M27 apple help please

[Tadpole123]

Last year I was given a 5 year old m27 coxes apple by a neighbour who said "it's not done much in my garden, you're welcome to it"
Not sure what to do with it as it was the height of summer, so I stuck it in a very big pot.
It has 1 main stem and a smaller 2nd one and very few fruiting spurs but I still got 4 apples off it and it's about 5' tall but that includes a 30" pot.
I've tied the main stem along my 3' high fence so it didn't get damaged in the winter, the other is too short to reach the fence.

So what do I do with it now? too tall for a step over which was my first and only idea so far, leave in the pot? plant it? prune it? leave it to grow?

[FB.]

Can you put up a picture?

Your neighbour's comment of "it's not done much" is probably because M27 requires excellent growing conditions. I suggest its best chance is a potful of fresh compost.

However, Cox is not an easy variety to grow without the use of chemicals. It is prone to all kinds of pests and diseases (canker, scab, mildew, woolly aphid, bitter pit), although some people get lucky and their tree somehow manages to avoid catching anything.

As time has gone on, I've gradually gone off the really dwarf rootstock M27 as it is just too demanding.
I now favour the M9 or M26. They are more vigorous than M27 and "the books" seem to put a terrible fear into people about anyting that isn't a dwarf will soon take over the garden.
However, many gardens have poor soil and without spraying, fruit trees often need that extra vigour to compensate for damage from pests (leaf munching bugs, sap sucking aphids) and diseases (especially scab, which damages leaves) which they have to fight off themselves.

[Tadpole123]

Thanks for that. Too dark now to take a pic but will do so tomorrow and post it here.

It looked very healthy last year, at least it did to me! we do get peach leaf curl on the peach tree a bit but I've almost got that under control now, but that's it for diseases, except for spud blight 2 years ago but that's the first time in 20 years.
I did speak to the original owner on my way in this evening and he said he had no idea how to prune it as it was a leaving present from work, so he just chopped bits off when he thought of it!

[Tadpole123]

Hope this pic works.............


it does is this pic of any help?
opps I've deleted it, off to try again!

[Tadpole123]

[FB.]

Hmmm......

It's got a long skinny trunk before the branches, and those branches have quite long bare bits before the secondary branches. It's not an easy one to work with; this is what I meant in that fruit trees need to be trained well in the early years, in order to become an ideal shape later. Too many people miss out the early training which actually saves a lot of work later.

As it's on a dwarf rootstock, I'm not sure that it would now be able to take the stress of the radical pruning that I'd have done to it in its early years.

The bulge at the graft confirms that it is either M27 or M9. It also shows the straggly, sparse-branched habit of many dwarf rootstocks which I mentioned on another topic earlier today, and the reason why it is very important to concentrate on good pruning in the early years, even if it is at the expense of fruit.
If it was M26, often the rootstock bulges but the scion doesn't.
More vigorous rootstocks don't usually have the bulge.
It is thought that the bulge affects normal sapflow - causing a bottleneck as the sap goes round the bulge - and that's partly how the dwarfing effect works.

So I don't really know what to suggest for the best.

If it was mine, I would plant it really deep, with the graft well below ground level to get the branches where you want, and let it become an "own-root" Cox's, which would be around M26-MM106 vigour once it forms its own roots in a few years time. In order to keep it alive in the meantime, I'd suggest a watering pipe down to the weak M27 roots which will otherwise not be able to get surface water.

Alternatively, plant it in some really fertile soil, stake it (perhaps against a fence) and see what fruit you can get.

Or take a chance on pruning it to a trunk height that you actually want to become a stepover, but it has a high risk of being a multi-year renovation project and it still might look ugly at the end of it.

I suggest that if you go for reshaping, that you only do winter pruning for the next few years as dwarfs take a long time to recover from summer pruning.

[Tadpole123]

If it was mine, I would plant it really deep, with the graft well below ground level to get the branches where you want, and let it become an "own-root" Cox's, which would be around M26-MM106 vigour once it forms its own roots in a few years time. In order to keep it alive in the meantime, I'd suggest a watering pipe down to the weak M27 roots which will otherwise not be able to get surface water.

That's good enough for me I'm very happy to take a long term view on it, but the only space available would be shaded (no direct sun in the summer due to neighbours trees) except for 12-2pm when it would get full sun or I could do it in the pot and put it in full sun or semi shade for a few years. Which would you suggest?

[FB.]

2 hours of sun per day in summer is probably not enough for good fruit quality (might be usable as a cooker though, but perhaps a bit small-sized fruit due to lack of sun), although the tree itself probably would tolerate only partial sun.
In those kind of shade conditions I'd prefer to plant a Scottish-bred cooker.

Is it possible to plant it (at normal level, not with the graft buried) in a pit of compost near the base of one of the fenceposts and then tie it to the fencepost for support and just let it do its thing?
Just keep it mulched with grass cuttings, compost and regularly watered in summer.

[Tadpole123]

Just been out to look at possible planting sites and summer sun options.
I can plant it on a west facing fence (only 3' high here) next to a post, where if it reached the top it would get sun for most of the day except 11-12 and 4-6ish in the summer, and it would have to put up with autumn raspberry runners trying to pop up close by!

Unfortunately for a south facing garden I have shade problems due to close neighbours sycamore trees. Both previous owners had them pruned every few years, neither current owner wants to so they are now taller than our buildings.