Fruit Trees

How exciting!! This is really the best part of gardening - planning the garden - sorting through a 1000 varieties till you find the perfect combination. The only problem is that it's now so late in the season that the selection is reduced and desisions need to be made because everyday the list of what's available gets shorter and shorter. The set list was already in place so there was at least a starting place. For the espalier trees we had decided on:

• a Quince,
• two Pears,
  
• two Plums,
  
• two Cherries,
• One large cooking Apple,
• 4-5 dessert Apples
• and a partidge in a .... no I already said the pear tree
  

The next step was deciding how to choose -
In time honoured tradition I drew up a list of essential and desirable features and then went through the Rodgers online catalouge till I had a short list of a dozen apples rather than a list of 200.
Criteria I used were:
Essential

• Available
• Hardy/Northern
• Not irregular or biennial crops
• No thinning required
• Flavour -some positive mention of flavour in the description - I didn't obviously taste all the apples
• Matching pollination groups

Desirable

• Large cropper
• Holding shape when cooked (culinary apple only)
• Disease resistant
• Some mention of Hertitage or heirloom variety
• Diversity of fruiting types and times
  

The Quince was really the easiest so I started there - plus apparently I am the only one with any opinion on quinces except eehhyukk why.....

But really who can resist the delights of rosy coloured transperant wonder that is quince jelly!
Besides there were only 4 to chose from so I went for the "large crops of high-quality fruit" pear-shaped quince.

Cherries next - cherries were also easy cos I was just going for the sweet cherries and I had two to play with and I wanted to diversify as much as possible so classic Stella "dark red fruit" "flesh juicy" and most importantly "good flavour". Followed by the slightly lighter and "very hardy" Cherokee.




n.b. all pictures are stolen