Tuesday 25 September 2007

Autumn Fruitfulness

I've got a very small town garden, but I was lucky enough to find four young fruit trees growing in it when we bought this house nine years back. Even from the first year we were here they produced some fruit, but this year they have totally surpassed themseves. They are groaning with fruit.....

Pear tree...still small, no idea of the variety, brutally cut back last year so that I could use it as a support for a Quadro "tree house". (The red bits.) Click on the pix and try to spot all the pears in one small section of this tree.



The biggest apple tree, a rather sprawling 15` high. (Still no idea of variety...sort of red Gala type.)



The very tall thin one I can see directly out from my study window, 25` up. Russett type, bit boring to eat. These branches are hanging downwards, btw, from the sheer weight of fruit.



Little shaggy apple tree in the corner. It looks horrible, but I don't want to take it out in case it's the main pollinator for the other two, or if they need to have a three-way orgy of pollination. (Some apple varieties do.) These are the sweetest apples of the lot, a sort of streaky yellow variety. The Iceberg climbing rose running through it cost me 10p in an end of season sale.



Belive me, we have tens of kilos of fruit here. None of the above store well as I've discovered in past years, and the kids get a bit sick of apples non stop alas. They don't even like pears. These varieties don't cook well either. I`ve given bags of fruit away and the local scrumpers are ever-eager, but there will still be literally hundreds of windfall apples and pears for the compost bins this year, sadly. What a waste!

Still on a foodie trend, I bought these for the allotment. My allotment neighbour and I have a friendly rivalry over the garlic we grow, but it's several years now since I "won". Time to buy in a little help, I thought.



I thought the presentation of this was brilliant...a sort of Thorntons Continental Selection Box of garlic, no? (That's a posh chocolate maker for the non-UK viewers.) And the contents of these bags are real sexpot vegetables too...look at these curves, and the lustre.



Lol....I must be getting a bit weird upstairs if I'm starting to think vegetables are sexy, no? I planted that whole box out today, btw. If they all come up, I should have nearly 150 assorted bulbs of garlic next summer. Hopefully, some of them will beat my neighbour's crop, no?