Buying Apple Trees

Guide to Choosing & Buying Apple Trees 

Location

This is the first consideration, which rules out those apple tree varieties not recommended for your location, and may dictate precisely how you train your tree. Three major examples:

• The further North you are, the more value there is in training trees as cordons or espaliers against a sheltered, sunny South facing wall. Also, you want varieties that flower later (giving them a better chance of avoiding late spring frosts), and ripen earlier due to your shorter growing season: have a look at our list of hardy apple trees for Scotland.
• In warm, humid areas of the South and West, it is wise to choose scab resistant varieties (Red Windsor is perfect).
• In drier Eastern parts of the country, mildew resistance is more important (Red Falstaff is perfect).

Aspect:

• South-west facing is best, but it can be windy.
• East facing is a problem if it is in full sun early in the morning, as frozen flowers will defrost too fast to survive, so late flowering varieties are best. By the same token, don't plant frost prone, early flowering varieties in frost pockets! 
• North facing sites lack sufficient sun for sweet eating varieties to ripen well, so try sour cooking apples and crab apples (frankly, a Morello sour cherry is your best bet).

High altitude is a challenge: when you get to about 900 feet above sea level, the thin air and strong wind make it harder for pollinating insects to do their job (remember that most self-fertile trees still need insects to move their pollen around their own flowers), the growing season is shorter, and storms are more damaging.
We advise fruit growers at high altitudes to:

• Have bee hives nearby, and encourage wild bees with lots of alpine flowers.
• Use a combination of mixed native and evergreen hedges (this provides the most food for bees) for windbreaks.
• Look up Sepp Holzer, who farms at 3600 feet above sea level in Austria (where they have consistently hot continental summers, unlike in the UK) and minimises pruning (using disbudding and notching instead) in order to maximise the strength of the tree; he also favours growing un-grafted trees, which we do not sell, but you could propagate them yourself using layering techniques.
• Favour soft fruit bushes like gooseberries, and sour fruit intended for cooking, especially damsons, Morello sour cherries, and the Edulis rowan is a sure bet 

Choosing Sizes

In a home orchard setting, you want freestanding trees: shorter bushes (with a short trunk, under 75cm) or taller half standards (with a trunk about 135cm tall). Bushes are much easier to pick, half standards are easier to mow under and give bigger crops. 

In smaller gardens, the ratio of vertical surfaces increases, so it makes more sense to train trees up against walls, fences or straining wires as cordons or espaliers, both of which can be made from maidens (as long as the variety is spur bearing), and a selection of our apples and pears are sold as ready-made cordons.

A wire trained tree obviously carries much less total fruit than a freestanding one, but because they take up less space and their ratio of fruiting to support wood is higher, they are actually more efficient in terms of fruit per volume of space used, which is one reason why most new commercial orchards use wire-trained methods.

• Cordons can be planted as close as 60cm apart along a row, so you can pack several varieties into only a few metres.
• Espaliers need at least 2-3 metres each, but they also carry larger crops than cordons.  

In patios, balconies, decks and terraces without beds, apple trees can be grown in pots.
Large containers of 30 litres and upwards are enough for a bush on an M9 rootstock, but dwarf apple trees and ballerina apples such as Flamenco and Samba will be happy in smaller pots.
Use soil based RocketGro Fruit & Veg compost for best results, and remember that large pots of moist compost are heavy, so be careful what you put them on! 

Rootstocks

The rootstocks we use are noted on each tree's description page, and you almost never need to choose between them: we have already chosen the best one for each form!
The rare exceptions are when you want an extra vigorous cordon or bush, in which case it's better to start with a maiden on MM106 than with a ready-made cordon on M9 or bush on M26.

• The majority of our apples use the semi-dwarfing rootstock MM106: vigorous enough for good-sized bushes and half-standards in an orchard, but still restrictive enough for espaliers and cordons with most varieties.
• Many of our ready-made cordons are on M9 dwarfing rootstocks, which need permanent staking / support. 
• A small selection of vigorous trees, especially in their bush form, are on the less dwarfing M26, which is in between MM106 and M9. 

Choosing Apple Varieties

The easy and fun bit! We stock over 110 apple tree varieties and everyone has their own preferences & situation, so here are general pointers:

• If you only have room for one tree, look to the self-fertile multi-purpose (eaters, cookers and juicers) varieties, the king of which is James Grieve. Lane's Prince Albert and Sops In Wine are also good, but the latter is not self-fertile.
• Early ripening apples tend to have thin skins and do not store well, so are less common in supermarkets - all the more reason to grow them yourself. They are delicious off the tree. Discovery is a superb early eater, and Grenadier is one of the earliest cookers.
• Some apples store and ripen better after picking than others. These are the ones that you do find in the supermarkets, where they should be plentiful and cheap in season, but it still makes sense to grow them yourself: a Golden Delicious off the tree is a totally different creature from the poor things you find on shop shelves; they've had ever such a rough time getting there.
• Plenty of varieties which are known as cookers will ripen into eaters in time, especially the older ones that have longer cropping seasons than modern varieties, where fruit harvested after the main crop are sweeter. Howgate Wonder, which is a huge cooker, is utterly delicious eaten raw late in the season and by Christmas it has a seasonal cinnamon taste.
• If you are growing espaliers and cordons, you can have a wide range of apples in a small space. If you choose your trees so that they cover the cropping calendar, from August to early winter, you will get a steady crop of apples each month, and avoid having too many to store, eat etc.

Apple Tree Pollination

Apples are very common in the UK, so pollination is rarely a concern, even in cities, where compatible crab apples are widespread ornamental trees. 

If your orchard is remote, or if you are planting either very early flowering (Pollination Group A) or very late flowering (Groups G or H) apples, then use our fruit pollination tool to find a partner; even self fertile apples benefit from cross pollination.

In theory, an orchard needs 8 varieties to reliably cover pollination groups A to G, with one tree in each pollination groups (although Bountiful is the only variety we sell in pollination group A, and it cross-pollinates with trees in groups B and C, so seven trees will suffice).  
Start by choosing your trees by their cropping period (given that most home growers want a mix of early and late ripening varieties), and then see if their pollination groups link up. 

However, a sure way to pollinate an entire orchard is a Golden Hornet and a John Downie crab apple, which between them cover the whole apple flowering season, and have good fruit for cooking. 

If you only have space for one full sized apple tree, you should be able to add another variety as a cordon to ensure a local partner.

Some Facts About Apples

Our climate is ideal for apple orchards. They like well drained, fertile soil including clay, and grow inland at altitudes up to about 900 feet / 275 metres. 
They take 8-10 years to reach full size, and then produce their best crops for about 60 years, producing around 10,000 - 15,000 apples in that time; if you start with a half standard (the biggest size we sell), that is less than 0.25p for every fresh, organic apple grown in your garden. 

There is not really a hard distinction between cooking, eating and cider apples: ultimately, it is your preference that says which is which.

• Cookers are usually large and acidic-sharp. Some sweeten as they ripen, making them good eaters late in the year.
• Eaters tend to be smaller with more sugar, but are very diverse in terms of bite, depth of flavour, and juiciness.
• Cider apples are the smallest, and usually inedible fresh. Good bitter or bitter-sharp cider demands high tannin levels, which is astringent and makes even the toughest palate pucker up. They also tend to be on the mushy side, ideal for pressing the juice out. 

Simple Apple Storage

 

Only store perfect looking apples that you picked from the tree. Any damaged or windfall fruit should be juiced, cooked, made into jam or just eaten right away.

Store apples in a cold but frost free place. A little humidity in the air is beneficial, but there should also be decent ventilation. Garages, most cellars, outhouses and shed are all ideal. Lofts tend to get too warm, but they can work in some houses.

If you have room, space the apples out so that they aren't touching each other. If you need to pack them in closely, you will have to wrap each one in paper to reduce the chances of rot spreading from one bad apple to your whole crop.

Avoid stacking the apples if possible. If you have to do it, only stack one layer high and place a sheet of thin cardboard between the two layers to spread out the weight.
Tip: The moulded papier-mâché trays you see in green grocers and supermarkets are ideal for storing apples.

Storing apples starts with picking them the right way, which is carefully! Part of the secret of storing apples successfully is judging when to pick them; practice makes perfect.

A cropping apple tree usually needs to be picked over several times. Fruit on the sunny side of the apple tree will ripen before the ones on the shady side and apples on the outer branches will ripen before the ones on inner or lower branches. Pick apples with the best colour and only pick them when they are ripe.

A ripe apple comes off the tree when it is lifted and twisted about a quarter of a turn - do not pull apples off. The apple should detach with the stalk. Take care not to bruise the fruit and use a padded or soft cloth container to carry them down from the tree.

Which Varieties are Good for Storage?
As a general rule, early cropping apples that are ready in August & September do not store well. Later cropping apples mostly store well and a number of late-cropping varieties only taste their best after a few weeks of ripening off the branch.

Some of the best apples for storage are: Ashmeads Kernel, Blenheim Orange, Bramley, Cox's Orange Pippin, Howgate Wonder, Kidd's Orange Red, Lanes Prince Albert, Pixie, Egremont Russet (in fact, pretty much all russet apples are good for storing) & Winter Gem.

Each variety ripens at its own rate, so store them separately and label them so you remember which is which. Check them regularly for rot.