Daniel Ashworth
Why Heritage Varieties Are Worth the Bother
Walk down any supermarket aisle and you will find perhaps half a dozen apples, chosen above all for their ability to travel and to look tidy under fluorescent light. Britain once grew thousands of named varieties, each selected by ordinary growers for flavour, keeping quality and how well it coped with the local soil and weather. Hundreds survive, and many of them will outperform a modern commercial apple in a garden or small orchard simply because they were bred for places exactly like yours.
Heritage apples carry a sense of place, too. Ribston Pippin came out of Yorkshire, Ashmead's Kernel from Gloucestershire, D'Arcy Spice from an Essex garden, Cornish Gilliflower from the far south-west. Plant one and you are growing a piece of local history that happens to taste superb. The catch is that these older varieties are more particular about pollination, rootstock and site than a mass-market tree, so it pays to think before you dig.
Begin With Varieties That Suit Your Corner of Britain
Resist the temptation to order whatever looks loveliest in a catalogue. Start with your climate. In the cool, damp west, scab and canker are the real enemies, and russets generally shrug them off better than smooth-skinned types. In frost pockets and cold northern valleys, choose varieties that flower late so the blossom misses the worst of the spring frosts. In warm, sheltered southern gardens you can afford a few of the fussier dessert apples.
A handful of reliable, widely grown heritage choices for a small plot:
- Ashmead's Kernel — a Gloucestershire russet with a sharp, pear-drop richness; stores well into January. Triploid, so it needs two pollination partners.
- Egremont Russet — nutty, dense-fleshed and remarkably reliable, cropping from September. Good in wetter districts.
- Discovery — an early, scarlet-flushed apple for eating straight from the tree in late August; it will not keep, but it is an excellent pollinator.
- Charles Ross — a Victorian dual-purpose apple, sweet enough to eat, large enough to cook, and a steady cropper over a long season.
- Annie Elizabeth — a Leicestershire cooker that bakes to a fluffy cream and keeps in a cool shed until March.
Pollination Groups: The Part Most Planters Get Wrong
Almost all apples are self-sterile. A tree cannot set a decent crop with its own pollen, and it needs a partner that flowers at the same moment. Varieties are sorted into flowering groups, usually numbered one to six, with roughly a three-day stagger between each. Choose two varieties in the same group, or in adjacent groups, and you will be fine. A spread of three varieties across two neighbouring groups is the safest arrangement of all.
There is a further wrinkle. Some varieties, known as triploids, produce little or no viable pollen — among them Bramley's Seedling, Ribston Pippin, Blenheim Orange and Ashmead's Kernel. A triploid cannot pollinate anything, including its partner, so it must be planted alongside two diploid varieties in a suitable group. A flowering crab apple such as John Downie or Golden Hornet solves the problem neatly in a small space, since crabs flower generously over a long period and pollinate almost everything. Do remember that bees need temperatures around ten to twelve degrees Celsius to work, so a cold, wet blossom time will always give a lighter crop.
Rootstock Decides the Size of Your Orchard
The variety on the label tells you what the fruit will taste like; the rootstock tells you how big the tree will grow. This is the single most important choice for a small plot, and it is the one most often overlooked.
- M27 — very dwarfing, reaching only 1.2 to 1.8 metres. Needs a permanent stake, rich soil and constant attention. Best for a patio or a very tight space.
- M9 — dwarfing, around 1.8 to 2.5 metres. A good choice for a small garden, but still wants staking and feeding.
- M26 — semi-dwarfing at 2.5 to 3 metres. A sensible middle ground that crops early and stays manageable.
- MM106 — semi-vigorous, 3 to 4 metres. The traditional choice for a small orchard; it copes with grass competition and poorer soil.
- M25 — vigorous, 4.5 metres and upwards. Only for standard trees in rough grass or a genuine field.
Space trees according to rootstock: roughly 2.5 to 3 metres apart for M26 and 4 to 5 metres for MM106. Deeper, richer soil will push any tree towards the upper end of its range.
Planting, Spacing and the First Few Years
Bare-root trees go in between November and March while they are dormant, and they establish far better than potted stock. Choose a day when the ground is neither frozen nor waterlogged. Dig a hole wide enough to take the roots spread out comfortably, but no deeper than the tree stood in the nursery, and keep well-rotted manure out of the planting hole itself — mulch it on top instead. Stake dwarfing trees immediately and tie them with a soft, adjustable tie.
Keep a circle at least a metre across completely free of grass and weeds for the first three to five years; grass is the quietest killer of young fruit trees. Water thoroughly in dry spells during the first two summers. Winter-prune to build an open, goblet-shaped framework on spur-bearing varieties, and be gentler with tip-bearers, which carry much of their fruit at the ends of young shoots. Thin fruitlets after the natural June drop, leaving one apple per cluster, to prevent biennial cropping and snapped branches.
Patience, and the Years That Follow
Trees on M27 or M9 may fruit within two or three years; MM106 takes four to six; a standard might make you wait eight or ten. Resist letting a young tree crop heavily — strip the blossom for the first summer or two so it puts its energy into roots and framework. Thereafter, a mulch each spring and a light scattering of potash is usually all the feeding needed, since too much nitrogen gives you leafy growth and precious little fruit.
Pick carefully, handle gently, and store sound fruit in a cool, dark, slightly humid place, wrapped in newspaper and checked weekly. The reward is not only a bowl of apples in October but a supply that runs through to February and beyond. Plant well now, and the tree will still be cropping when the grandchildren come to scrump it.
