What We Are Growing This Year. Part 1: Fruit

As we are now fully into spring and the growing season in well under way we wanted to document what we are growing this year. 2019 was a great first year in terms of produce. especially given the time constraints we had due to not living on site. But, like any gardeners we made mistakes and learnt lessons for moving forwards. The fruit has been an absolute winner for us as the ratio of effort to produce is highly weighted in our favour. We have gone from novice jam makers so a point where we feel fairly confident to be able to preserve most of the fruits we have in the garden. We have a selection of preserving books but two favourite are Pam the Jam and The Jam Makers Handbook.

Orchard

We had a bumper crop of plums from three highly productive trees but excess weights of fruit and high winds meant that we lost some large branches off of all the trees. We’ve given the trees a hard prune over the winter and will be much more mindful of thinning fruit if necessary to protect the remaining branches. The two damsons also fruited well and made some delicious jam.

We found the apple trees to be much less productive than we expected but we had pruned them the winter before so wonder if they were just taking a year to recover from that. They have blossomed beautifully this spring and lots of fruits are forming so fingers crossed. We have also planted in two more apple trees, a Cox’s Apple Pippin and a Scrumptious. We would like to try our hand at some cider making so may well plant some more trees this year and need to start researching a press to buy!

Other new additions to the orchard are the two cherries and two pears that went in last year and we have also added a mulberry tree. In total that brings us up to about 18 fruit trees in the orchard itself. Around the garden we also have three fig trees which were amazing last year, two more pear trees, a medlar and a crab apple. We plan to take cuttings from the figs to propagate but that is best left until the dormant season. On the front lawn we planted a ‘Strawberry Tree’ which we hope will give us some interesting fruits over time. Apparently you can get a little drunk on the overripe fruits which sounds like an interesting experiment!

Fruit Cage

There was a large raspberry bed in the fruit cage when we moved here along with two established blackcurrant busses. We weren’t sure if the raspberries were summer or autumn fruiting so we chopped them to the gorund over winter a kept our fingers crossed. Luckily for us they grew brilliantly and we struggled to picking eat the berries fast enough. The raspberry jam we made was super easy and as we mentioned before it was everyone’s favourite so great to plant more. The extra canes were gifted from a friend who had no space for them any more and we chopped them back too but unfortunately they don’t seem to be growing as quickly as we’d hoped. Maybe they will just fruit late in the season or not that well this year, time will tell..

We also added a gooseberry, a loganberry and a redcurrant bush to the cage and are soon to plant out some cuttings we took from the blackcurrant bushes last year. We took the cuttings in the autumn after the leaves had died back and overwinter the cuttings four to a pot.

We planted up our strawberry bed from new last year and only got a handful of strawberries. We are growing them on a large patch covered in black weed suppressant fabric with holes cut in for the plants. This has kept the weeding down considerably but we realised the runners have nowhere to take with this method. We tried to lift and pot some but to no avail. Had the garden centres been open I would have topped up this bed with new plants this year but we will make do with the ones we have, which fortunately are flowering lots and looking very productive. Well, apart from the several plants that were enjoyed by a nighttime rabbit visitor who happened to burrow uo in the fruit cage!

Other fruit

We have six rhubarb crowns in the veg patch and have decided not to force any this year. They have been great with zero input from us and we have enjoyed lots of crumbles, cakes and fresh stewed fruit on porridge in the mornings. We also have sloe bushes which will come into their own later in the year and be used for sloe gin for Christmas gifts mostly. Just this week we discovered a large elder tree at the back of the property in full flower. Super excited to have made some cordial but also looking forward to using the elderberries later in the season.