Last week I was potting on plants in the potting shed when I was lucky enough
to see the baby swallows, who were raised in nests in the roof, making their
first attempts at flight. It was delightful, and a young family visiting the
Park were equally entranced. This week a young swallow flew in through my office
window and, amazingly allowed me to pick it up without protest and release it
into the open air.
I
tell you this to emphasise some of the pleasures of working here at Normanby;
most days it's incredibly busy and very hard work, but it does have its compensations.
It's a very beautiful place to work, and over the past few weeks it's been good
to see visitors enjoying the Park too in the summer sunshine.
The
swallows are also a sign of the seasons progress. I forget whether they're the
second or third brood (they arrived very early this year with the warm spring)
but we're now in mid-August and autumn isn't far away. Another sign of the changing
season is the development of the fruit in the walled garden, which looks delicious
but isn't ripe enough to eat yet.
The
apple and pear crop should be good this year, as long as we get a little more
sunshine to sweeten and ripen it. Early spring, when the blossom was in flower,
was warm and sunny, with plenty of bees active to pollinate the blooms, and
there were no frosts to stop the fruit forming.
We
grow many varieties of apples and pears, all in trained shapes. Trained fruit
not only looks beautiful in blossom and fruit, but it takes up little space
and is ideal for small modern gardens. The technique of training fruit into
cordons, fans and espaliers - and sometimes even more complicated shapes - was
brought to a high art form by the French. The Victorians eagerly adopted the
style for their wonderfully ordered kitchen gardens, and the trees endured in
these old gardens for well over a century.
The
theory behind training fruit aims to restrict the growth to producing flowering
and fruiting spurs which are highly productive. This is done by growing or training
trees at an angle, which restricts the flow of growth hormone away from the
tip, and always pruning back to a basic framework.
Many
gardeners are put off growing trained fruit both because they feel that the
pruning system is complicated and because they think that the fruit needs to
be grown against walls - a luxury that most of us just don't have. Stout wires
stretched between posts provide an ideal support for trained fruit, and has
the added benefit that the plants fruit on both sides, as opposed to just one
when they are grown against a wall. The pruning too is easier than it looks
at first sight, and in this case practice really does make perfect - and brings
with it the confidence to tackle ever more complicated shapes.
For
apples and pears, the standard shapes are cordons and espaliers. Both are started
by buying what is called a maiden whip in the variety of your choice, from a
fruit specialist. This is a single stem about two feet long, grafted
onto an appropriate rootstock. For cordons, the whip is planted at a 45 degree
angle to the ground, and tied into wires fixed at 18 inch - two foot intervals
against a wall or fence. The aim is to prune back to this single stem each year
to keep its neat shape, and it's an easy form to achieve.
Step-over
trees are easy too, but this time the whip is bent over and tied into a horizontal
wire about 2ft above the ground. The tree can be trained in this way for
six or sixty feet according to your space. Espaliers are very decorative, and
take up little space. The whip is planted against wires spaced at 2ft intervals,
up to the height required. Just above the first wire, the whip is pruned immediately
above three buds (the point where leaves and stems can grow out). The two outward
facing buds are trained along the wire on either side of the main stem, whilst
the top bud grows upwards to the next wire, where the whole process is repeated
again.
I
have to say that explaining it is much more complicated than actually doing
it, and next week we'll be summer pruning all our trained fruit, so do come
along and watch and ask questions. We've also got Apple Day again this year
on 30 September, and the Northern Fruit Group has kindly offered itsr services
to identify apples and give advice on growing them - it should be a good day.