Saturday Morning With Jack Tame

Planting fruit producing systems in small spaces  Last week, we looked at saving space in the garden and still grow fruit trees. One of the topics was grafting fruit tree wood on a root stock that supressed growth. Some fruit trees are available as multiple-grafts: imagine a plum tree with two or three different varieties grafted on different sides of that one tree! You can add a pollinator and an extra variety for extended plum harvests. You can get triple-grafted apples, nectarines, you name it. Each variety tends to look slightly different in terms of leaves and branches. You can often pick exactly where the graft is – that is quite crucial for when it comes to pruning the tree (so you leave all varieties on the tree in roughly equal amounts of leaves and branches and fruiting spurs). For your balcony, you could get one of those multi-grafted trees and plant it in a large wine barrel on the 16th floor. Different ripening times stretch your harvesting season. Remember though: you can only graft apples on ap