JOHN PENNY

Urban Fruit Production

Fruit Trees for Containers and Small Gardens

John is a self confessed plant nut with a passion for great plants and sympathetic landscape design. He has been a teacher, a landscaper, a nursery manager and has been involved with introducing new plants to New Zealand gardeners. After a move to Nelson he has worked at Waimea Nurseries with one of his tasks being, advancing the concept of urban fruit production.

John lives on a lifestyle block with a new orchard of over 150 trees and is currently developing a very large potager surrounded by espaliered fruit trees and incorporating many fruit varieties into this kitchen garden.

This workshop will help home gardeners, landscapers and garden designers to incorporate fruiting plants in their landscape plans and potager designs. John very much promotes the move back to the days of growing your own fruit selections.

Topics covered will include fruit tree selections (with a focus on dwarf, columnar trees and disease resistant selections) and how to use these plants to maximum effect in both a productive and aesthetically pleasing way.

How to espalier and also training and pruning of fruit trees to keep plants small will be covered along with growing fruit trees in containers.