Our First 2 Apple Trees from Blackmoor Nurseries

Apple Trees from Blackmoor Nurseries 

I'd like to introduce you to the very first trees for the Didcot Orchard Town Project, I purchased them from www.Blackmoor.co.uk for £25 each, Bargain!

Ordering

I decided to buy online after checking my local Garden centre and finding only one variety of apple tree there. Before deciding on Blackmoor I done extensive research and found that there are a lot of websites to choose from. What made me ultimately choose Blackmoor was a combination of easy to use website, comparatively good prices, extensive range, good product information and being able to deliver the trees all year round. Some of the other sites would only deliver the trees when they are in dormancy (Winter) and me being impatient, wanted them now! 

The Trees

St Edmund's Pippin

I chose two different varieties, a new variety called Fiesta AGM and an old english variety called St Edmund's Pippin, they will be ready for picking in September and October. Hopefully they will pollinate each other as neither variety are self fertile. Both varieties are 2 year old trees on M26 rootstocks so will grow be medium sized trees, roughly 3-4 metres tall when fully grown. However I don't plan on letting them grow that tall, otherwise we'll need a ladder to pick the apples.

Fiesta AGM

Also, when you order you get a choice of either bush, fan, cordon or espalier trained trees. I chose bush for both because i want to train/prune these trees to have an open centre (I'll write blog on training/pruning soon). Initially my plan for these trees is to grow them to a good size in pots and take cutting from them to graft to the rootstocks i'll be purchasing this winter.
Once i have secured the varieties on the rootstocks we will be planting them somewhere in Didcot.

Delivery

Flowers have fallen after pollination

Little Apple

When the trees arrived only 1 week after payment i was shocked by the size of the boxes they came in. They were huge! You will see from the picture that the two trees i received look to have been trained in 2 completely different ways but both are healthy so i'm not going to complain (life is too short to waste time moaning about imperfections). As you can see from these pictures, the trees have already flowered this year and we already have apples growing! Overall I'm very happy with Blackmoor and will be ordering some new varieties soon.

  And Here they are!

These will both be repotted into much larger pots to give the roots room to grow

 I hope you enjoyed the pictures

~ Mark