Rabbits are a complete pain if you happen to grow hedging and trees and fruit for a living. Cute looking they may be, but they have a horrid habit of biting branches straight through (usually close to the stem) and of tearing leaves off plants they don’t bite…

This is just about pruning cordons – there is a much longer piece on growing cordon fruit trees if you would like to know more.

Cordons should be pruned every year around mid August (i.e. about now). Your cordon is ready for pruning when the new side shoots from the main stem(s) become woody at their base. Shorten all of this new growth from the main stem to 3 or 4 leaves above the basal cluster of leaves at the base of the shoot – see the diagram below.
Where a shoot from the main stem has a side shoot coming of it, prune this also – to one leaf above the cluster of leaves its base.

Tags: Fruit trees

Some hedging plants and trees produce suckers (new plants that grow up from the parent plant’s root system). Sometimes this is bad – because the sucker is the same as the rootstock, but not the tree as the plant is grafted. An example here would be a named rose variety that is grafted onto a dog rose rootstock.

Sometimes this is good – because you want a bushier plant. Rugosa roses make a bushier hedge because they sucker.

This is a list of Apple Flowering Groups for the UK.  You can use it as a reference for the purposes of ensuring you have the correct pollinator(s) available for your Apple trees

Early Flowering Group

These trees will pollinate one another and any tree in the Mid Season Flowering Group (see) below:

Beauty of Bath, Discovery, Egremont Russet

Mid Season Flowering Group

These trees will pollinate one another and any tree in either the Early or Late Season Flowering Groups:

Tags: Fruit trees