Best time to plant fruit trees?

Hi Adam, welcome to the Vine. Whereabouts are you? If you add your location (nearest town) to your profile it will show on your posts and helps when giving advice.

As to planting fruit trees - when they are dormant is best time (Winter).

Firstly, check that it's allowed in your Tenancy Agreement. There will also be a rule about where you can plant perennials (mine says at least 3ft from any boundary)

The best time to plant fruit trees is:

Container-grown trees: autumn (Sept-Oct) when the soil is warm but damp and when the plant leaves just start to show some yellowing for winter.

Bare-root trees: winter (Nov-Feb) when the plant is dormant. Planting later than Feb is possible, but establishment tends to be better the earlier they are planted because they will slowly begin to grow roots on any days when the soil temperature reaches about 7'C.
If planted at the end of the bare-rot season (March-April) the plants can be weakened because they lost all the nutrients and energy that went into roots during and mild winter days.

As others have said: you may have restrictions on what you can grow, where you can grow it and how big it can get. The choice of rootstock onto which the fruiting variety is grafted, along with the growing conditions, will influence how fast it grows and how big it gets.
Rootstocks such as these should keep the tree fairly small, although they tend to need quite good soil (but it's an allotment, and allotment soils tend to be better than garden soils):
Apple: M9 or M26
Pear: Quince C
Plum: Pixy
Cherry: Gisela 5

A guide to rootstocks (Keeper Nursery) is here:
Keepers Nursery

Note that those are the maximum likely sizes; in poorer conditions trees can be much smaller (in my difficult soil trees reach only about half the size indicated by Keepers).

Finally: I would strongly advise not to grow varieties which are common in the shops because they tend to be susceptible to many pests and diseases (so need spraying). Depending on where you live and what might suit your conditions consider some of the more unusual but trouble-free varieties grown by others on this forum.

Hi Adam, The best time of the year to plant a tree is autumn or early spring, when trees are dormant. I personally prefer autumn planting of fruit trees, because they have a chance to take root before winter arrives. Fruit trees are then less stressed in spring. This applies to bare root fruit trees. Potted trees can be planted throughout the year (except heavy frosts and extreme heats).

Have fun.

MoD edit
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