Not the Best Orchard Year Ever, Then...

A "Katy" apple - just the one!

22 Trees and nowhere near that many apples, pears, plums and what-not. 2014 has not been a good year at all for our top fruit or stone fruit. We are not unduly concerned about this -there are very young trees in a very new orchard and fruit trees are definitely in the 'long term' category of projects. We had a brilliant year for blossom and I published plenty of very pretty pictures on this blog in the Spring. We then even seemed to set a lot of fruit - prior to the 'June Drop' I could have taken pictures of flower trusses resplendent with tiny potential pears and cherries.

"Golden Hornet" crabs - around a dozen.

Then came the June drop and the heatwave of June followed by some wicked chilly winds through July and the rain in that month and through to August. Each evening, as I exercised the dogs off the leads in the orchard field (dog proof; no vanishing acts!) I could see fewer and fewer fruits - all the cherries and pears seemed to wither 'on the vine' and fall away so that only a few trees have ended up with any fruit at all, and most have just the one or two if they have any. I had great hopes for a single 'Czar' plum turning a nice deep purple but then one day that had gone, stolen by a magpie, maybe.

Buff Orpington chicks at four and a half weeks

So, now it is September and I can probably give you a 'final score' without counting too many chickens. We have 9 apple trees, on which I have one 'Katy' fruit, one 'Red Windsor', 2 'Bramleys' and a 'James Grieves'. I have no fruit on the 'Egremont Russet', none on either 'Braeburn' or the 'Irish Peach'. I have a dozen or so crab apples on a 'Golden Hornet'. I do not have a single cherry despite having 3 trees. From 3 plum/gage trees I had two 'Victoria' plums. I brought those in to Liz, handing her the clean one. I went to cut away the 'wasp damage' at the stalk end of my 50% of the crop and an earwig reversed out of the hole. "Could have been worse;" said Liz, "It might have been half an earwig!"

Goldie's 3 remaining sons. 2 more sold yesterday.

The damson did not even blossom and the mulberry is way too young yet - they grow very slowly and can make very old trees. The quince set 3 fruits but these stalled during the cold winds of July and have not put on any size. A while back I published a picture of an inch long quince. I could take almost the same shot 2 months later. They will presumably just fade and drop off, inch and a half long undeveloped babies. The hazel-nut tree got decapitated by geese within minutes of planting and is now recovering, and the 2 pear trees (a 'Williams' and a 'Conference') I have already described as fruitless.

2 happy pigs snuffle for blackberries dropped among the grass

This little lot is not meant to be a 'moan', just a statement for the record. When someone writes the annals of fruit growing here, 2014 will not be among the good years, but 2015 is yet to come and we hope there will be many more years for these trees.

White cat Pirate camps out on the front doormat
hoping to gain access to the house.

Meanwhile, out in the 'wild' the fruit is looking much more promising, the hedges are laden with a fast-ripening heavy crop of blackberries. We need to get out there with our buckets soon but for now I have been grabbing a few in a small bag from the lanes while walking the dogs and bringing them home to spice up the pigs' lunchtime snack. We are also enjoying a good crop of Autumn fruiting raspberries. And finally, I have some colour break in tomatoes in the poly-tunnel. I feel like I am weeks behind anyone else I talk to.

The kitchen garden has done excellently for salads
and is now starting red beetroot.

I have a huge and heavy crop of plum tomatoes and big beef tomatoes but all of them were hanging onto their chlorophyll and looking like they'd be green tomato chutney at best and a failure at worst. But no, I now have orange and red colours coming on the plum tomato plant at one end of the house and a slight fade towards yellow-green on the beef-tom fruits on other plants. We may yet get some crop and even a glut which I am sure the piggies will enjoy if we cannot cope with it. We currently have a glut of yellow courgettes but the pigs turn their noses up at those. There's no pleasing some folks.

The Ramones on the front lawn.

In other news, Pirate the Cat's adoption of us and our house has moved on a stage; the lad is now staking out the place camped out on the front door mat and trying to nip inside every time we open the front door. He seems oblivious of the bad intentions of the three Westies all being held back on leads whimpering their lust for his blood and intent on his destruction. We are having some fun trying to manage this conflict and coming up with ways where we might be able to let him be the indoor cat he so badly wants to be.

Ginger pigs gleaming in the sunshine.

Liz started to let him come in for a wander while I was 'orcharding' the dogs or walking them down the lane and he likes to wander about but then settle in one of the easy chairs (mine mainly!). He was also allowed a couple of nights over-night in the Living room but we have to lock him in there safe away from the dogs, so he thanked us with a poo on the leather sofa. That was a short lived experiment. He may not even be house trained (why would he be?) but being locked indoors did not help. So now he's allowed in while I'm out with dogs and we are moving his food and bed to the Utility Room; although not really part of the 'indoor' house, it is indoors and has a radiator and a cat-flap. So far so good except that it is still warm, so we leave a window open for Blue (our other cat) and last night Pirate discovered this and was then discovered by Deefer-dog in the wee small hours asleep, once more on my chair. That was a bit exciting for a while, but nobody got injured. It's never boring here, even if it is a bit short on apples and pears.

Stirring It Up

Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people etc etc. Yes, a whole year has rolled around since I posted the post at

http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2012/11/stir-up-sunday.html

and we are back to "Stir Up Sunday" again. For my Irish readers this is a rather nice little British (and probably Protestant) Calendar Custom when it came time for the cooks of the parish to mix up their ingredients for Christmas Pud and Christmas Cake to give them time to 'meld' (for flavours to merge) and the Vicar would select the above 'collect' from the Book of Common Prayer which would remind the cooks. I have no idea how traditional this really is but it's a nice story and it happens in The Archers, so it MUST be true.

We do it in this house, anyway, and Liz was there today with a table covered in the different packets and tubs of suet, dried fruit, glace cherries, bowls of eggs, the bottle of brandy and the rest. We use an old family recipe which comes to us from Pud Lady and which I believe comes from our family's ancient and venerable, much thumbed and well used recipe book which we know as 'Flo' (It's Florence somebody or other). Pud Lady may correct me if I am wrong. Last year we almost had a two-fold disaster when firstly Pud Lady, relating the recipe over the phone, omitted bread crumbs and also, we were so short of eggs that we were anxiously waiting on one of the hens to lay that day's egg before we could proceed. Luckily the bread crumbs did not seem to matter and the hen laid her egg - the result was a delicious success after all. This year we have a glut of eggs and we have added the bread crumbs to our saved version of the recipe.

Goldie Rabbit gets two visitors.

In their own attempt to stir things up, the Irish Rugby team almost beat the All Blacks, being beaten by only 2 points just 4 minutes from the final whistle. It would have been the first win over the New Zealanders for a hundred years or so. We deny ourselves the permission to follow these matches lest we jinx the team as I used to do to England when ever I watched them but my absence today was not enough. I understand it was a gripping match.

4 trees as delivered.

For me, a very enjoyable job today and another milestone in the November sunshine, once the mist had been burned off. I receive through the mail via Anne and Simon, my fruit trees ordered from "Future Forests". These are my last four for the orchard, filling the final four slots in my 6 by 4 array, a 2nd "Braeburn" apple, a "Sunburst" dark dessert cherry, a crab apple named "Golden Hornet" and a black mulberry.

Each has a small story and a reason to be included. The Braeburn is a potential substitute for my existing tree which is suffering a bit from a canker like lesion which has nearly gone right round the main trunk from a side bud. The cherry is the closest we could get to the Black Wonder we grew in Kent. We'd heard about it from a Bob Flowerdew answer on Gardeners' Question Time and had to have it specially grafted by Brogdale, the famous Fruit Research Station (which was in our town) as a one-off order. The Sunburst looks quite dark in the catalogue picture (though not on the pictorial label) so we will have to wait and see whether we have a "dark dessert cherry" at all.

The Black Mulberry harks back to my University days when the college with which I was associated while doing my research, Wolfson College, Cambridge, had a huge black mulberry tree growing in front of the main doors which used to literally drip the black sweet juicy fruit all over the flagstones but which we students used to happily 'scrump' every time we walked past. The crab apple harks back to our family home in Hastings, where Pud Lady and my Brother, Tom, still live. There is a magnificent crab apple in the front garden which gave us boys no end of pleasure in the climbing and in the harvesting of the crabs for making crab apple jelly and wine.

Well, those four trees are now in place and the orchard, nicely grazed short by the geese, is complete. We hope for great things over the coming years as the trees establish and grow. We have a vision of looking down the rows between the blossom and of picking plenty of fruit as it comes ripe. This year the trees were all very young (the first trees were planted in August 2012) so we got some blossom this year but the only fruit which set was on a plum, which gave us 2 dozen lovely fruit. Next year, who knows? Apples, pears? Quince and greengage?  Plums and dessert or sour cherries? Damsons and Mulberries? Hazelnuts and crab apples? We'll have to wait and see.