informed as soon as we’ve arranged the date.

I’ve also booked in a few private pruning jobs and/or tutorial sessions. I do still have a few days’ worth of availability here and there, so if you’re within reasonable travelling distance of Whitefield in north Manchester and have a pruning job that you’d like me to take a look at, or an orchard that you’d like me to assess, or would like to book in a one-to-one pruning tutorial, then please do get in touch and let me know the details. I’ll have a look and get back to you as soon as I’m able to, and let you know if it’s something I’d be able to help with.

OrchardNotes.com

And so we come to the section of the annual planning session that always seems to be paved with good intentions, but usually ends up filed under “distinctly aspirational”: developing and adding value to this here website.

For starters, I have a few long-read articles, or article series, that I really do need to finish writing (the ongoing History of Norfolk Beefings, and various others that have been in the pipeline for ages) or re-writing in the light of new research (the History of Norfolk Biffins). Hopefully this will be the year they get done.

I also have a couple of new content sections that I’d either like to add to the site or that I’ve started and now need to expand upon. These are all very much “time allowing” kinda things though, so we’ll see.

The first section I’d like to work on is the Fruit List (a.k.a. Fruit Varieties I Have Known and Grown) which I want to expand by setting up individual pages on each variety, with my own photos, details of key characteristics, growing notes, links out to more info, my personal impressions, back story, that sort of thing.

Next up: I’ve been thinking for a while of setting up some reference galleries of the imagery I’ve used in my posts, plus some of the many pics I’ve taken but not yet used here on the site. They’d be available under a Creative Commons license, free to use by anyone who thought they might be useful in a personal or educational project.

I’ve also been musing on the idea of adding a good, old-fashioned Links Library. In this age of AI-driven search engine confusion and outright misinformation, I think there’s definitely room for a return to the concept of a list of human-curated links to reliable online sources. Not that I think fruit growing is an area of endeavour rife with attempts to deliberately mislead and confuse the general public, but it would still be good to have a library of links that someone with a keen interest in the subject has assessed as worth reading, no?

New AI Policy

Speaking of AI, I’ve decided I’m done with AI image-slop.

Whilst I’d love to be able to pay talented human beings to illustrate my posts, I simply can’t afford to commission actual artists to create work for the site. Which is why I have, in the past, dabbled with a few prompts to produce images to accompany an article or two. I’ve tried to be careful not to steer the AI-LLM in question towards producing anything that might be directly based on sources that are, or should be, copyrighted, or to output anything in the recognisable style of particular artists, living or dead. And I’d like to think that a few fake Roman mosaics, or obviously faux medieval manuscripts, won’t have done any harm on that front.

But over the past year I’ve come to agree very strongly with the increasing outcry against what seems to amount to the mass-theft of creative work that has been perpetrated in the process of training the majority of the current AI-LLMs. So until the issue is properly addressed, and AI companies actually start to fairly pay the original artists, designers, writers, animators and other creatives for using their work – re-charging the end-users at point of service delivery and passing those fees on to the relevant originators, why not? – then I’m saying no. No more, not for me.

I will probably continue to use AI LLMs as research tools. They’re extremely useful for trawling through the likes of Google Books, or open source research archives, in search of obscure references to arcane fruit-growing terms. I’ve also found them highly useful in translating text – more so than Google Translate, it has to be said – and for bouncing ideas off of, or suggesting avenues of further enquiry.

But I certainly won’t be using AI to write any of my posts or articles, and will continue to clearly indicate where I’m quoting from LLM-generated output, as I would with any other print or online source.

Right then, those are my definite plans and general aspirations, for the first part of 2026 and on into the rest of the year. If you have any thoughts or feedback on any of the above, please do feel free to leave a comment below, or send me an email if you’d prefer to have a private chat.

How about you? Are you planting a new orchard in 2026? Pruning a veteran orchard? Grafting dozens of new trees? Learning a new orchard-related skill? I’d love to hear what you’re up to, so again, please do let me know.