apple – Notes From The Orchard

How to: Pick Apples and Pears

Top fruit harvest season is here, so it’s time for a guide to picking apples and pears the safe and careful way.

Fruit thinning is an essential operation to carry out to improve your chances of better quality fruit this year and more fruit buds next year.

2020 has been a rather excellent year for fruit blossom. Here’s a gallery of some examples I’ve seen in various places.

A grey but dry and hugely enjoyable Sunday afternoon was well spent on helping to finish off this year’s winter pruning work.

Here’s how I pruned three stepover trees on our allotment plot, leaving them until January rather than pruning in late summer as usually advised.

In which we remove the lower branches to create space for the tree’s owner to move around their garden.

Applying the Modified Lorette to our air-pot mini-orchard apple trees.

Thinning out weaker, surplus fruitlets helps to improve the size and quality of the final fruits.

A healthy display of blossom should hopefully mean a few fruits to enjoy later in the year.

In which we plant out our new fruit trees into air-pot containers.