As with most long-term projects, developing a home apple orchard requires planning.
For most homeowners, the most limiting factor when looking to become a home orchardist is their yard. The size of the yard will determine how many apple trees you can manage. Even dwarf or double-dwarf apple trees require sufficient space to grow and produce fruit and the home orchardist will need enough room around each tree to properly train, prune, and manage insects and diseases. Fruit tree catalogs provide recommended planting distances between trees and between rows.
Full sunlight is critical to the success of any fruiting plant. Apple trees use sunlight along with nutrients and water from soil to produce delicious apples.
Where you plant your apple trees is important for both water and air drainage. Be sure that water will not stand and puddle around the trees for more than a few hours after a rain event. Standing water in the winter can cause trunk damage near the soil line.
Air drainage is also critical to prevent cold, frosty air from settling in around apple trees when they are about to bloom. Flower buds are more sensitive to cold temperatures than foliage buds. The top or side of a slope is a good location for apple trees, but not at the bottom of the slope or in a valley. In urban settings , there is little a homeowner can do other than plant apple trees in locations that receive the best sunlight possible and amend the soil to drain at planting time.
Pruning
Apple trees are pruned differently at home than in a commercial orchard. In the home orchard, the trees are usually visible from the kitchen or back deck. These orchards are pruned to have a normal tree-like appearance, a balance between aesthetics and fruit production.
The most common pruning method is called central leader in which fruiting scaffolds radiate from the trunk in a systematic manner allowing for easier pruning, spraying, and harvesting of the apples.
To get the scaffolds in the right places you must train the apple tree beginning on the day you plant it. A common mistake is waiting for the tree to become established for two or three years before you start the training; this results in large branches growing in unwanted places.
Pollination
As you read your fruit tree catalogs to plan your home orchard, note the section about pollination requirements. Apples typically require cross pollination to bear apples. Two trees of the same variety will not cross pollinate each other, so you will need at least two different varieties that bloom at the same time.
In an urban setting, ornamental flowering crabapples can be the pollinator. If your apple tree in the backyard is blooming at the same time as your ornamental flowering crabapple in the front yard, you will have the cross pollination needed to produce your apple crop.
Pollination occurs when bees and other pollinating insects visit the blooms of the apple tree, carrying pollen from another apple or crabapple tree.
Weather, Wildlife, Insects and Disease
A home orchard is a commitment of time and resources. Young apple trees will need to be trained for three to five years before they bear fruit in any quantity and during that time they need to be protected from a variety of threats.
Mulching the soil around the tree will help prevent sudden changes in soil temperature in the winter sometime after the soil has become cold.
Wildlife such as rabbits, deer and field mice can eat the bark of the tree or eat the tree itself.
Young, non-bearing apple tree need protection against insects and disease. Leaf-feeding insects and foliar diseases both lessen the tree's ability to develop into a mature fruiting tree and set up a situation that will be harder to control after the tree is bearing apples.
Pruning should start in late winter through early spring to train the scaffolds, and sprays for insects and disease should start prior to bloom and continue throughout the season.