#Edible Forest Gardening 101: Plant a Mini-Orchard, with Columnar and Cordon Trees
My partner’s aunt is something of a horticultural guru in my life, and one maxim she seems to live by is: “a tree only gets as large as you allow it to.”
I am something of a plant hoarder myself, and because I believe preserving biodiversity in the food system is extremely important, I find myself more inclined to want 10 small but different tree cultivars (or a tree grafted with 40 cultivars) than a single large tree.
Training trees to grow in a compact form, such as a columnar or cordon tree, is a way to pack a huge amount of species diversity into a small space. These forms of tree maintenance are suitable for species and cultivars that fruit on what are called “spurs.”
Spurs are short, stocky shoots with shortened internodes, which is the space between two nodes; nodes are the part of a stem where leaves, and sometimes flowers, are attached. They form on shoots that are two years of age or older and can be branched or unbranched. Both flowers and fruit can form on spurs.
It takes a little bit of practice, and quite a few visual references, but fruit spurs are easy to identify once you know what you are looking for.
Viron, on The Home Orchard Society
This form of maintenance is best for certain cultivars of apples and pears, so research and observation is needed before choosing the right trees. Some cultivars can even be persuaded to fruit in pots when pruned properly, so a mini-orchard is even possible for an apartment gardener with a balcony.
In any case, when done right, it is a dense, attractive, and productive mode of cultivation. Species and cultivars can be chosen to cascade across a wide range of flowering and ripening times: an early-ripening ‘Clapp’s Favourite’ Pear, can be planted alongside a mid-season ‘Brandy,’ and a late-season ‘Bosc,’ so that pears are available over a period of months, instead of a period of weeks.
I use this high-diversity strategy with my blueberries and strawberries as well, so I have three months of harvest from the former, and five of the latter. It entails a bit of work in keeping plants artificially small, but the consistent, small harvests are much more practical than one-time, large harvests. I don’t worry about canning and preserving, so much as going out in the garden and finding something ripe for the picking.
Read more: Controlling Apple Tree Size by Horticultural Means
Related: Of Pears and Espaliers; Living Fences
Images: Pomona Fruits; htterina; The Meaning of the Columnar Apple Tree System (CATS) for the Market in Future by Helmut B. Jacob, The Geisenheim Research Institute, Department of Pomology
#pruning #fruit trees #forest gardening #edible landscaping
