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Plums, gages, damsons and mirabelles are some of the most rewarding fruit trees you can grow in a British garden, and with the right care they’ll produce delicious fruit year after year. Knowing when to prune plum trees is probably the single most important thing you can do to keep them that way.
Many people move to new homes where the previous owners or even the builders had planted fruit trees. In pre-war years there was often an emphasis on providing new homeowners with two fruit trees – an eating apple and a cooking apple. The reality is that these trees usually get left unpruned or get hacked about as the garden owners have no time or knowledge to manage the trees. Continue reading
Plums are a wonderful fruit to eat and cook with and fortunately an ideal fruit for growing at home, so please ignore the pundits who may suggest the contrary! When I refer to plums I use this term to include gages as they are essentially the same fruit. Gages are considered to be so named after Sir Thomas Gage who was a great fan of the juiciest plums and would go out of his way to select and hunt out the finest. Continue reading
Pyramid fruit trees are popular forms for growing apples and pears and plums, gages and damsons as they allow you to grow single specimens, which managed well, will result in fairly small and attractive trees. Continue reading
If you are growing restricted forms of top fruit trees – cordons, espaliers, fans, pyramids, stepovers or even bushes – you need to undertake your pruning in the summer to help ensure maximum fruitfulness and vigour as well as for keeping your trees in good shape. Additionally, the removal and shortening of shoots and thereby leaves will allow more light to get the fruit which is essential for late ripening varieties. Continue reading
The flowers of the ‘top’ fruit trees that we grow in the UK – apples, pears, cherries, plums, peaches and nectarines – have both male and female parts and for a fruit to be created these female parts must receive pollen from the male parts of another flower – usually from another tree. In the majority of cases this means that you cannot grow a single top fruit tree by itself – unless you happen to have another close by in a neighbour’s garden. Continue reading
Fruit as we know it is changing! Well after a fashion anyway! Breeders have started to move on from simply developing different varieties of existing kinds of fruits to developing distinctly different types of existing fruits to interspecies crosses of existing fruits. Continue reading
Although generally considered to be part of the plum family, damsons (and bullaces) are of the species Prunus insititata whereas plums are of the species Prunus domestica. The name ‘damson’ is derived from Damascus in Syria where it is considered that it originated and was introduced into England, in due course, by the Romans. The damson is also known as the damson plum or Damask plum in parts of Europe where it is used to make the spirit slivovitz. Bullaces, which are more acidic and lower in sugar than damsons, are considered to be native to Britain. Continue reading
Many gardeners who grow their apples and pears as cordons have often contemplated whether they can grow stone fruits in a similar way. Books and “experts” often say that this cannot be done – or at least very well – as stone fruits can only do well when grown as bushes or fans; I beg to differ! I have experimented growing all stone fruits as cordons! Continue reading
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