Having fruit trees at home has nothing but benefits: you will always have fresh fruit available and without paying anything, you can be sure that you will be eating food without pesticides or agrochemicals, and you will also have beautiful trees that will fill your garden with life.
However, the problem that can arise is the lack of space to grow them. But there are many fruit trees that can be grown in pots, such as mandarins, bananas and mangoes.
You can learn the care that each type of tree requires to grow healthy in a small space. But if you want them to take up even less space, you can also learn techniques like this one that will allow you to have fruit trees in columns, in which the fruits will grow next to the trunk and the branches must be pruned so that they do not take up so much space.
How to make your own columnar tree
The technique of planting in columns can be applied to many species of fruit trees, however, some grow better than others. In fact, you can find trees that are sold already with a certain growth, and they are usually of species such as red and green spur apples, or the so-called lilliput pears.
The apple tree is undoubtedly one of the trees that best adapts to this technique, which receives different names, such as “columnar fruit tree”, “vertical cordon” or “ballerina formation”.
The technique to “glue” the fructification to the stem basically consists of a careful pruning method.
1. First of all, you must pot your apple tree or the fruit tree with which you want to experiment with this technique. You can learn how to do it in this article.
2. When your tree begins to grow, you will need to prune the lateral branches to within three buds of the central trunk. The two closest to the trunk will be the ones that will sprout, and the last one will be used as “tirasapias”, that is, a sprout almost at the tip so that the sap is not abruptly interrupted and the tree is damaged.
Note: you will recognize the buds because a bud will be coming out of them.
3. When the “fruiting bags” are formed, that is, when you see that the two buds or one of them are blooming and about to bear fruit, eliminate the tirasavias, so that the fruits have more strength.
4. When the leaves or twigs grow, arrange them close to the stem, as if it were a vine.
If you can read English, you will find a much more detailed manual here.