So left to my own devices on my last day (Victor comes home from camping today) I decided to venture into the garden and look at what I can do with the Crab Apples.
Firstly, a bit of background why we have Crab Apples in the garden because we put 15 plants in. And it is only for their ornamental value. I couldn't see myself picking these tiny little fruit and ending up with maybe 1/2 cup of Crab Apple Jelly ! But, there was a method to my madness. They have a beautiful show at the beginning of Spring and they bring all the Bumble Bees into the garden. Such a beautiful sight. But that was not my ulterior motive either. I had a horrid fence that I was trying to cover. The driveway alone is over 40 meters long and this fence runs the length of it. I needed to do something.
My brother in law suggested Crab Apples. The nursery man suggested these trees because I was only thinking of fast growing, ornamental. I was not interested in the fruit. So, Victor with the help of his brother dug the holes and planted the 15 trees.
I was going to espalier them. We bought them bare rooted (much cheaper) and as you can see I used, pegs, a cloth string that you can buy from nurseries much like stocking strips, and with nails into the fence. This was tedious and not a very good way of doing it because I could only nail on the cross bars. The picture above is when they first started to bloom this spring.
Since then we visited the Hobart Botanical gardens and saw how they had Espaliered some apple trees and they had used stones to bend the branches over. So I used that method when I came home to manipulate the branches. I had to be careful not to break the branches and not to kill the new growth by too much fiddling around with them etc.
Victor and his son put up some fencing wire along the fence. This made it so much easier to manipulate the brances as well. And I use wooden pegs, and plant wire to tie them to the wire. I always wonder whether I am doing it right. I have never done this before. But the plants are alive and they are travelling the way I want them to as much as possible, so I am being appeased. They always have the upper hand !
Note the bending that I have manipulated on the top branch. It was reaching for the sky !
Having originally saying I didn't care about Crab apples themselves. I am sorry now that I cannot make that 1/2 a cup of Crab Apple jelly !
On the left of the driveway we planted climbing roses. The Crab Apples flowers in Spring. The roses pick up from there and hopefully go all the way through to Winter. We have grown alternate White Iceberg and Dublin Bay Red. We also had poles put up and wire strung so that this climbers could be manipulated across the wires to hide the other fence and also to make a wall of roses. We bought them bare rooted in June last year and they had a good show this year already.
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