in reply to DBI fetchall_arrayref

It looks like what you want is a UNION of the fruit column from table1 and some_col from table2.
SELECT fruit FROM table1 UNION SELECT some_col FROM table2
That will give you [[apple], [a1], [a2], [a3]], I guess, which is pretty close to what you're looking for. To get exactly what you want, you'd need to transpose rows and columns, for which I know of no straightforward, general solution.

We're not really tightening our belts, it just feels that way because we're getting fatter.