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Hi all, this is my first post here and I'm not an experienced food grower so I guess in the first instance I'll be asking more questions that answering. Hopefully that will change soon enough though.
My first question relates to planting a triplet of an apple, a pear and a plum tree to espalier. Due to a lack of foresight we've come to realised that the best place for these to grow would be along a south west facing perimeter fence that due to a small amount of required retaining requires an 18" dwarf wall with footings at it's base. The overall thickness of the wall needs to be pretty thin and the material that we have to build it in is random blocks of gritstone, meaning only about 10cm of soil between the front and back faces so no good for this. What we are thinking though is that we could widen the wall just at the points where we'd like to plant, to 30cm. I guess this makes it kind of like planting them into pots. I'm planning on separating the footings for the front and back leaves of the wall and tying them and the wall leaves together so the roots would have access and drainage right down into the ground soil below.
Finally, the questions!
Is this even a sensible approach? If it is doable, then I'm thinking I could either plant the trees at the ground level at the base of the wall then back fill in a year or two when they are more developed. This might reduce the chances of the wall being damaged by the root growth but then again it might mean the the trunks would rot with the soil. Or I backfill when the wall is built and plant at the surface. Or half and half. The trees will be grafted onto dwarf root stock so I'm hoping that the root system won't go so crazy as to damage this type of wall.
We are yet to select the varieties and root stocks which would probably have a baring on the success of this.
Any advice at all would be so so much appreciated!
Thanks, Adrian
My first question relates to planting a triplet of an apple, a pear and a plum tree to espalier. Due to a lack of foresight we've come to realised that the best place for these to grow would be along a south west facing perimeter fence that due to a small amount of required retaining requires an 18" dwarf wall with footings at it's base. The overall thickness of the wall needs to be pretty thin and the material that we have to build it in is random blocks of gritstone, meaning only about 10cm of soil between the front and back faces so no good for this. What we are thinking though is that we could widen the wall just at the points where we'd like to plant, to 30cm. I guess this makes it kind of like planting them into pots. I'm planning on separating the footings for the front and back leaves of the wall and tying them and the wall leaves together so the roots would have access and drainage right down into the ground soil below.
Finally, the questions!
Is this even a sensible approach? If it is doable, then I'm thinking I could either plant the trees at the ground level at the base of the wall then back fill in a year or two when they are more developed. This might reduce the chances of the wall being damaged by the root growth but then again it might mean the the trunks would rot with the soil. Or I backfill when the wall is built and plant at the surface. Or half and half. The trees will be grafted onto dwarf root stock so I'm hoping that the root system won't go so crazy as to damage this type of wall.
We are yet to select the varieties and root stocks which would probably have a baring on the success of this.
Any advice at all would be so so much appreciated!
Thanks, Adrian
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