advice on fruit for new allotment

What fruit do you like to eat?
If you don't like blackcurrants or gooseberries, there's no point in growing them!
I grow lots of raspberries - summer and autumn fruiting ones. The birds like them too so you may need to consider netting or cages.

I prefer the taste and 'easy-ness' of autumn raspberries to summer ones. I did some research last year and by far, the two most popular varieties were 'Polka' and 'Joan J'.
Don't buy too many....they reproduce!

You haven't mentioned strawberries. Roitelet can tell you about them....she grows LOADS!

You haven't mentioned currants either.
My faves are redcurrants...little ruby drops of loveliness. I grow blackcurrants too (but don't see the point of the white ones)

I grow grapes as well and I have fig, quince, plum, damson and apple trees. Tayberries, thornless blackberry and cape gooseberries *in the greenhouse)

It's all down to what you like - as VC says, there's no point growing something you don't like.

Planning is the key. Invest in as big a fruit cage as you can - you'll easily fill it. Get support structures for things like raspberries, blackberries, loganberries etc in place first - much more difficult to create them around existing plants.

Chat to some of the other people on your allotment if they're a friendly bunch and ask what grows well locally with your soil/ micro climate. Ask if you can taste some if u think you can get away with it!

Above all, have fun choosing!

How and what preserves do you do/wish to do? You can grow lots but if all you want is the odd bowl of fresh fruit then there is not much point.

If you are happy to train trees then a few apples and pears for choice and pollination, couple of plums or gages, couple of cherries (I tend not to do sour cherries as I have a wild cherry but you could also forage). Then the odd peach or nectarine if you can protect it from bud to full leaf stage to avoid leaf curl. A couple of grape vines. I know that sounds a lot but it is surprising what you can get in. Also it is worth looking round at what can be foraged or swapped for.

Soft fruit blackberries (but again you may be better foraging for them), currants, jostaberries, strawbs, rasps., gooseberries (I only grow the red ones but green are good for cooking with).

if you have heavy soil then Black currants thrive and produce heavy crops. Red currants are easy, but targeted by birds so you would need to protect them [thats one advantage of the white currants, birds leave them alone.]. Gooseberries are also easy [and left to ripen fully are much nicer than any shop ones] some varieties are very thorny making picking a delicate business.

I'm just starting off my fruit garden as well with the majority of my fruit garden planted this year.

I have a fruiting fence on my boundary between my plots which has strawberries on the bottom layer, redcurrants and gooseberries grown as triple cordons in the middle layer and I'm going to train a kiwi and a grape along wires at the top.

In my front garden I'm building my main fruit garden and have a couple if thornless blackberries being trained up and over a gated arch entrance and the beginning of a hedge using honey berries and fuchsia berries with a himalayan honeysuckle on the end.

I'm experimenting with a square foot orchard - I have 12 fruit trees planted 18" apart in two rows 2' apart. these will be pruned and trained into vertical cordons. These have just been planted this year so it's going to be a couple of years till they're established and fruiting well before I can evaluate the experiment.

I have two little figs planted in 2' pots sunk into the ground to control their roots, 3 black current bushes and 2 summer raspberries. Currently working out where to put 4 grapes, 3 black currants, a blackberry and a tayberry - some may have to go on my other plot.

I'll probably underplant the currants, raspberries and fruit trees with strawberries/pineberries or something similar.

I also have three bananas, a pomegranate and a lime growing in the greenhouse. I have a hardy orange as well but that’s barely an edible. My blue sausage plant looks as if it's given up the ghost and has lost all it's leaves - but the stems looks alive and there are buds that may spring into life so I haven’t slung it out yet.

Is that true? Ive never managed to pick more that a handfull of redcurrants the bushes are too big to net. I love white currants but I didn't see the point of growing the to bird damage, now if they don't like them as much I'll get some planted up in the Autumn.

The first thing we bought specifically for the allotment was a quince. Not easy to find to buy and they have lots of preserving uses, and keep well for ages. Plus it is a very attractive tree.

Come the January sales I plan on buying a whole load of red baubles and decorations to hang around my fruit gardens – hoping that the birds will fer so frustrated pecking these that they'll just assume anything red is a bauble and leave it alone.

I have found that birds will eat them but they are very reluctant so you do actually get to pick them when ripe

Well you lot have certainly given me lots to think about, thanks so much, I will reply to this thread further down the line with some photos hopefully 👍😄

I've had a whitecurrant in my back garden for years, have never netted it and usually get a reasonable crop. It's doing a bit poorly this year but that's due to a particularly bad sawfly infestation that I didn't get on top of early enough. Apart from the risk of those, I'd say it's easy and pretty rewarding.