Planting a community orchard

In city, town or village, the Community Orchard can become the equivalent of local woodland a century or more ago – a communal asset for the whole parish. Orchards can work in housing estates and industrial estates, in hospital and school grounds, in city and suburb, village and market town. They can help us improve our diet, offer healthy activity, enliven a curriculum and help to speed the recovery of the sick.

Establishing a Community Orchard is no mean achievement, but think of it as part of a bigger picture, as the start of a movement, a change for the better. Looking at your orchard from above, you can begin to see it as part of a complicated web along which wild (and cultivated) fruit trees can spread – as green corridors linking green places. As well as having beautiful blossom, the fruit is much sought after by birds, insects, small and larger mammals. Get a large-scale map and look at the planting possibilities with your tree officer and local tree group. The most appropriate wild fruit trees to plant are the sorts that are already thriving in your area – there may be sloe, bullace, damson, wild cherry, bird cherry, crab apple and wilding apples (see our page on which trees to plant).

Create a parish fruit map

Producing a parish map that identifies cultivated and wild fruit trees in the vicinity may reveal forgotten or neglected orchards and varieties and perhaps even help to identify a potential Community Orchard. In addition to showing what local people value, the map could have many uses. It could:

help to save old, local orchards
encourage the planting and grafting of local varieties by gardeners, local councils and schools
be used to persuade local nurseries and garden centres to stock local varieties of fruit
form the basis of local orchard walks, following existing footpaths through orchards, creating new ones and linking places with historical associations, sites of cider houses, old orchards and special fruit trees
act as an historical and contemporary record of local fruit growing

This text has been abridged from Common Ground's Community Orchard Handbook. For more information and to buy your copy, visit their online shop.

Which trees?

Which trees to plant in your orchard

Fruit that grows on trees in an orchard is also known as top fruit or tree fruit. These include:

Pome fruits – apples, pears, quinces
Stone fruits – apricots, cherries, peaches, plums, gates, damsons, bullaces and more
Nuts – hazel, almond, walnut, as well as mulberries and figs

Most orchard fruit trees are grafted onto special rootstocks which regulate their eventual size. Fruit trees like as much sun as possible to ripen the wood and the fruit, to be in a sheltered place with an annual rainfall of less than 40 inches. Ideal conditions are a south-east to south-west aspect and well-drained soil. Where soils are poorly drained, trees can be planted on ridges or mounds.

Which trees to choose?

A survey of nearby garden / farm fruit trees will not only tell you what is out there, but indicate what grows well in your area as well as local preferences or fashions. It may also unearth rare varieties and unusual local varieties, although some trees could be common varieties with local names (synonyms). Grafts could be taken from trees of interest and grown on in the orchard, or in a nursery bed for future sale and income.

Orchard apples
The link with place may be so particular that the variety will grow or produce tasty fruit, only within a short distance. Apple trees, like most plants, are adapted to local conditions and do best where they originated.

I cannot graft from local varieties...

If you do not have local varieties avaiable, or if you want to supplement these with additional varieties / species, there are a number of things to take into consideration:

Suitability: will the species/variety do well in your situation? Remember to take into account the soil, the aspect and the local climatic conditions – have you avoided frost hollows, is there shelter from wind? Are some varieties more resistant to disease? Local varieties will do best because they are already adapted to your conditions.

Blossom times: will the apples find the pollinators they need? Most apple trees need pollen from another variety that blossoms at about the same time. The RHS divides the apple-blossom season into seven time bands – and a tree can usually be pollinated by another variety in the same band or by the ones immediately before or after it. A good fruit nursery will be able to give you advice on trees that flower at the same time.

Fruiting times: will your orchard enjoy and extended harvest? You could select a range of apple varieties that will fruit from July to December (some of which may keep until Easter). This way you will get some fruit even if there is a late frost that ruins the blossom on some trees.

Hedgerow fruit for wildlife

Blackthorn fruit, known as sloe, is quite large and blackbirds and song thrushes find them difficult to swallow – you may see them stabbing at sloes on the ground.

Blackbird enjoying a fallen apple in the frost Crab apples can be picked and eaten by deer. Fallen fruit is also enjoyed by blackbirds, thrushes, robins, starlings and carrion crows. Chaffinches, great tits and marsh tits eat the seeds.

Dog Rose hips are swallowed whole by blackbirds, fieldfares, mistle thrushes and woodpigeons. Greenfinches eat the seeds.

Hawthorn “haws” are eaten by blackbirds, thrushes, robins, starlings, woodpigeons and hawfinches. They provide much of the food for migrant winter visitors such as redwings, fieldfares and other thrushes. The fruits are often defended over winter by mistle thrushes. The fruit can be ruined by very cold weather.

Holly fruit has a long season. Blackbirds, redwings and mistle thrushes (who often defend ‘their’ bushes) are the main predators, followed by fieldfares, song thrushes, blackcaps, woodpigeons and robins.

The above text has been quoted from the Community Orchard Handbook. To buy your copy please visit the Common Ground shop.