I’m planning to plant some fruit trees (apricot, peach, pear, perhaps…) next Spring and I’m a little wary of the standard garden centre offerings.
Can someone please recommend a specialist nursery with good healthy plants - and is good at giving advice to an ignoramus incompetent gardener such as me!
Can’t help @_Brian , sorry, but wish you the very best of luck. They seem to be all over the place and I’ve slowly been finding the ones around us - not at all well publicised but so very helpful with advice when you do find them. Going by how I’ve been finding them, do you have any markets near you that have plant stalls which are clearly not just from one person’s back garden? We found one, talked to him, found which day his nursery was open and went to it. We asked about trees, which he didn’t grow, and he pointed us to to a specialist tree nursery in the area.
Just to add - unlike other plants, trees are normally planted in the winter when they are dormant (they are also plantable bare-rooted at this season and are much cheaper then the potted-up ones). We started out originally from our local Point Vert outlet and their trees were a reasonable quality at that time but it was a long while back.
Thank you @AngelaR for your helpful tips. I had planned to plant in early spring so your information about winter planting is especially germane. If I do find any good suppliers I’ll post here.
Happy New Year!
Brian
There are a good variety of trees in Agriflor, L’Isle Jourdain. They are also increasing their stock and new outside covered display areas. Pot grown trees can be planted any time of the year providing you water very often.
Thanks, Peter.
In fact I am local to that branch of Agriflor. They have, as you say, a good selection but a limited range of varieties of each tree. Also. the last time I bought from them I did not feel the advice they gave was particularly helpful. It’s possible I was just unlucky with the assistant though!
I have also bought from meillandrichardier.com. last year got 9 raspberry plants(3 of each variety), all good.
Thank you all for your recommendations.
I eventually went for mail order, as each nursery within an easy drive only stocked one of types of bare-root fruit tree in which I was interested.
Bauchery looked promising but their website was a little ambiguous regarding whether or not they could despatch all elements of the order in one go. I emailed them to ask, and they replied to say that they would complete the order in one lot - perfect. But when I went to order, 2 of my required plants were out of stock.
I then found Meilland et Richardier who seemed to have everything in stock for a similar price so I placed my order.
The site explained that all orders for bare root trees would involve selecting then digging up the required specimens before packing them and despatching.
The trees arrived 9 days after I placed my order, wrapped in plastic and inside a long card box. They all seemed to have a large and well-developed root system - length varied from 80cm (noisette) to 1.5m (apple - reine des reinetttes). The trees came with clear instructions, so I put the bare rooted trees into a wheelbarrow and covered the roots with wet earth for two days until I was ready to plant them.
Planting took place two weeks ago, and all 4 trees (apple, nectarine, pear, hazelnut) are showing signs of growth.
I’ll post an update in a few years when they have borne fruit 