Columnist Mark Cox from Weston’s Baytree Garden Centre looks at the myths surrounding fruit trees

In this week’s Out in the Garden column, Baytree Garden Centre’s Mark Cox discusses the myths surrounding fruit trees and box sets...

I have to admit somewhat shamefully that I have fallen off the wagon and with the help and support of my family and close friends I hope to one day be able to show my face in public once more following my decent into binge watching.

Binge watching a television programme for me has always been an alien concept. I used to love watching Knight Rider as a child and discussing with my friends in the playground what may or may not happen in next week’s episode. The anticipation would grow until the show aired the following week. I so loved a cliff hanger.

Sadly I let my no binge watching guard down this week with BBC’s drama The Sixth Commandment - what a fantastic piece of storytelling with a group of actors at the top of their game. After the first episode I was so engaged I forgot that I was watching actors and found myself getting angry whenever the villain was on screen.

Four hours later, I had watched the entire series. However afterwards I wondered what other outdated and misplaced viewpoints had I been falsely labouring under.

I remembered back to an old school friend whom I bumped into earlier on in the year. Lisa was her name and she told me how she so enjoyed as a child picking the apples off her Grandad’s apple trees. Now that she had a family all of her own she wanted her children to experience the thrill of picking ripe apples from their own trees. Sadly her garden was not particularly large and she had wrongly believed that to grow an apple tree you needed a huge garden.

Over a coffee I explained how the belief that if you wanted to grow an apple tree in a pot that it would need be the size of an Olympic swimming pool and you’d need a 30ft Cherry picker to harvest said fruit was so wrong. Whilst this may have been the case a number of years ago modern growing methods have eliminated that issue.

Today apples trees can be grafted onto different rootstocks which control the growth rate and vigour of the tree. If you are looking to plant a fruiting apple tree into a pot then you want to look out for a variety of apple tree that has been grafted to an M27 rootstock.

Apples grown on an M27 rootstock will grow to a height somewhere between 5 and 6 feet tall in about 10years time. The pot wouldn’t need to be visible from space either. An 18inch pot with a loam based compost which gets watered and fed regularly would do just fine in producing a good supply of fruit.

Another advantage of growing a dwarf variety of apple is that within a couple of years you’ll be able to start enjoying the fruit it produces with your children. I recommended to Lisa that she opt for Apple ‘Christmas Pippin’ as it has crisp, honeyed sweet flesh and thin skins. This variety of apple has been especially bred for gardens.

I don’t think I can ever go back now to being a non-binge-watcher. In the same way that Lisa will challenge people when they inhale sharply and say you can’t do that in the garden. Modern hybrids and gardening methods are transforming what we can grow which can only be a good thing as the joy of gardening is simply gardening and enjoying the fruits of our labours.