Planting 2 apple trees near veg garden
Moderator: appledude
Planting 2 apple trees near veg garden
Hello everyone. I am newer to vegetable gardening, and brand-new to planting and raising apple trees. I've been advised by the gardening center to plant my 1 Drawf-Gala and 1 Golden Delicious on the South side of my yard, being the same area that I'm working on the vegetable garden. I have two options in this space to plant the apple trees: I could plant them both on the one side of the garden, which would leave one of the apple trees 4 to 9 feet from the edge of the garden OR I could straddle the trees over the garden putting the trees only a few feet from the garden (probably wouldn't decide this anyways). Would the roots from the trees hinder growth to smaller plants? Would the apple trees need to be planted a particular distance away from sidewalks, or are the roots too weak to worry about anything? If these are planted in a spot that shades the garden, would these types of dwarfs be bringing enough shade to affect many types of vegetables plants, or is it not too big a deal? Lots of questions, thank you for helping me plan this out RIGHT.
Re: Planting 2 apple trees near veg garden
Adamicaah wrote:Would the roots from the trees hinder growth to smaller plants?
Really it depends on just how dwarfing the rootstocks really are, and how large the ultimate shade-canopy shadow gets. M26 would be about as big as you would want to go so close to a garden, even their feeder roots might ultimately cause problems by hogging nutrients as the tree ages. M27 stock or P.22 would not present such a problem and would give you a tiny tree, which might be what you really want. M9 has a weaker root system, and you might get away with using it without its roots getting invasive in your garden. But M111, Bud118, Anotnovka, and seedling stocks will definitely be a huge problem in the years to come.
So it finally depends on exactly which stocks your applegrafts came on!
Would the apple trees need to be planted a particular distance away from sidewalks, or are the roots too weak to worry about anything?
Again, it depends on the strength of the understock. I would not expect M9, m26, P.22, or m27 to lift sidewalks. The larger ones could.
If these are planted in a spot that shades the garden, would these types of dwarfs be bringing enough shade to affect many types of vegetables plants, or is it not too big a deal?
Depends on the stock and pruning. you can put a whole row of m27 or p.22 based applegrafts in your garden all 3 feet apart and just treat them as an apple hedge. They will get 4 or 5 feet tall when they max out.
Hope that helps!