From The Fruit Garden (Week 25).

Today I will just give you a quick look at the fruit garden as things are progressing well now.

In this first picture you can see the Tayberry which I showed you a few weeks ago. They are starting to turn ripe now, when they are ready for picking the fruit will be a dark purple in colour and twice the size of a Raspberry. After this picture was taken I had to net the Tayberry as I could see the birds were taking the berries. It seems to me that we feed the birds all winter just so they can spend all summer eating our fruit.

The next picture is of one of the Fig trees in the garden. When I first came the trees were over grown and neglected so what fruit we’ve had in the past has been hard to get at so I’ve cut them right back and trained the new shoots in to the wall. This is the first year of producing fruit since being trained.

I don’t know if any of you have noticed or are even bothered but I will point out that I have a new little feature in my sidebar highlighting some of the jobs that I do through my day/week.

Strimming & Edging.

Today I managed to get the Leeks planted, I will show you those in another post, the rest of the day has been spent edging the lawns, strimming and mowing. When it comes to edging and strimming because there is quite a lot to get through I split the whole grounds in to three. This also applies to a few other things too. You will probably have seen me categorise parts of the garden as Main Garden, Walled Garden or Public Gardens, well this is how I allocate the edging, this week it was the turn of the Walled Garden which has by far the most amount of edging to trim. I do it this way for two reasons the first being after edging the Walled Garden I need a break from edging. Secondly if you do it on a three week cycle there is always part of the gardens newly trimmed. Of course the best way would be to trim the whole lot every week but I don't have the time for that.

Tonight we will have a look at how the fruit is progressing. First up we have the new Quince tree that was planted a few weeks ago. Its starting to put out new shoots now so thats good. There is a little problem in that the two lower shoots that I wanted to grow up the canes have not grown but fortunately there are a couple of new shoots growing that I hope to train in their place.

In blossom this week is the Tayberry, this, for those that don't know is a cross between a Blackberry and a Raspberry - I think. The fruit are purple when ripe and have the shape of a Raspberry but twice the size.

A Close up of the Tayberry

Tayberry

I'm with you as far as the Orchids go Emily. It is quite rewarding when they are in flower but really these days they're ten a penny so not that special anymore therefore hardly justify all the trouble and expense but I was given them to look after so thats what I did.