GROW YOUR OWN:APPLES ARE ONE of those fruits that suffer much from the travails of intensive farming. Commercial varieties are heavily and regularly sprayed to prevent disease and post-harvest they are often heavily sprayed again with chemicals, such as 1-MCP, to prevent the fruit from rotting. This is how we have "fresh" apples on our supermarket shelves now, even though it's been about seven months since apples were in season.
So, if you want a supply of apples that haven’t been riddled, sprayed or generally messed with, it makes sense to grow your own. We put in about four apple trees when we moved to the country about five years ago and it probably says everything about our apple-growing skills that I can’t even tell you what variety they are. They are much neglected with regard to pruning and the like, and I suspect that they may well have been planted in the wrong part of the garden. And so, the spectacular vista of self-sufficiency – enough apples to eat, store and perhaps even make an occasional batch of cider – remains elusive for now.
The McDonnell family from Dungarvan, Co Waterford, long ago realised that there are lots of people like me out there – people who want a decent supply of their own apples but who do not have the skills or the inclination to do the regular tending required to keep apple trees in tip-top shape.
The family is steeped in the tradition of fruit growing. Dr Pat McDonnell studied horticulture at UCD and specialised in apple studies at Cornell University in New York. He established his nursery business in 1975, selling apple trees to garden centres. Selling the trees became a tougher proposition in subsequent decades, when French growers began to flood the market with cheap Golden Delicious apples. In search of a unique idea to outsmart them, he realised that with increasing urbanisation the average garden size was becoming too small for a large apple tree, so he went about designing a miniature tree that would produce regular-sized fruit. By using a special dwarfing rootstock called M27 and grafting various apple tree varieties onto it, he invented (in 1998) the Coronet miniature apple tree. It’s an apple tree, but not as we know it.
At their Springfield nursery in Kilmurry, Co Waterford, McDonnell’s son Liam (who joined the family business from Cadburys in 2000) shows me one of the Coronet trees. It is no more than chest-high, but there are beautiful little pink blossoms all over it, a harbinger no doubt of lots of lovely autumn fruit. The Coronet is a marvel of modern horticulture – a single tree produces two different varieties and colours of fruit (in this case James Grieve on top and Elstar on the bottom) courtesy of some nifty grafting work.
As Liam McDonnell explains it, the M27 rootstock is like a basic building block that ensures the tree will remain miniature. On to this building block they graft cuttings from regular apple trees in two stages. “A cutting is taken in spring and attached to the rootstock using wax and then wrapped in plastic,” he says. “Then a second graft is done about a year later about two foot up the tree. We also de-fruit the trees each summer, which encourages extra fruiting ultimately, and the tree is fully shaped when you buy it, so there is no pruning required.”
The Coronet is small enough to be grown in a pot on a balcony, but still produces between 15 and 20 regular apples. The McDonnells sell more than 35,000 trees a year and about 60 per cent of those are sold overseas. It retails at about €45 in most garden centres. Four years of careful nurturing has gone in to producing the shapely little tree that you buy in a pot, and because of its age, it is guaranteed to fruit in its first year. Another concern for the spaceconstrained gardener – that you generally need two apple trees so that they pollinate each other – does not arise. Because the Coronet has two varieties in one tree, it pollinates itself.
Father and son are busy bucking the trend of the recession. “This year has just been unbelievable. Most of our garden centres take two orders a year for trees,” he says. “This year some of them have taken two already and will take another two before the year is out. It’s just gone through the roof. I think there has always been this romance attached to growing apples and people are just mad keen to try growing their own food now.”
See www.coronet.ie