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Review ------ You'll need an extra season to make best use of all the advice contained in this comprehensive, practical book. It will help you to choose your fruit trees and rootstocks, situate your orchard, prune your trees and keep them y. It is bursting with well-illustrated guidance, generously given from someone who knows orchards and cares about the wildlife that they can support. --Sue Clifford & Angela King - Common Ground The Fruit Tree Handbook is a really well-organised, approachable yet thorough guide to sourcing, ing and caring for fruit trees. It's a must for anyone considering anything from a couple of trees to an orchard. --Mark Diacono - River Cottage Head Gardener At last! A book about growing fruit with an approach, written for British conditions and with home fruit growers rather than professionals in mind. To my knowledge it s the first book that ticks all three boxes but, just as important, it s very good. --Patrick Whitefield - Permaculture Magazine About the Author ---------------- Ben Pike's love of gardening comes from very early childhood memories of walking past a garden laden with fruit trees and rows of vegetables on his way to school. By the age of 28 he was working as a landscape gardener, followed by a spell as a jobbing gardener, and it was during this period that his love affair with fruit trees began. Asked by his clients to prune their trees, he began to enquire into all aspects of growing fruit. Ben taught himself how to prune fruit trees and his passionate interest started. During this time he met Tom Hoblyn and in 1995 they set up South Hams Orchard Services. This involved ing and pruning fruit trees as well as consultancy work. For the six years until 2011 Ben was head gardener at Sharpham House, near Totnes. There he looked after a walled fruit and vegetable garden as well as two orchards containing 150 fruit trees. Ben also mentored the volunteers who come to work in the gardens and has always enjoyed passing his knowledge and enthusiasm on to young people interested in horticulture. Through Ben's work and interest in orchards he became very involved with Orchard Link, an organisation that supports orchard owners and the preservation of old orchards. For many years he was their horticultural advisor and he has run courses on orchard management.