Rewriting the apple rule book

In late April 2007, HE Hall & Son, in Marden, Kent, planted a four-hectare organic “concept orchard”, at the behest of marketing group OrchardWorld and customer Sainsbury’s. A sister orchard to a 1ha conventional version planted nearby exactly one year earlier, the concept orchard is a super-intensive planting based on the Dutch table-top system and is entirely systems-driven. Tommy Leighton visits Peter Hall to see how the first crop in the new orchard has turned out.