Peaches and milkmaids
April 2006

‘So once you’ve planted your fruit tree you should think about feeding it. The best is wool, or human hair – 12 per cent nitrogen. Find your local shepherd and buy a couple of fleeces and then stake them down to the ground.’… Er, right… Is this before or after we should ‘pop down to the blacksmiths’ and get them to mould some iron supports for my espalier apples and pear trees?

It’s fruit tree day at garden school and we appear to have stepped back in time to 1790. ‘Your local shepherd’? ‘Pop down to the blacksmith’? It’s only
a matter a time before we’re urged to call on our village milkmaid. It’s all charmingly buccolic, of course, and, as instruction goes, certainly has more elan than the phrase ‘dash into B & Q for some Growmore’. But I worry I may fail to locate a cast of convenient locals or that, once tracked down, they might laugh at me in a humiliating Straw Dogs-type way.

The thought, though, of achieving perfect fan-trained peaches and apricots, and espalier apples and pears is potent enough to make me risk humiliation. Discounting the human hair option on the grounds that it sounds a bit Burke and Hare, I find myself on yell.com with some trepidation and little expectation of success.

‘Oh hello, I have a garden near the field with your sheep in, and I wondered if you might have any fleeces that I could buy off you to use as fertiliser…’
Expect stunned silence followed by deranged yokel cackle.
‘I’m afraid we don’t have any fleeces at the moment,’ comes a gentle voice.
‘But we will have some in about a month when we do the dagging [at least it sounded like dagging]’
‘Shall I call back in a month then?’
‘Yes, that would be fine.’
So I’ll call back when they’ve finished the dagging.

Next I call a blacksmiths in Surrey Docks. The phone rings hopelessly into what I imagine is a filthy cobbled yard filled by clanging iron, large
shifting horses and hulking aproned men with giant forearms. I leave a quavering message.
‘Oh hello, I wonder if you might be able to help me with some iron supports for espalier fruit trees…’
Within minutes comes the briskly professional reply. ‘Yes we do do espalier
tree supports; actually the last lot we did were for Lambeth Palace…’

So it seems that the fruit tree expert wasn’t living in 1790 after all. I planted the apricot, peach and fig against a south-west facing wall, pruning
back the branches to make a fan shape and tying them to bamboos that are attached to parallel wires in the bricks. The peach is the only tricky one since at this time of year, the early blossom must be protected from frost at night with fleece, and the flowers hand-pollinated (just dab inside them with a make-up brush) because there aren’t enough bees around yet.

Otherwise, it’s all fairly simple. Visitors to the garden in a month’s time may wonder why it appears to be taken over with dead sheep, but they should count themselves lucky it’s not human hair.