When Big Papa and I redesigned the Urban Cabin’s tiny yard after our house remodel, I wanted more plants that would literally climb the walls. The perimeter of our yard is walled with a wood fence which made me feel like we were spending our outdoor time “in a box.”

We put in a few vase-shaped shrubs (like the late-winter blooming Verbena Bodnantense Dawn), started several climbing vines and, on the east wall, planted two espaliered apple trees.

I took a class in espaliering fruit trees from the University of Washington’s Center for Urban Horticulture and learned a lot about the this ancient agricultural practice of controlling woody plant growth by pruning and tying branches so that they grow in relatively flat planes, frequently in formal patterns, against a structure such as a wall, fence, or trellis.

The instructor recommended purchasing root stock and grafting our own fruit to the root stock. There are about 100 rootstocks for the major tree-fruits, and more than twenty for apple. Some of these rootstocks-like M.7 and M.9-can be traced back hundreds or thousands of years in history. Doing this yourself is a way to optimize the strength and growth of your trees for you specific site, but it also take a long time and I wasn’t sure how much I felt like waiting five years before I could reap the fruits of our labor.

So, we purchased our trees, rootstock, grafts and all from City People’s Mercantile. We chose a three-tier “cordon” design which is like a basic vertical trunk with horizontal branches that grow out from each side. Each branch is a different apple varietal. We have: Macintosh, Braeburn, Gravenstein, Fuji, Gala and Jonagold on our trees.

Big Papa did the hard labor of building a fence system for them to grow along. We used wood posts for side support and plastic-coated wire for the branches to grow along.

This year, the second summer the trees have been in our yard, we got fruit buds on two sides. Unfortunately Twitchy, our resident pesky squirrel, managed to break the stems of the two apples growing on the right side of the trees as he was running up and down (and up and down and up and down) the fence post near where they were growing.

Thankfully, the two dwarf Jonagold buds on the left side survived. As they grew, I protected them by surrounding them with plastic chicken wire. And…they made it!

Just this past weekend, we picked our two ripe dwarf Jonagolds. And we ate ‘em. They were tart, crisp and downright delicious.

Want your pick of more deliciousness? Check out Wanderfood Wednesday!