Grow a Little Fruit Tree by Ann Ralph

I love this book. I had planted some dwarf trees a little too close to the house but not close enough for espalier, using Ann's method  has saved my trees from my shortsightedness.  I also wanted an orchard with a smaller footprint, so this is allowing me to have a compact yet still varied small orchard. The book is great, David the Good's, You Tube videos are a great visual addition to the method.

I give this book 9 out of 10 acorns

For most of my life I've loved full sized trees. I wanted to give each one the chance to develop to its full potential, to produce enough fruit to share with all the wildlife, and to have acres and acres of productive land.

I've had to prune my ambitions a bit, and these days I'm lucky to have the energy to get myself beyond the little garden areas on the terraces in front of and beside the house, where there simply isn't the room to have very many full sized trees . I can't really climb up ladders to harvest things, and that close to the house the canopies of the trees mustn't be allowed to intermingle due to the risk of fire spreading between them. So I've reluctantly agreed that as my personal world has had to shrink, so must the size of the trees that feed me.

The final straw came when a young peach tree we planted a couple of years ago got peach leaf curl in the wet weather this spring, mostly because we hadn't thinned out the excess branches growing around the main stem. Most of the fruit that formed was at the very tip of the central leader, which promptly bent over as the fruit grew until it was threatening to reach the ground. I needed to swallow my pride, reach for the loppers, and grow smaller, more sturdy fruit trees.

This book, Grow a Little Fruit Tree by Ann Ralph, is the perfect way to learn how to do just that.

It's a beautiful book. It's easy to read. And it will teach you how to strike up a conversation with your trees and build a relationship with them that allows both them and you to thrive. It will teach you that to control size, it is best to prune during the summer, while to give structure to the tree winter pruning is best. It will give you the confidence to make a first cut, and encourage you to watch the tree's response to that cut so you can plan the second and third cuts. It also teaches you about more general aspects like choosing trees, planting them, and looking after them.

But what I like most of all about this book is Ann's obvious love for her trees and they way she talks about them.

Here are some of my favourite quotes...

"Growing a Meyer lemon is like keeping a goldfish. Attending to a full-sized apricot is more like looking after a goat. Maybe you want the goat, but you don’t want to tend it, so you hire a caretaker. That works fine. Or you decide that a goat is too much trouble. You plant the Meyer lemon. That story has a happy ending too."

"Like children or puppies, fruit trees absolutely require structure, training, and shaping. If you let it go, your innocent little tree soon becomes a thicketing monster, prone to breakage, fruiting erratically beyond your reach, then dropping that fruit to putrefy on the ground"

"You don’t need a bunch of fancy rules to do this. In fact, you become a better pruner if you leave the rules behind."

"Loam wasn't built in a day."

"Caring for a fruit tree has the capacity to nail you down to your own nature, to pull you into the turn of the seasons, to steal you away from the distractions that so consume us all. A fruit tree invites us to rejoin the circle of life that is built into us, who we are, and where we belong. Even if you haven’t planted your fruit tree yet, you know enough to want to. That alone is a promising beginning."

Very excited to try out this book! Thankfully the library has it.

​​​​​I give this book 8 out of 10 acorns.

First a disclaimer. I picked up this book thinking I wouldn't find it too interesting because I live with huge deer pressure where any small tree's life is in constant danger. I hoped it might give me information that would allow me to grow cherries, but that was my only goal - a small cherry tree I could build Fort Knox around!

However, I know too many people on small properties, so knowing something about the techniques Ann Ralph is promoting seems like a way to help my community become more food secure. This book is totally worth reading, even if you can't follow her techniques due to animal predation without adaptation.  

Good ideas I hadn't considered:

1. putting 3 different related baby trees in the same hole rather than grafting 3 varieties on the same tree. Each tree has its own roots, so the roots compete as well as the fruiting branches so less likely for one variety to become dominant. I had heard of planting a nitrogen fixer along with a young tree, but not this option!

2. Using baby fruit trees as a hedge or fence if wildlife permits - keep them small but get a hedgerow effect. Different species work for this technique. You might not get as much fruit all at once, but may do so over the season, without taking up a larger footprint than you can afford.

3. The genuine benefit for urban or suburban permies to plant a wide range of fruit and be able to manage it easily. Three or more apple trees all with different ripening periods and still have room for 3 plums which ripen sooner or later. A definite help for food security.

A couple of things that as a permie I disagree with:

1. "dropping that fruit to putrefy on the ground" - many bountiful fruit trees produce during our driest season. Any fruit that falls gets cleaned up by the rabbits, the deer, taken to our ducks, or dumped in our composts to add some much needed moisture there. Organic material is never a waste, at least not in my ecosystem!

2. The author pretty much says you have to start with professionally grown trees. I suspect permies' ideas of starting from seed so the roots are sound, then grafting if you get a dud, isn't in her toolbox. I'd have liked more information on how permies could start with a seed and get to the same place.