Small apple/pear trees

soba

We recently came back from a holiday in France and noticed that lots of people have fruit trees in their front gardens. Quite a lot of them were no more than about 3' high but seemed quite wide - I think they were either pear or apple trees. Is there a certain variety or type I'd need to look out for over here?
Thanks.

rhiwfield

Were they dwarf bush trees or trained trees?

We have 4 fruit trees (trained along wires) in our front garden, and they are about 3' tall and 12' wide. Its a cultivation method in our case rather than tree type, but you do need spur bearers rather than tip bearers.

oldtractor

look for M27 rootstock. they give a mini tree. not as long lived as M9 or M106 rootstock though.

soba

rhiwfield wrote: »

Were they dwarf bush trees or trained trees?

you do need spur bearers rather than tip bearers.

Really sorry, I don't understand the terminology:o They were in a row in a little garden, it looked like the tips of the branches of one tree touched the branches of the next tree. I don't know how to explain it better:o

splodger_seedswapper

i expect they were trained as step-over trees - it's just a dwarf variety tree trained as a mini espalier - you can buy step-overs from nursery / garden centres - or train the right dwarf trees yourself

rhiwfield

soba wrote: »

Really sorry, I don't understand the terminology:o They were in a row in a little garden, it looked like the tips of the branches of one tree touched the branches of the next tree. I don't know how to explain it better:o

Fruit trees can be left to grow naturally but can also be trained to make them fit into available space or to aid cropping and harvesting.

This picture shows pears (foreground) and apples (background) planted last year with branches tied into/trained along two wires approx 18" apart. All other branches have been cut out. New growth from the branches is tied in and unwanted growth pruned out annually. This kind of training is known as espalier, there are others e.g. cordon.

In the above case there are two rows of trees, each row has two trees which are approx 14' apart to allow for lateral growth of branches.

A stepover mentioned earlier is just an espalier with one training wire set 12/18" above the ground so that you can literally stepover the tree. Its often used for edging a bed or path.

Tip bearers = tree that fruits at tips of branches (not much use for training)
Spur bearers = tree that fruits on short spurs off the main horizontal branch

Hope this helps

soba

Thanks rhiwfield, that's really useful information. Thanks for taking the time to explain all that.