Growing apples in your garden.
Glasgow is wet and reasonably far north so not all apples that local garden centres will sell you will do well in an organic Milngavie garden. Fruit and vegetables in Scotland by Kenneth Cox and Caroline Beaton has an excellent section on apples that has helped inform my apple choices. I now have five apple trees in my typical garden - one was there when we moved in and four are new.
I inherited an old cooking apple tree when we moved in a year ago. Last year I got just 3 apples, and so in an effort to improve things this year I removed all weeds and rampant shrubs from under the tree, pruned it, and fed it, and bought 4 more apple treees to assist in cross pollination. Alas it is still looking like I may only get 1 or 2 apples this year. Unfortunately, it turns out to be quite a late flowerer so my other trees had mostly all finished flowering by the time the old tree blossomed. I suspect a wood pigeon might also have munched some of the flowers. I will try grafting on some of my other apple trees later on.
The good news is that the four new trees are all looking good. I bought a Discovery (which has 2 apples on it), one of which is shown below, a Cambusnethan Pippen, a Galloway Pippen (1 apple) and a Lord Derby from Scottish Fruit Trees. I chose these four as they are meant to do well in Glasgow because they have a local heritage - such as the Galloway Pippen from Galloway and Cambusnethan Pippen from the Clyde valley - and/or are sufficiently hardy and scab resistant that they should do well in our damp climate. The other critical consideration when buying two or more trees is that they must sufficiently overlap in pollination group to be compatible (adjacent numbers such as a 3 and a 4 are meant to be OK). Other options would be Winter Gem and Katy (which I think is what they have out at Geilston Gardens). You might want to consider early and late ripening and storage longevity so as to get a long supply of apples. Lastly, rootstock is the other thing to think about as this will affect the size of the tree. Two of mine are on MM106 rootstock and two on semi-dwarf (M26) rootstock. On reflection, the M26 rootstock seems the way to go in a typical garden as it allows you to grow multiple trees to aid pollination and especially if you train them as an espalier they won't overwhelm the garden.
