Grow Your Own Magazine

hi, just browsing my T&M fruit catalogue and a question has sprung to mind, what is the difference between buying a feathered maiden and a tree?

the plums and peaches etc are sold as maidens yet apples are sold as trees.

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if you can't tell the difference between a maiden covered in feathers and a tree, i'm afraid theres no hope

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I think a feathered maiden is in it's second year of growing & has a few side branches?

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I thought that a maiden of any fruit tree type is where no fruit had been allowed to set. When I put my trees in, I was advised to pick off all the flowers for the first two years, to allow the tree to lay a good root system and strengthen the branches.

A tree on the other hand would have had some fruit. You know, when you go into Wyvale's, they have trees that are not very big but with fruit on them already.

Maybe wrong though.

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A feathered maiden is grown on for one or two more years more than a maiden, it will be bigger and have more side branches ('feathers'). For fruit trees it usually means it is being grown on with a tall stem to produce a standard ie. with a clear stem up to about 1.8m.

Does that help?

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A feathered tree is one that has formed some branches (it looks like a feather).
A whip is a baby tree with no branches (it looks like a whip).
A maiden is an unpruned baby tree.

A feathered maiden is a baby tree that has branched by itself, without being pruned.
Such feathered maidens often reach maturity at a younger age than unfeathered whips and they are usually smaller in overall size.

Dwarfing rootstocks encourage earlier feathering and earlier maturing of the tree.

Strong-growing varieties (such as Bramley and many of the triploids) tend to need hard pruning in their first few years to get good feathering.
Weaker-growing varieties will often feather nicely by themselves, or with only moderate need for pruning (such as Red Pippin/Fiesta, Discovery, Egremont Russet).

Buying one that is feathered, speeds up development of the branch structure by one season. But you won't know how well feathered it is until it arrives.

Most mail-order trees are either one-year-old maiden whips (the cheapest) or two-year-old bushes (pruned to about 3ft a year ago, to produce some primary branches).

Plum trees often don't need much pruning.