Where’s my Fruit?

I’ve just come back from a rather fruitless journey up the garden. I had gone to take a photo of my blackcurrant bushes to show you an image of them bursting with ripe fruit. Julie’s mum Hilda has some bushes that are just a shimmering hew of dark purple, so heavily laidened that you can’t even see the branches. Mine on the other hand show no sign of fruiting at all this year. There are no tell tale signs of birds feasting on the sweet fruit or anything laying on the ground half eaten by slugs either, we just didn’t get any.

Poppy Fields

Hilda’s fruit harvest is looking very promising this year with apples and strawberries also doing well. The only crop that’s not producing this year for her is the raspberries. Generally Hilda will be boiling up her rich pickings by the gallon in her jam making cauldron. This season though There’s hardly enough to fill the lid, and Hilda has resorted to collecting them on a daily basis and building up her supply until there is enough ripe fruit to warrant turning the gas on. I’m not sure what the reasons for this are but it might be something to do with the fact that her vegetable garden is overrun by large poppies. These are of sentimental value to Hilda and so she won’t let anyone pull them out and they have self set seed freely over the few years they have been planted. You’ll soon be able to see the poppies on Google Maps, which could spark an international opium poppy growing alert. They do look pretty though.

Codylines – Here to Stay

I notice that the cordylines have started to grow back. For those who waited patiently for the growing season, their reward is a new tropical looking plant growing in their garden. The Cordyline will be a bush more than a tree now as it will be multi stemmed. Not everyone’s happy though. I put the issue out onto the gardening forum and people are split about their loyalties to this New Zealand plant. Putting to one side the fact that this plant has been used for centuries for fibre, sweetening food, treating skin injuries and food, especially the carrot like rhizomes, some people just don’t like it because they think they are messy and invasive. However you feel about them, they haven’t gone away and they are coming back with a vengeance!

Courgette catch up

We’ve started to harvest the peas and mange tout this week. They started off badly but have picked up not and producing well. Our runner beans are very slow to establish, but there’s time yet. We don’t seem to be having much luck with the courgettes though. It might be a bit late in the season for them to catch up now and produce the bumper crops were have been used to over the years. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the soil. We are managing to produce the most enormous dock leaves we have ever seen. You could hide under them in the rain or use them as sails on small boats. They will come in useful as an antidote to the nettle stings we generally get when we are weeding, they are doing well too.

Jury’s Out
Julie has just pointed out that the shrub I have been looking at to get the blackcurrants from is actually a ribes, which is an ornamental current bush. Now I might be getting a bit forgetful at times (or choose not to remember in the first place) but I know I have collected loads of blackcurrants off this shrub in the past year. I an adamant and so is Julie so the jury is out. I’m back out into the garden to do a leaf comparison.