Apple Walk Planted

On Wednesday, our Yorkshire apples arrived, barerooted. They all came from an excellent (and relatively local) nursery in Pickering, called RV Roger, and are all young maiden trees, probably one or at most two years old from grafting:

• Court Pendu Plat (Norman)
• Joaneting (1600)
• Cats Head (1620)
• Ribston Pippin (1707)
• Dog's Snout (1720)
• Hunt House (1720)
• Balsam (1750)
• Greenup's Pippin (1750)
• Acklam Russet (1768)
• Hornsea Herring (1780)
• Yorkshire Greening (1803)
• Flower of the Town (1831)
• Fillingham Pippin (1835)
• Cockpit Improved (1850)
• New Bess Pool (1850)
• Winter Cockpit (1860)
• Nancy Jackson (1875)
• Sharleston Pippin (1888)
• Yorkshire Aromatic (1945)
• Grandpa Buxton (1990)

To these, we're adding Craggy's Seedling (I can't find a date for this, but guess around 1850), and Crimson Superb (similarly, but it's a sport of Laxton's Superb, bred 1897, so I'm putting it in the first half of the 20th Century, which is all the precision I need, as you can see). They're currently just MM106 rootstocks, as the graftwood will be arriving in a week or so.

We planted out almost all of these this morning, starting at the back left corner of the apple walk with Court Pendu Plat, and working through them chronologically, back right, then penultimate left, penultimate right, and so on. Pleasingly, this puts Cats Head (the biggest plant) next to Dog's Snout; and Cockpit Improved and Winter Cockpit adjacent. The bottom four on the left we've not planted, as we wanted to further increase the drainage, and re-assess the soil on Sunday.

They've all been planted with mycorrhizal fungi, and tied to their 2½" stake, next to their metal arch-foundation tube. I'll give them their establishing cut, at the height of the first 'tier', as part of the winter pruning in the next couple of weeks.

These trees planted, we also put the Hessle pear, and Marron de Lyon and Marigoule sweet chestnuts, which were part of the same order, in their prepared holes. Similar to the previous standard fruit trees, they're in decent planting pits, with more mycorrhizal fungi, a 2½" stake, and a 1.2m circumference, 6' height chicken wire cage, held in place with two 8' bamboos. (Sorry, terrible mix of units.)

Hessle, like the apples, is a Yorkshire native, coming from an eponymous village in the East Riding, near Kingston upon Hull. Sadly, there don't appear to be any Yorkshire-bred chestnuts (not terribly surprising, really), so we have the two French varieties that seemed best. I'm sure they'll be lovely.