Recommendation of fruit trees and soft fruits

I have been growing a lot of different fruits in recent years.
Due to my preference for not using chemicals, I have found old, traditional, or locally-grown varieties (not shop varieties!) of apples to be by far the easiest to get a good crop with only modest attention.
Pear and plum flowers often succumb to late frosts because the flower early in the year. Due to them flowering early this year - and then a late frost - my Williams and Concorde pears produced so few fruits that the pests ate them all.
I would have thought that passionfruits would also succumb to frost, but I know very little about them.
Similarly to the pears - due to frost - my neighbours large plum tree has had no fruit for two or three seasons.
The Northwest tends to be wetter and cooler than much of the UK.
Because of that, fungal diseases could be troublesome without sprays. Few pears will resist scab without spraying. There are a number of old apples that have good resistance to scab and canker - the diseases that you are most likely to face.

My advice would be to grow several apple varieties as either fan, espalier, cordon or minarette shapes.
By planting several different varieties, specific pollination partners are not likely to be needed as there should be enough pollen when needed.

As for which varieties.....
Well, I live in a very different climate to you (my disease problems will be veyr different to yours), so I can only give some educated guesses as to what might do well in your area without too much need for spraying.

Perhaps look at:

Grenadier (early season cooker)
Newton Wonder (late season cooker)
Discovery (early season eater)
Egremont Russet (mid-season eater)
Ashmead's Kernel (late-season eater)
Winston (very late season eater)

Crawley Beauty (late season multi-purpose) - flowers very late so avoids frost.
Court Pendu Plat (late season eater) - flowers very late so avoids frost.

Note that Crawley and Court Pendu need to be grown as a pair (to pollinate each other) because they flower weeks after the other apples have finished.


FB




If you're buying bare-root trees to train yourself, you'll be best to look at rootstocks M26 or MM106 for apple.

thanks very much for the advise, FB, will look around for them.

Passion fruit is a climber and needs a lot of room. The flowers are amazing. You should get the edible variety if you want the fruit, but I don't know how frost hardy they are. (the normal passion flower plants that can be bought in GCs are normally hardy).

I did a thread titled "growing apples without sprays" or something like that. You might find it an interesting read, if you plan to grow some apples.
In the thread, I listed a number of varieties that I have grown or still grow, with scores (to be taken with a pinch of salt, so to speak) as to roughly how resistant they were to various diseases.
I would guess that for your area, you'd need at least:

scab resistance level 4 or more.
canker resistance level 3 or more.
mildew resistance level 2 or more.

Higher resistance is better, but few apples are resistant to everything.
Older varieties tend to be suited for growing in the area they originate.
Supermarket apples tend to have poor disease resistance, having been bred for the use of sprays to produce immaculate fruit.

Newton Wonder is not on my previous thread because although it has good disease resistance, it has one achilles heel if grown in my area: it would probably succumb to the powdery mildew attacks that I have to endure. Mildew is a disease of warm, dry, low-rainfall areas. Curiously for a fungus, apple mildew hates wet conditions and thrives in dry conditions.

I'd agree with FB on Crawley Beauty.

I grow it and it flowers really late. Luckily there is an old orchard aroung here so the flowers get pollinated. The apples are big and to my mind they are predominantly cookers. they are v.juicy and but don't necessarily keep their shape that well when cooked.

thanks for the advise. How about colours? I would like something really attractive like red or bright yellow, any suggestions?

What about cherries? they are red /yellow. If you decide to get them though check on whether they are self fertile. If not you might need to get two.

My dislike of cherries is that the birds will take them all, unless netted.
Unfortunately, most pears and plums have white blossom and most apples have white-tinged-pink blossom.
Maybe it's a personal taste, but I am not overly impressed by pear blossom, although plum blossom looks nice and so does apple.

Apparently, the apple variety: "Red Devil" has deep pink blossom and is a mid-season, fairly disease-resistant, offspring of the Discovery that I suggested.

Some apples have very decorative flowers, even though they are mainly white-ish.

I think that - of the apple varieties that I suggested - a lot of them have very attractive flowers.

Egremont Russet is my favourite.
Ashmead's Kernel can be attractive, too.
Court Pendu Plat produces lots of blossom.
Crawley Beauty is named for a very good reason: it's prolific and beautiful flowers.
My two Crawley's are very keen to produce blossom and they are currently heavily loaded with blossom buds for next May-June.

i have a passion fruit ..... planted in june, it didn't grow particularly quickly, (just has one sprout that reached the top of the arch) , and hasn't flowered this year, but despite some heavy frost and snow, over the last couple of weeks, still looks very healthy and alive ....... so i'm keeping fingers crossed for next year.

Most fruit trees look pretty boring through the summer. How about sowing some sweet peas and allowing them to scramble through the branches. If you buy a pinky-white variety it will look a bit like apple blossom all summer and I believe the roots will fix nitrogen for your trees.

We had our first crop from our newest apple tree this year (Herefordshire Russet). The apples themselves weren't huge, but there were lots of them and the flavour is lovely. This variety is a recent introduction, but I can recommend it.

Thanks for the advise guys, will keep you updated once I order them.