Apple Harvest

I know, I know, you were expecting a post on upcycling a bed into a raised bed this weekend.  I have actually finished that project now and it looks great, but I've been so poorly with tonsilitis that I've not had a chance to write it up yet. I'll try to get that written up this week ready for you to have a go next weekend if you want to.

In the meantime thought I'd pop my head round the door and show you our latest harvests.

After the hackening our tomatoes have started to ripen. I managed to catch a picture of some of them before they were devoured by my children. People keep asking me if they taste better than supermarket ones but I couldn't tell you because the children haven't let me have one yet!

As you can see, some of them are still green and on the vine.  That's because I accidentally broke that vine when trying to reach a ripe tomato.  I've put it in the basket with some ripe ones to ripen on the windowsill. In the next couple of days, before the frosts arrive, I'll be cutting all of the vines and hanging them in the window to ripen. Those that don't ripen will be made into green tomato chutney. I've never tried to do that before so if I end up making some I'll talk you through the process.

Our main harvest today was apples.

It's hard to believe all of those apples came from one dwarf tree! I'll be saving the best to try and store for the children's packed lunches, but will be making most into apple pies, apple sauce, and pectin for jams  and jellies (if I can work out how to store it, since we have no plums this year to make into jam). I really want an apple press! Pressed apple juice is my favourite, and cider one of few alcoholic drinks I actually like.

The tree looks relieved to have given up her fruit, she was so laden down her top branches were almost touching the floor. 

I've left a few of the more manky looking apples at the base of the tree to rot down over winter and feed the insects (so therefore the birds) and the soil, and after picking them all I gave the tree the same organic feed to give to the tomatoes, mixed with rain water. That's not a gardening tip - it's really more of a witch thing to want to thank the garden after harvest - but I've always given my trees a feed or a mulch after they've given me fruit, and they've always seemed grateful for it. Just remember if you're mulching a tree - whether that's with cut grass, bark mulch, leaf mold, or manure - not to let the mulch touch the trunk/stem itself.  It'll make the trunk soggy and that could lead to disease or damage. Leave the trunk a little room to breathe, the worms will take the mulch down into the soil for you to release the nutrients around the roots. 

Now is also a good time to check your fruit trees for any signs of damage (when the tree is heavy  with fruit and it's windy you can end up with split or snapped branches) and tend to it now before winter sets in.

It's new moon here (or close enough for my purposes) so I'm going to try planting some peas to see if they'll overwinter. I'm doubtful but I've read up on it and the variety 'Meteor' is supposed to be very hardy, so I'll let you know how it goes.

Happy growing!

"Dwarf" Fruit Trees

In my first post, I mentioned that when I first moved in to this house, I planted three dwarf fruit trees. I promised I'd tell you more about them later. This probably counts as one of my biggest garden fails, was a total rookie mistake, and I'm still not sure how to fix it. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

When we first moved in I was super excited about the idea of food forest gardening - a low effort gardening technique that mimics the multilevel production found in nature. I wanted to get fruit trees planted quickly, so theyd get on with producing fruit quickly (generally speaking, fruit trees take about 3 years to go from bare root plants to producing fruit).

I ordered bareroot dwarf grafted apple, plum and pear trees (Braeburn apple, Conference pear and Victoria Plum if I remember rightly, but it was a long time ago). 

My planting technique was good -they arrived in early November and the weather was quite mild with the soil neither frozen nor waterlogged. I dug a hole about twice the size of the rootball, threw in some fish, blood and bone fertilizer, and planted the trees, backfilling the hole with a mixture of compost and the soil I'd dug up to plant them, up to the soil mark on the trunk where they'd obviously been planted before. They stood about 4 feet high, and the planting instructions (such as they were, you don't get many instructions with budget plants) assured me they'd grow to around 5foot, maximum. That suited my garden size. So far so good.

What went wrong?

My planting technique was great. But my planning left an awful lot to be desired, and my pruning...well.

I've always been scared of pruning. I worry about cutting back too harshly and damaging the tree, or inviting in disease and pests. And I figured that wild trees never get pruned, and they're fine. This was one occasion where I should've ignored my instincts and got some advice from a seasoned gardener.

Fast forward 10 years, and I'm trying to reclaim the garden. The apple tree is a nice size. It struggled to get going because the corner I planted it in doesn't have a lot of light and it is competing for nutrients with a huge overgrown hedge and other wild plants, but this past two years it's given us a bumper crop, with no maintenance at all. One out of three aint bad I guess.

The Conference pear and Victoria Plum are now both well over 30 feet high and still growing. 

Here is the Victoria Plum, taken from an upstairs window. Dwarf tree she most definitely is not. Despite all that blossom, we had only one plum this year. I'm not sure if that's just because the birds were stripping the fruits off when they were tiny, or if the tree has just put so much energy into height, it has nothing left to give for fruit.

As you can see, I planned the site of the tree badly. It's up against my boundary, so I can't walk all the way around the tree, and my lack of pruning means it's now helplessly out of control, and I'm not sure how to rescue it, or if it even is salvageable at all. If you have advice, I'd be very happy to hear it.

It's a similar story with the Conference Pear. It shot up and is a similar height to the plum, but it has never fruited, and blossomed only once.

 Looking back I think it may have had signs of pear tree rust when I first got it, so I always assumed that's why it didn't fruit, but much like the plum, it's now far too huge to manage anyway, and poorly sited so I can't walk around it.  At least the birds love to nest in them, and we get the joy of being greeted by song every time we step out the door.

So, that went wrong. That's something I find myself saying a lot when it comes to the garden. But there's hope for my mixed orchard yet.

The picture is pretty awful, but during the years of neglect the Victoria Plum must've dropped a plum, and it has grown into a healthy looking little sapling.

It's currently just under my shoulder height, and seems really happy, so I'm going to wait until the dormant season and then attempt to move it across the garden to become part of my mixed native hedge.  It's really important I don't let it grow out of control like the others (apart from anything else, that would upset my neighbours and block light to my planned veg garden) but I'm thinking that if I'm brave about pruning it should be fine. And if I cut it back too hard and it dies, I won't have lost any money on it.  I'm not sure it'll ever fruit, coming from a dropped seed rather than being a grafted tree, but I'm always happy to have more nesting sites in my garden for the birds and the insects. After all, they were here before me, it's their home too.

When I move it, I'll try and film the process to show you how it's done.