Interactive lesson

Orchard plan, step by step

Interactive lesson: how many trees a family needs, where to plant them, which species, varieties and rootstocks, pollination partners and a plan on paper before you buy the first tree.

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The whole lesson as text

1. How many trees

The plan starts with how much fruit your family eats and preserves.

75 kg per person — An adult eats and preserves roughly 75 kg (165 lb) of fruit a year. Count a child aged 7–14 as 0.7 of an adult and a child up to 6 as 0.4.
Trees and soft fruit — About 70 % of that fruit comes from trees and 30 % from soft fruit. In lowland UK and Ireland that is roughly 1.6 trees per adult.
A family of four — Two adults and two children need roughly 163 kg of fruit from trees: 2 apples, 2 plums, a pear, a sweet cherry and a peach. That is 7 trees on 167 m².
Plant a little more — Because of pollination, families usually plant 9–12 trees. If you're not sure of the site, plant half the plan the first winter and the other half the next.

Why: A vegetable garden can be redesigned every year. An orchard can't. An apple tree on a vigorous rootstock crops for 50 years or more. So an orchard is drawn on paper first, and only then do you dig the hole.

If you dry a lot of fruit, make cider or sell, scale the plan up.
Yields vary a great deal: a tree may give 80 kg one year and 10 kg the next. So plant a little more than you need.

2. Site

Site matters more than variety: a tree in a bad spot won't crop even with the best care.

Sun 6–8 hours — A fruit tree needs at least 6–8 hours of sun a day. Peaches, apricots and sweet cherries need full sun; apples, pears and plums tolerate a little shade.
Not in a frost pocket — Plant on the middle of a slope, not at the bottom of a valley. Cold air settles there and a late frost kills the blossom.
Not on waterlogged ground — If water still stands in a 60 cm (2 ft) hole a day after rain, the roots will suffocate. Plums and pears put up with more wet, peaches and sweet cherries the least.
Shelter, close to the house — A hedge or a row of trees on the windward side protects blossom and bees. A tree you can see from the window is easier to guard from birds, deer and thieves.

Why: A late spring frost is the orchard's worst enemy. Open blossom is damaged at roughly −2 °C (28 °F), and young fruitlets at even less. Cold air drains downhill and settles at the bottom of a valley.

Don't plant a fruit tree where the same species has just been removed, especially apple after apple: young trees grow slowly there (replant disease).
For the first two or three years a young tree needs roughly 20–40 litres (5–10 gallons) of water a week in dry spells.