Glossary · Orchard
Spur bearer
Definition
A cultivar that carries most of its fruit on short, slow-growing shoots — spurs — on two-year-old and older wood. Spur bearers tolerate the routine winter shortening of shoots that pruning involves.
- Subject
- Orchard
Related terms
Terms that belong to the same part of the subject, or that this one is routinely confused with.
Orchard
Tip bearer
A cultivar that fruits mainly at the ends of the previous season’s shoots. Pruning a tip bearer as though it were a spur bearer removes the fruit buds and the following crop with them.
Orchard
Pruning
The removal of wood to shape a tree, control its size, admit light to the fruiting zone and renew bearing wood. Formative pruning builds the framework; renewal pruning maintains it.
Orchard
Cordon
A tree trained as a single stem, usually at an angle against wires or a wall, with fruiting spurs held close to that stem. Used for very high density planting and for trials rather than for commercial cider fruit.
Orchard
Bush
A small tree on a dwarfing or semi-dwarfing rootstock with a short stem, planted at high density and cropping within a few years of planting. Most cider fruit grown commercially since the mid twentieth century comes from bush orchards.
Where to go next
- Cider glossary — The whole vocabulary, by subject and A–Z.
- Comparisons — Terms that are only really clear when set against the thing they are not.
- Search — Finds terms by their aliases and by their spellings in other languages.
Sources
What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.
NIAB (incorporating East Malling Research)
NIAB · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
East Malling developed the M-series apple rootstocks that determine tree size in essentially every modern orchard, cider orchards included. The authority CiderHQ uses for rootstock behaviour.
A Somerset Pomona: The Cider Apples of Somerset
Liz Copas, The Dovecote Press, 2001. ISBN 9781874336877 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library: Liz Copas, The Dovecote Press, 2001, ISBN 9781874336877. The author was Long Ashton’s cider pomologist, which is why this work is registered for Somerset cultivar identity at all — it is the nearest thing to a successor to the station’s own descriptions. No copy was opened. Not digitised in any open collection.