Well perhaps I am exaggerating a little, if not a hundred there are still a host of good reasons for growing fruits. And if I dare suggest anything as radical, there are even better reasons for growing fruits rather than vegetables. I suggest we all make the same error- when we decide to grow food we rush to create a vegetable patch; which may not actually suit our needs, or resources. And when we consider fruit at all it’s when other space is available rather than as a primary goal. Yet I would argue that we should all establish fruit cages and orchards as a priority.

There is a lot to be said for growing fruit, and for the lazier gardeners amongst us, even more so. You will get crops of many fruits regardless of whether or not you do a good job. But the quality and value of those crops may vary tremendously, and their season of use. The skill is not just growing apples; but in producing sufficiently good enough apples to store and eat over the most months of each year. Each fruit varies with it’s more crucial cultural aspects. Variety, micro-climate, pollination, watering, feeding, pruning, each have greater or less importance for every type of fruit.

One of the things that may discourage gardeners from growing some sorts of fruit is the apparently elaborate pruning methods that seem to be involved. Whole books are devoted to this esoteric art and offer many different methods, especially for grapes and pears which seem to have attracted more different and diverse pruning regimes than all other fruits put together. In these complex instructions, that pruning, which is the truly necessary minimum, has become overtly complicated - mostly because of the desire to train fruit trees into constricted forms.

To all intents and purposes there’s only one perennial vine for a kitchen garden, a grape-vine. All the rest pale into rightful insignificance by comparison. The kiwi and it’s relatives are fair croppers but the others are only of academic interest. Which is a shame as vine crops are convenient in small gardens where they can be trained up, and or affixed to perimeters, to catch most sun.

There are many fruits that taste considerably better off the tree than their equivalent shop bought. Most commercial fruits are picked too young, and after shipping, storage and display can only be a poor substitute for what they could have been. But a fresh home grown apricot rises above such mere distinction, the texture as well as the taste becomes sublime. You have not lived till you have eaten a sun warmed apricot fresh plucked from the branch. The sweet, tart and aromatic flesh can be so gorgeous you barely believe it is the same fruit as the supermarkets sell.