How to grow apples

Almost every apple tree sold is two plants joined together: a variety grafted onto a rootstock chosen from a different plant entirely. The variety decides what the fruit tastes like. The rootstock decides how big the tree gets, how soon it fruits, how long it lives, and whether it needs staking for ever.

This catches people out constantly, because two trees labelled with the same variety can finish at eight feet or thirty, and nothing on the label may say which you are buying.

Very dwarfing stocks — the M27 and M9 family — give a tree six to ten feet, fruiting in two or three years, needing permanent support because the root system is too small to hold it up. They suit a small garden and a container, and they are unforgiving about drought and weed competition.

Semi-dwarfing stocks such as M26 and MM106 give twelve to eighteen feet, fruit in three or four years, and are the sensible default for most gardens. Vigorous and standard stocks such as MM111 and M25 make the twenty-five-foot trees in the photograph at the top of this page — decades to reach full size, a century of life, and a ladder for every harvest.

So decide the size you want first, then find your variety on that rootstock. Doing it the other way round is how people end up with a tree that shades the whole garden.

The old orchard shape is the open centre or goblet: a short trunk, three or four main limbs spreading outward, and a hollow middle so light and air reach every branch. It suits vigorous rootstocks, it makes a beautiful tree, and it needs a ladder.

The modern commercial answer is the opposite. Dwarfing stock, planted close, trained flat against wires so that every fruit is within reach from the ground and every leaf gets light. The photograph below is one version — a V-trellis, where two rows lean apart from a shared post line.

For a garden, the useful middle is a cordon, espalier or fan against a wall or a wire fence. A single-stemmed cordon on dwarfing stock takes eighteen inches of border, crops in its second or third year, and lets you grow four varieties in the space a standard tree would shade out.

Whatever the shape, the principle is identical and it is the only pruning rule worth memorising: light and air must reach the fruiting wood. Everything else is detail.

Prune in winter while dormant for shape and vigour, and in summer for restraint — summer pruning slows a tree down, which is exactly what you want on a wall-trained form.

Most apple varieties cannot fertilise themselves and need pollen from a different variety flowering at the same time. A single tree in an isolated garden may set a light crop or none at all, and the owner reasonably concludes something is wrong with it.

Nurseries handle this with pollination groups, numbered roughly one to seven from earliest to latest flowering. A tree needs a partner in its own group or an adjacent one — group 3 works with 2, 3 or 4.

In a town this is often solved already: apple pollen travels a few hundred feet, and a neighbour's tree or even a crab apple in a hedge will do the job. In an isolated garden it will not solve itself.

Two complications worth knowing. A few varieties are triploid — Bramley is the famous one — and their pollen is sterile, so they need two other varieties nearby and give nothing back. And a family tree, with three varieties grafted onto one trunk, is the neat answer for a garden with room for exactly one tree.

Do not rely on a self-fertile label. Self-fertile varieties do set alone, but nearly all of them set a heavier, better crop with a partner.

A tree carrying too much fruit makes small apples, breaks limbs, and — worst — exhausts itself so thoroughly that it sets almost no flower buds for the following year. That is biennial bearing: a huge crop, then nothing, then a huge crop.

Breaking the cycle is a job in June. The tree drops some fruitlets itself — the June drop, which is normal and not a problem — and then you thin what is left to one fruit per cluster, spaced four to six inches along the branch. It feels like vandalism and it is the difference between a bowl of large apples every year and a glut followed by a blank.

Feed and mulch in early spring, keeping the mulch off the trunk. Keep a clear circle of bare ground or mulch around a young tree — grass growing up to the trunk competes hard and noticeably slows establishment.

And check the graft union, the kink low on the stem. It must stay above soil level for the life of the tree. Bury it and the variety roots directly into the ground, escapes the rootstock entirely, and grows into the full-size tree you were trying not to plant.

Plant a pip from an apple you enjoyed and you will get a tree — and its fruit will not be that apple. Apples are extreme heterozygotes: every seed is a genuinely new individual, and the overwhelming majority are small, sharp and not worth the twenty years.

This is why every named apple in the world is a clone. A variety is one original seedling, grafted onward indefinitely — so a Northern Spy today is a cutting of a cutting of a tree that appeared in New York around 1800.

It also means every named variety was once a chance seedling that somebody noticed and thought worth propagating. That is the entire history of apple breeding until the twentieth century: not design, but attention.

The drawing below is what recording those varieties looked like before colour photography. The USDA employed artists to document fruit, and this sheet is a graphite cross-section of a Northern Spy — the core drawn as carefully as the outline, because a written description could not settle an argument about identity and the inside of the fruit was part of the evidence.

The handwriting records everything a modern database would: the variety, an accession number, the grower who supplied it — Wm. Andrews of South Haven, Michigan — the artist, and the dates.