Five Years On: Development of a Fruiting Spur System

ByDarren T Posted onMay 1, 2026May 1, 2026

Back in March 2023 I posted an article, Lifecycle of an Apple, From Bud to Blossom to Fruit, in which I followed the growth and development of a single apple, through a series of photographs that I took over the course of 2021.

Five years later, the ‘Herefordshire Russet’ tree that was the subject of scrutiny in the original piece is growing quite happily down on our allotment, and I thought it might be interesting to check up on the section of the tree that I tracked, to see how it had grown and developed over the four gropwing seasons since the original photo series.

Here’s how we last saw the fruiting spur in question, in November 2021, with a nicely developed pair of bourse shoots, primed and ready to hopefully produce more apples in the years to come:

And here’s the same photo, annotated to indicate various anatomical features:

Luckily, our ‘Herefordshire Russet’ tree is on super dwarfing rootstock, most likely M27, so even though it has been planted in the ground, it hasn’t expanded its canopy all that much since it was transferred to the plot. That meant it was fairly easy for me to locate what I’m reasonably sure is the same section of the tree, five years on:

Two grey-brown, twiggy-looking fruiting spurs on an apple tree surrounded by bright green leaves.

Assuming I’ve got that right, we can now read the year-on-year development of the fruiting spur system in the photo below. From the end-of-2021 origin point, marked with cyan blue lines, we can see the addition of new bourse shoots, and what looks like one long, brindille shoot, in subsequent years. Each bourse shoot has developed where an apple formed, and as bourse shoots are generally a good location for new fruit buds to develop, that leads to the annual build up of a bourse-on-bourse fruiting structure, as indicated by the orange lines:

Two grey-brown, twiggy-looking fruiting spurs on an apple tree surrounded by bright green leaves, annotated with cyan blue and orange lines to indicate the pattern of growth.

What this tells us is that this particular ‘Herefordshire Russet’ is inclined to be a spur-bearer, and has fruited regularly over the past five years, despite a couple of particularly poor growing seasons in 2023 and 2024.

It might not be a large or particularly impressive tree, but it’s a dependable cropper and the apples it produces are rather delicious, so it’s a winner all round in my book.