Growing small fruit trees

[JackieWeaversZoomAc]

I'd like to plant some fruit trees in my garden. It's a smallish garden but I had a friend who really successfully grew loads of fruit trees in her small L-shaped wraparound garden.

sadly my friend has died so I can't ask her for more for more specific advice on how she did it.

I don't want massive fruit trees in my garden but I don't need tiny/dwarf/cordon ones either. Just growing reasonably sized smallish trees would be great.

Is it all about the pruning? 🍎

It's all about the rootstock when choosing your trees. Nice info from RHS explaining various rootstocks for different types of fruit tree is here https://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?pid=359

Depending on your space, the aspect etc, you might like to consider espalier or can trained trees - which would sit flat against a fence or wall and save huge amounts of space. Or even cordons or supercolumns which are basically the trunk and fruit growing immediately off it. Not all fruit can be trained in these ways so it depends on the fruit you want, and obviously you can have a mix of differently trained trees. You need to consider the training method you will use when choosing the rootstock - then once you have them planted it is all about the pruning from that point

Oh dear *fan trained, not can trained

thank you - so much to learn! I am probaBLY too lazy hands off to do anything that requires much training or wires. I'll take a look at RHS x