It is hard, in my opinion, not to say enough great things about catchy, technical buzz words or phrases. I can’t get enough of them. Besides being efficient forms of communication, they make people sound smart when talking shop with others. Just think about it. You and I may be sitting in a restaurant talking about our various landscaping projects…riiiight. Because we are excited about the topic, we’re speaking a little bit louder than is probably acceptable. The couple at the table next to us can’t help but eavesdrop on our conversation and oh how impressed they are when they hear us drop phrases like “High Density Home Orchard.” We’re very special people.

Barn Wall Espalier

High Density Home Orchards are the perfect answer to the space dilemmas that many urban gardeners face. The concept does require a change of perspective though. When seeds, seedlings, bushes, fruit, etc., are purchased at a nursery, usually accompanying them are planting instructions. Those planting instructions are generally geared to insure the planter of getting the maximum yield out of those plants, but they also require a significant amount of space not typically found in urban areas. For instance, an everyday orange tree could produce as many as 750 oranges per year, which is great if you are a commercial farmer, but at home, quantities like that tend to air on the side of ridiculous. By the end of the season, your neighbors start screening their calls or simply stop answering the door for fear it will be you on their doorstep with yet another basket of stupid fruit.

Another drawback in particular, to planting fruit trees with large, commercial-like spacings is the significant reduction of varieties and ripening times that come with planting one variety of fruit. When implementing the concept of the High Density Home Orchard, it is easy to plant four or five times the amount of fruiting trees in a significantly smaller space. The results are lesser quantities of fruit that ripen all year-round, versus one type, ripening for 3 or 4 weeks.

Pleached Hedgerow

High Density Home Orchards revolve around the concept that almost all fruit trees can be bent, trained, or pruned into submission, using ancient Roman gardenening techniques like the hedgerow, pleaching (raised hedgerow), espalier, and/or the Belgian Fence, to name a few.  In many ways, I’m as new to this as the next guy, but in the coming weeks, I’ll do my best to explain different ideas and techniques that I’ve researched related to these sorely under-utilized practices on this side of the Atlantic.

Belgian Fence

And another good example, albeit one that is far less ornamental:

4 Cherry Trees in 1 Hole-Less aesthetically pleasing, but extremely functional (You look awesome in there fella, you really do)

More to come.

*Normally, I prefer to use my own photos, but for good examples of these techniques, I had to search the web. I’d love to give credit for them, but was unable to locate all of the proper information. For the Flickr Photos that were used, I linked the pictures to their respective homes.