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fruit

Yellow plums

These little beauties are growing on a tall tree in a neighbour’s garden. Odd ones are dropping onto the driveway, so we picked one up to investigate – they’re sweet little yellow plums (maybe an inch in diameter). We gathered a handful and I sowed the stones in pots – but what are they?

Are they Wild plums, or Cherry plums or something else? I don’t know how to tell.

Blue Tits

All four of the minarette fruit trees in the chicken run have fruited this year, for the first time. Today it was time to harvest the plums (the variety is Blue Tit). That’s the entire harvest, but it is exciting none the less.

The Summer Sun cherries have long since been eaten by the starlings. The Saturn apples will be ready in late September; apparently I have to wait until early October to harvest the Concorde pears.

Also new this year are the John Downie crab apples, which should also be ready for picking in October :)

IWOOT: Jaboticaba

I’ve been a StumbleUpon user for years now. I used to get bored and stumble a lot, but I haven’t done it for a while (for those of you who haven’t encountered it, StumbleUpon is a cross between social networking and bookmarking – you rate sites you visit and it suggests others you may like).

This morning I resurrected my login and the first page it showed me was about Jaboticaba, a tree that fruits on its trunk. And not only does it have this unusual fruiting habit, but the fruit is edible as well. Of course, I want one.

According to Wikipedia, the Jabotica (Myrciaria cauliflora, AKA Jabuticaba and the Brazilian Grape Tree is native to South America. It seems unlikely to survive in my climate (boo hoo), although there are some suggestions it could tolerate a couple of degrees of frost. Apparently it makes a nice bonsai specimen, if I ever have the time and patience to take that one up.

It doesn’t sound like a good prospect for my garden – slow growing (no doubt large when not a bonsai) and a bit on the tender side. And there don’t appear to be any UK suppliers of seeds or plants. I still want one though ;)

JFDI June

Pete and I have a number of unfinished projects that are weighing us down, so Pete came up with the idea of JFDI June – it stands for Just F* Do It. The idea is that we finish two of the major projects so that we can start new things next month – when we will have JFDI July and try and continue the momentum.

I’ve been fighting some kind of bug and I haven’t had much energy, but this week I have been feeling better and have (somewhat unexpectedly) taken a couple of long jobs off my garden to do list.

Firstly, I spent a couple of hours pruning the fruit trees in the chicken run. Whenever I do this I normally go on about how I don’t know what I’m doing, but this time I found it quite a zen-like experience, outside in the dappled shade on a nice day. The apple, the only tree to reliably fruit, has a good crop this year; but the big news is that the three other trees (a pear, plum and cherry) also have fruit – although not enough to get excited about it does give me hope for future years. I would have grubbed them out last year, except that the one thing they do do is give the chickens some shade.

Yesterday I spent a similar amount of time removing 9 concrete blocks (they’re pretty heavy) from the Grow Dome raised bed to make it one block lower – the idea being to make it far easier to reach the back of the bed. It has had an interesting effect as the Grow Dome now looks far more open and inviting. I didn’t take two hours to move the blocks, though. I spent the rest of the time mulching with black plastic, watering, and planting out some exciting plants. Half a dozen watermelons and one luffa.

Hopefully now I can make better use of the greenhouse. I do need Pete to chop back a bush which is causing too much shade. I can’t reach, but we’ve been waiting until the sparrows finished nesting as they like that bush. Maybe it will be on the list for JFDI July ;)

Hawthorn?

Every so often I look a the tree which overhangs our fence from our neighbour’s garden and wonder what it is. It has pretty flowers and spiny branches, followed by little red berries in the autumn. Every so often I have to trim a branch off, as it threatens to poke my eye out when I’m seeing to the chickens – it overhangs their run.

Today it has occurred to me (I don’t know why) that it’s probably hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna). Can anyone identify it definitively, or let me know how to?

If it is hawthorn, then it’s current avalanche of blossom will be good for bees, and the garden birds love it as the dense canopy gives them a safe place from which to survey the garden.

According to Mabey’s Food for Free, young hawthorn leaves are really tasty, known as ‘bread and cheese’ in times gone past and a nice addition to cheese sandwiches. I know that in autumn many people turn the haws into hawthorn fruit leather (the fruit is supposedly nicer cooked), although that’s only one possibility and the Herb Society has a lovely recipe for Haw Sin Sauce :)

Mind you, if it is a hawthorn, and I get around to harvesting some berries this year, then I am very tempted to try turning them into hawthorn schapps instead!

High Hopes 2

At the end of 2008, an Alternative Kitchen Garden Show listener offered me some medlar seeds in a seed swap. I potted them up, put them outside, and duly noted that they could take two years to germinate. I left the pots on the patio, and quickly learned not to bother looking at them too often. They grew the occasional weed, but that was it.

But this spring, a seedling has emerged. It’s almost in the centre of the pot, which suggests planting rather than self-seeding. I do not recognise it; it has rather pretty toothed leaves and a red stem. The leaves don’t look entirely like medlar leaves, but the juvenile leaves could be different, it’s not that unusual.

Could this be a medlar seedling? I can’t find an image on the internet to compare it to – medlars are usually grafted onto a rootstock for propagation, as they take so long to germinate.

I asked the supplier of the seeds what he thought – he trundled out to look at his tree and came back to say that the leaves were similar, and his tree does indeed have a red tinge to its foliage.

The timing is right – the seeds have been through two winters and could be ready to emerge. Is it a medlar seedling? Has anyone seen one, and so can confirm or deny?

May Day

There’s always a lot in the media (especially at this time of year) about how you can save time in the garden, and about how you can have a beautiful and productive plot without spending your life outside tending it. And to a certain extent it’s true – there are plenty of techniques you can use to cut down on the time you need to spend outside to make your garden presentable.

But it’s also true that gardening is one of those activities where you get out what you put in, and that spending time outside in the garden has physical and mental benefits as well as being useful. The more time you spend outside, the more likely you are to be able to nip potential problems – pests, diseases and weeds) in the bud before they become real issues.

The picture above represents my gardening activities over the winter – I spent a lot of time on Facebook playing FarmVille and turning a virtual farm into a beautiful food forest. I enjoy seeing which unusual crops and trees they come up with on a regular basis, but once the weather improved this spring I decided it would be a better use of my time to go and play outside in the real garden instead. Last year’s garden was mediocre for various reasons; this year I want one packed with productive plants.

The plan is that I will try and spend a couple of hours outside each day, pottering in the garden and getting things done. It’s not a draconian rule – if I’m needed elsewhere, or don’t have the energy, then it won’t matter if I miss a day or too. The weather (which is very wet today, for which the garden is grateful) won’t be too much of an issue at this time of year when there’s lots of sowing to do that can be done indoors.

And so, hopefully, this blog will be more about work that I’ve done – and less about gardening in general – for the rest of the growing season.

Yesterday, for example, I sowed mixed salad and peas for pea shoots in containers for windowsill growing, as well as plenty of sunflowers. I sorted out a lot of old plant pots that I am intending to take to the Hampshire Green Fair and offer them as freebies to people who take part in my seed and seedling swap.

I layered the jostaberry, as it had a low-slung branch that was too good an opportunity to miss. I potted on 3 citrus plants and my new feijoa (a lovely, large plant I bought from the National Herb Center a couple of weeks ago).

And I moved several sets of seedlings outside to harden off (including my Petit Posies flower sprouts, which are looking well).

The next item on the list was a seaweed foliar feed for the fruit bushes, but I was too whacked to get that far, so it’s top of the list next time. Phew! I’m quite glad it’s raining today, so I can do some les intensive stuff :)

Not dead

One of the joys of spring is watching perennials come back to life after the winter. There’s always some doubt that they will – they look so dead – and there’s always one or two that (for whatever reason) don’t make it.

These are plants that I am particularly glad to see have survived the winter, despite my doubts:

Two sea kale plants, grown from seed last year. They spent their first year in pots, which they didn’t like, so as they have survived I have planted them in the ground.

Proof that Jerusalem artichokes are indestructible after all – I thought the dry autumn had killed all of mine off last year.

I have two honeyberries, in pots on the patio. They weren’t very happy last year, and looked dead all winter, but have sprung into exuberant life this spring.

And last but not least, my lovely kiwi Jenny is again producing her rosy, furry leaves. And as this will be her third summer she may well even fruit this year, fingers crossed!

That’s the good news. Of course, there is some bad news. It looks as though my beautiful manuka dried out too much in the grow dome and won’t be joining us this summer. None of the passionfruits made it either, nor did the samphire.

Future Fruit

Grape vine cuttings, wildlife twig bundle and kindling

The weather so far this year has been pretty awful (and it’s snowing again as I type this), but Saturday was sunny and I spent a couple of hours outside pruning in an attempt to ensure bountiful fruit crops in the summer. I wrapped up warm, but it wasn’t cold unless the sun went behind clouds. The chickens, who have been shut in their run for much of the winter, enjoyed a short walk around the garden and the chance to have a good dust bath inside the Grow Dome.

I had a To Do list, arranged partly in terms of urgency and partly in terms of difficulty. I started off nice and easy, pruning back my autumn-fruiting raspberries (MTP reminded me) and giving them a good mulch with partly rotted bunny litter.

While I was there I did a little bit of light pruning of the blueberries, simply to remove dead wood and relieve any congestion.

Then I was off into the chicken run to prune two of my minarette fruit trees. Winter is the time to take the tops out of the apple and pear (the instructions say to prune the ‘leader’, but mine have several branches reaching for the sky), which encourages the growth of the sideshoots that bear the fruiting spurs. Later in the year I have to prune the fruiting spurs….

The third job on the list was the trickiest – pruning the grapevine. I used to have two, but one died. The remaining one was rampant last year and escaped onto my neighbour’s side of the fence. Whilst very leafy, it was not fruitful. I am attempting to tame it by training it in the Guyot style, and have cut off all the stems bar one. It should grow two or three stems this year, which I will bend down to the horizontal next year. Or something like that. One step at a time, and step one was getting it under control. Step two is fitting the training wires. But even if my vine doesn’t fruit, it has other uses.

As I took so much wood off the grapevine, I thought I would try growing some more from hardwood cuttings. I trimmed down sections of stem, stuck them in potting compost and have left them out in the Grow Dome. If they grow I will try growing a grape in a container, which looks like fun. I can’t remember whether this is the Cabernet sauvignon or the Sauvignon blanc, so I will have to check at some point.

I also bundled up lengths of stem for a wildlife habitat, and put them down by the fence. Any dinky bits of wood I saved to fuel my Kelly Kettle.

Chinese Persimmons

We have been snowed in. The garden is covered in several inches of snow, the chickens are stuck in their run (since snow freaks them out) and the car hasn’t moved from the driveway for 3 days. We can get to local shops on foot if we want to; mostly we don’t. So there’s not much news from my garden, but a Tweet from Kew Gardens caught my eye this morning.

Their Chinese Persimmon (Diospyros kaki) is the thing to see at Kew Gardens today (Kew in London is open; Kew at Wakehurst Place is not) – it is covered in brilliant orange fruits, despite the weather. Apparently they’re better harvested after a freeze, as it kick-starts the bletting process – they have to become soft before they’re edible.

I don’t currently have a persimmon (given an edibility rating of 4/5 by PFAF, but if they’re that hardy then they would make a good forest garden plant for temperate zones. The one in Kew is a champion specimen, apparently, so if you have one don’t expect it to look as good!

There’s no space here to put one in, but I have wanted one ever since I read a couple of lovely posts about persimmons on the Balcony Garden blog. There’s instructions on how to dry persimmons in traditional Japanese farmhouse style and eating persimmons for breakfast in Japan. There’s even a post on using bitter persimmon juice as a wood preservative. Sounds like a very useful tree :)

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Which wild plant species would you save? Donate to the AKG Seed Appeal to help Kew save another useful species.

What would you save?

If you could save any plant in the world (but just one), what would you choose? I am currently fascinated by the wild apple forests of Kazakhstan, so I guess that currently I would choose the original apple species Malus sieversii* – although it’s hard to choose because there are so many worth candidates.

So what would you save? Leave me a comment below!

*If we’re going to save apples (and any other fruiting plants) then we’ll have to save the bees as well.

I’m raising money to save an entire species with the Millennium Seed Bank – if you have a little bit of spare cash then please head over to the Alternative Kitchen Garden Seed Appeal on JustGiving and make a contribution. Thank you!

Wonderberries

The award for the prettiest plant in the garden this afternoon goes to the Wonderberries (Solanum burkbankii, sourced from Jungle Seeds). They’re flowering and fruiting. Apparently the ripe fruits (they will turn black) are only tasty when cooked.

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Oh, and before I forget – I am thrilled to be participating in this year’s Emsworth Online Village Show. The competition is sure to be stiff, so don’t forget to head on over and see what’s going on.

Rain stops play

It’s been quite wet for the last few days. When it stops, the overcast weather makes some of the colours in the garden look quite sultry, but it’s not really any compensation.

There’s soft fruit to eat, though :0)

The variety shown in the picture is Sunshine Blue. I also have a third plant, which is Chandler.

Finland

I took hardly any photos in Helsinki. We took a boat trip across the harbor to the Suomelinna Island fortress, which was fun, and a nice change from city tours. Suomelinna is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but it’s also home to around 850 people.

Back on dry land I spotted some strawberries growing in a tub outside a shop. Outside the indoor market there was even a strawberry growing as weed in a crack in the pavement!

Le Manoir: Fruit

One thing the garden at Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons doesn’t have at the moment is a lot of fruit. These strawberries are grown among the polytunnels. However, the estate has some fields, and these are in the process of being turned into productive land (they need drainage to be installed).

The plan is for an extension to the vegetable patch on fertile ground near the river, plus an orchard and a nuttery. Raymond Blanc wants around 30 varieties of apple (they’re currently trying varities out to decide which ones), almonds, hazels and walnuts and some soft fruit.

Inside the polytunnels, the overwintered leafy crops (including spinach, oriental mustards and rocket) are coming to an end. The rocket is bolting – but that’s fine because the flowers are used in salads as well. They have have the same flavour as rocket, but are a bit sweeter. Raymond Blanc prefers the pale flowers of salad rocket to the yellow ones of wild rocket for use in the kitchens.

In another tunnel there’s a bolting crop of coriander, but again it doesn’t matter because the chefs use all the part of this plant – flowers, stalks (thick stalks are dried), roots and seeds. Coriander is sown successionally to have plants at different stages of growth all season.

The final stop on our tour was the culinary herb garden – which provides the kitchens with almost all of the herbs they need throughout the year. Seasonal, local, sustainable and organic, the gardens at Le Manoir are a model we can all learn from. It’s just a shame that it costs a packet to visit!

Explore other parts of the garden at Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons:

• Fish ponds


• Vegetable garden


• Mushroom garden


• Tea garden


• Exotics


• Field beans


• Microgreens


• Courgettes

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