Fruit trees in gardens

[Alex321]

For people not in the know if you want a good eating apple, Cox's or Spartan are easy and excellent, for cooker little beats a Bramley, for pear Concorde is juicy and a good cropper, and Czar or Victoria for a plum. Any of then should get you off to a good start.

Another good one is Worcester Pearmain.

We had 4 apple trees in our last house - one Worcester Pearmain, one Bramley, one Cox's and one James Grieve. The Worcester and Bramley gave us really good crops almost every year, while the Cox's and James Grieve were much lower. I suspect the main reason for that was positioning of the trees - the Worcester was in the most sheltered spot, followed by the Bramley, the other two were much more exposed.

We also had a plum tree, a cherry tree, and a conference pear tree (Not sure what breeds the plum and cherry were). The pear struggled a bit with the length of season we had there, the pears never got very big before all the leaves were dropping. We had one very good year from the cherry, then the squirrels and birds got the crop in future years, as it became too big to net it.

 

[Reynard]

A tip for prospective cherry tree growers...

If you want an eating cherry that the birds won't bother, then look for a variety called Napoleon Bigarreau - they're a big yellow cherry with a pink blush, and birds leave them well alone until they're very ripe.

The reason for this (thanks to Autumnwatch many years ago) is that birds are hardwired to go for red and purple fruit out of preference, then orange and last of all, yellow.

 

[Poacher]

I live in a flat and do not have my own back garden. Mysteriously, in the last ten years, various fruit and nut trees have appeared in the local grounds. An apricot, variety Tomcot from which I picked three carrier bags full of fruit, two walnut trees, one is the variety Broadview and the other grown from a nut, collected in the Czech Republic twelve years ago. A plum tree variety Opal has popped up and is producing beautiful sweet plums in late July.

All very, very strange

Guerrilla Gardener unmasked

May I present my hymn for the guerrilla gardener? <clears throat>

We plough the fields and scatter
Before the farmer sees
'Cos he will get his shotgun out
And shoot us in the knees.