It has been a decidedly mixed growing year, and the fruit crop has been no exception. One unexpected success was our first fig (just one); a little on the dry side, but a reasonable size. There are several little figlets for overwintering, so I have some hopes of a few more next year. The raspberries did quite well (one of the canes has now started to flower, very unseasonably – what’s all that about?). However there were no gooseberries or blackcurrants worth mentioning, and some neighbours have had the same experience. The cold spring weather, resulting in fewer pollinators?
Given the lack of soft fruit, I wasn’t surprised that in
early summer there seemed to be relatively few apples and plums developing on
the trees, and when it came to thinning the crops I erred on the side of generosity,
to make the most of what fruit there would be.
This proved to be unnecessary and, in the case of the cooking apple
tree, a mistake. The plum tree actually produced
fairly well, and the apples, the cordon dessert apples as well as the cooking
apple tree, turned out to have the heaviest crop we’ve ever had; and in the
case of the cordons, some of the individual apples are larger than ever.
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| Some of the plum crop |
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| Dessert apple cordons |
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| More cordons |
Of course, this came at a cost. Because I didn’t thin the fruitlets
particularly thoroughly (though goodness knows I took a lot of them off the
tree!), the cooking apple tree’s branches are now overloaded, bending down low
and, in some cases, breaking off. They’re
big apples, and can be heavy. It’s
difficult to get underneath the tree where it overhangs the veg beds, as it’s
bent down to the ground; some of those branches are going to have to be removed
during the winter pruning, just to allow us to get under there, and to get the
tree back into shape. A lesson learnt:
next year, don’t allow too many apples to develop near the ends of the branches,
to stop them being pulled down.
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| Don't even try to sit under the apple tree! |
Those branches nearest the veg beds have been a bit of a problem for a while now. When I designed the vegetable plot, I put in the main access point, a little path through the bed along the edge, just where those branches are. It was a geometric thing: the plot is three times as long as it is deep, so the beds are laid out in three equal-sized groups, and the central group has a path running down the middle which is aligned with the entrance path. As the tree grew, it became increasingly difficult to get in and out without banging my head on the branches. Over the summer, the obvious solution dawned on me: don’t do anything to the tree, instead move the entrance! I’m in the process of creating two entrances, one each side of the tree, aligned with the paths separating the three bed groups. You can see one of the paths, still under construction, at the bottom left of this picture of part of the plot.
Also visible in the pictures, and also still under construction, are some of the new woodchip paths that I’m creating in there, using woodchip from the felled ash tree. The paths were originally gravel, but over the years this has disappeared into the soil. There were also plank edges to the beds – some of the planks are still lying about, partially in use but no longer retaining any soil. They were a mixed success, falling over a lot, easily kicked over and needing to be put back up again, and in the end I more or less gave up on them. The final straw came last autumn when our local tree man removed the large overhanging branches from next-door’s ash tree; if a guy is prepared to climb 10 metres/30 feet up a tree and lower the sawn-off branches down, you can’t really ask him if he would mind not disturbing the bed edges while he does it (and could he possibly not disturb the parsley growing underneath? In fact the parsley survived very well). Reasonably enough, the beds looked rather dishevelled afterwards.
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| Rather dishevelled (after last autumn's tree work) |
Charles Dowding, whose no-dig methods I’m trying to follow to some extent, reckons that wooden edges are unnecessary and act as a haven for slugs and snails; he demarcates the paths and beds by using woodchip for the former and mulch for the latter. You need an awful lot of mulch (compost, manure, leaf mould etc), but it does seem to work. Some of the paths still need weeding before I can get the woodchip down – in particular there are a number of productive alpine strawberry plants (visible in one of the photos above) which will be pulled up once they’ve stopped fruiting – but already things are looking a lot better, and the woodchip should keep the weeds down. It also allows me to widen the paths, which have been too narrow to be practical. And I can now walk past the apple tree instead of ducking down under it!
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| Starting to look better! |
