THE GARDEN ORCHARD

In this excerpt from his new book, fruit and permaculture enthusiast Wade Muggleton explains how even those of us with small gardens can grow fruit – and plenty of it!

- Wade Muggleton

When starting at a garden scale, what you plant can rather depend on what you have to begin with. You might be fitting a few trees into an already established garden or designing a garden from a blank canvas.

On a domestic scale, almost all gardens can incorporate one or more fruit trees; it really is a case of the right tree for the right space. While the field orchard may have taller trees (what we might think of as those traditional fruit trees), in the garden and especially small gardens and yards, we can look at trained and dwarfing forms of fruit trees. I have often heard the lament: “I don’t have room for a fruit tree” when in truth, through good design, a range of fruit trees can be included in almost any garden.

Our plot, Station Road Permaculture Garden, has 30 fruit trees in a rectangular plot of an ex-local authority semi-detached house. I describe it as a very ordinary plot, for red brick, three-bed semis of this type (ours is 1950s) were built in their tens of thousands across the UK and often had a decent-sized garden: ours has a 12 by 24m (40x80ft) rectangle at the back with a 12 by 12m (40x40ft) square in the front.