Page 26 - Simply Vegetables Spring 2024

The Mini Orchard 2023
The Mini Orchard started life as a handful of M27 grafted rootstocks, little more than ‘heeled in’, in one of the veg plots, a temporary nursery plot in fact. The trees, when grown on were to be moved into the orchard ‘proper’, this fortunately never happened. Several years of procrastination means they stayed put. The M27 very dwarfing root stocks were grafted with scions taken from ‘mother’ trees in my main orchard, in a greenhouse in March.
The purpose of using M27 rootstocks was to see if by making the variety on the tree work harder it would produce more colour in the fruit. I found in the past that vigorous varieties and triploid varieties seldom produce fruit with much colour once they get anywhere near being established. One example of this is the very un-orange of Blenheim Orange, a vigorous triploid. I noted years ago that couch grass growing under the canopy induced highly colourful apples. This could be that the
Open Day, M27 Mini Orchard
couch grass sucks all the nutrients out of the soil. In particularly nitrogen, or it takes up a high proportion of the rainwater. This year (2023) has been extremely wet in the East Midlands since July, the two Belle de Boskoop trees had poor colour; so, the reduced root system due to the very dwarfing rootstock and a very heavy organic mulch or impermeable plastic mulch may produce consistently colourful apples, year on year. Two Holstein Cox trees were nicely coloured, but not overly so.
The varieties
These consisted of two x Holstein Cox (in my opinion, a better variety than Cox’s Orange Pippin and surely in the top ten
for flavour), Two x Crispin Mutsu, these are mostly, naturally green, turning yellow when ripe, one of its parents is Golden Delicious, in 2022 Crispin Mutsu was by far better than Golden Delicious, best described as
a mouthful of pineapple, (These came off a M9 tree in the hottest year ever), can I replicate this year on year on M27? Two x Belle de Boskoop, a dual-purpose apple, I am reliably informed that in Germany this is a Christmas apple. In addition to these I planted two other grafted rootstocks, one Aroma, a course dessert apple and one Alfriston, a cooker from West Sussex. The purpose of planting these two trees was merely to preserve the two varieties as I had grubbed out the mother trees to try something better.
The trees are planted about eighteen inches to two feet apart, eight trees planted in an orchard a mere five feet wide by around seven feet in length. The current definition of an orchard is – wait for it –
six trees. So satisfied am I with the Mini Orchard that in 2021 I reworked two M27 rootstocks that had Winston grafted on them originally and turned them into Cox’s Orange Pippin, they were planted out last
Fat fruit buds - the results of pruning back to three leaf axils ten to fourteen days or so after the longest day, there is no further green growth. 027
Belle de Boskoop on M27
Crispin Mutsu on M27.
26 Simply Vegetables
ADRIAN BAGGALEY