How to Manage Your Fruit Garden

When it comes to manuring one cannot lay down hard and fast rules as regards fruit trees and bushes as a whole. Types which tend to bear on the young wood, like blackcurrants, generally need more nitrogen than a soft fruit like the redcurrant, which hears its fruit on short spurs produced on the older wood.

Redcurrants tend therefore to suffer more quickly from lack of potash than do blackcurrants. if therefore one had wood ashes available, as we always have from our log fires at the College, these should be used primarily for red currants – and, as a matter of fact, for gooseberries that also readily show potash starvation on certain soils.

Here it was necessary to paint the trees with Colophene. Management therefore entails day-to-day interest, day-to-day supervision, day-to-day work, and day-to-day planning.

Young trees are naturally vigorous, whereas older trees that have started to crop heavily may so concentrate on the production of fruit buds that they do not produce enough young wood. Thus the owner will see the need of varying his manure program as the years go by.

The overall picture may be summarized thus: High nitrogen may be necessary for soft fruits like blackcurrants, for succulent fruits like plums, and even to a certain extent for the larger cooking apples. High potash, on the other hand, is advisable for the high quality, richly coloured dessert apple, as well as for the red currant and gooseberry.

There is no quick way to success in fruit growing. Part of the management must be to let Nature take its course, and merely to act as an encourager rather than an stopper.