Category: fruit and veg

Scrumptious Scrumping

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date October 10, 2011

What a harvest! Today we harvested the “Scrumptious” apples from the tree trained over a garden arch and these two baskets of deep rosy apples weighing in at just over 11lb are the result. The taste is sweet and juicy and the flesh white with red blushing close to the skin.

Tags apples, fruit and veg growing, grow your own

allotments community gardening fruit and veg grow your own meadows

Lottie Working Party

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date September 7, 2011

At the weekend we took part in a working party at the allotment. These are held regularly aiming to maintain the shared green spaces around the site. The main task for this day was to give the meadows and long grass areas their annual haircut. The photo below shows members strimming the turf spiral maze and mowing the long grass under the fruit trees in one of the community orchards.

Once the orchard has been treated to its annual trim it looks so flat and dull. The tall grasses always sway gently in the slightest breeze and attract insects and butterflies. Cutting these grasses down really emphasise that summer is coming to an end.

We hope next year to be able to plant plugs of wildflowers into the grass of the meadows and orchards. We have already planted bulbs in the meadows, daffodils into the one and alliums, muscari and crocus into the other. The photo below shows one of our orchards in early summer when the purple globes flowers of the alliums look stunning with the dainty yellow flowers of the meadow buttercups. This picnic is particularly popular with plotters when they take their coffee-breaks or wish to sit and quietly read a book.

Tags allotments, community gardening

allotments fruit and veg grow your own

Fruity Welcome

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date September 7, 2011

Today we harvested our two Red Windsor apple trees. They are miniature trees called “coronets” and we chose them to flank our front door, where they live in big, heavy, 24inch terracotta pots mulched with a layer of pebbles. One of the trees was a thank you gift so we bought another to make a matching pair. They seemed a far better option to the more formal possibilities – standard hollies, conifers or lavenders.

They are ideal for this position as they give lots of blossom early in the year which is much loved by bees and hoverflies and colouful fruit throughout the summer. Then today they yielded a 6 lb harvest of tasty looking fruit. The fruit is described as cox-like but we shall wait and see. The only problem with growing apples by your front door is that the postman thinks they are for him!

Tags apples, fruit., grow your own, harvest

fruit and veg gardening grow your own permaculture

Permaculture Garden

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date September 4, 2011

We recently visited the permaculture garden of Wade Muggleton and his family in South Shropshire and what a wonderful garden it is, full of interest, attractive and so productive. Every inch of space is used and productive on several layers – tree, shrub and ground. The front garden is home to fruit from strawberries at ground level, through gooseberries, including a deep red fruited bush with intense sweet taste, and on up through cordon apples and finally up to apples grown on trees. The star of the front garden though was the Japanese Wineberry with its bright orange and red colouring and textured stems – and they had a sweet, rich taste.

The back garden of this ex-council house overlooks beautiful rambling Shropshire countryside, which can be appreciated from a well-placed bench. Chickens roam freely and contentedly under fruit trees amongst a wildflower meadow. The most striking tree was a pear which bore deep red fruit which Wade was unable to name as it was bought cheaply without a label, but he could tell us that it tasted as good as it looked.

The back garden contained everything a good organic garden should – water butts, comfrey plants, small wildlife pool, compost systems, and a small greenhouse. Examples of original ideas in recycling could be found everywhere, such as a shower cubicle as a coldframe and a plastic container that housed a mini-square foot garden.

Wade talked to us about permaculture, about optimising your productive space by prioritising which crops you grow, choosing crops for richness of flavour and encouraged us to play the percentage game by realising that we could not be totally self-sufficient but every bit we do builds up to reduce pressure on the wider environment.

Tags fruit and vegetable growing, grow your own, organic gardening

allotments fruit and veg gardening grow your own

Busy Day on the Lottie

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date August 27, 2011

We spent a busy day up on the lottie yesterday, expecting the plot to be wet after 36 hours of steady rain at home. But even though the lottie is only 10 minutes away the plot was dry all but a dampness on the surface. The plot is divided into quarters by grass paths and we thought these may need mowing but the weather has been so dry that there was no grass growth at all.

The main task was to improve the soil in the one quarter – dig out a trench, rotovate over the bottom to break up the boulder clay, spread a layer of half-rotted straw in the bottom, fill the trench back in and finally top it off with a thick mulch of compost. We planted out more leek plants, about 80, into this, half Musselburgh and half Swiss Giant. We had already planted out some Swiss Giant weeks ago and they have made good growth. Our aim is to keep harvesting leeks throughout winter and spring – we eat so many of them!

In between the rows of leek plantlets we sowed Mooli, two types of chickory one for leaves and one hearts, turnip for autumn salads and some winter spring onions, both red bulbed and white. We also took the risk of sowing some carrots chancing the weather in the hope of some very late baby roots and some dwarf french beans for late autumn cropping.

So it’s fingers crossed now in the hope that the late summer and early autumn weather is benevolent!

Tags allotments, grow your own, vegetables

fruit and veg

Purple Plum Profusion

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date August 20, 2011

We have just harvested the plums from one of our row of cordons- lovely rich purple plums. We filled the trug after picking over 10lb of fruit – not bad for one cordon.

Our two metal chickens admire our harvest. The real ones would be eating them with relish.

Tags allotments, fruit., gardening, grown your own, harvest, plums

fruit and veg gardening grow your own

Apple Arch

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date August 19, 2011

We have trained a Scrumptious apple tree over an archway over the path to the greenhouse. Starting with a one year maiden whip we trained it over the arch pruning it as a cordon and within three years we were harvesting heavy crops. The only problem we encountered was when the main trunk was snapped off in heavy winds when it was heavily laden with fruit. But we learnt our lesson and from then on always tie it in as it grows with much stronger fixings.

In the photo the redness of these delicious and attractive apples looks great behind the yellow saucer shaped flowerheads of the fennel and the metallic blue globes of the echinops.

Tags allotments, apples, fruit., gardening, grow your own

allotments fruit and veg gardening grow your own

First tomatoes

: A few Gardeners Delight ready to pick.

It is a poor year for my tomatoes. The plants look very healthy, deep green leaves free of blemish but few flowers and not all have set fruit. The first to ripen are the Gardeners Delight looking like shining red marbles. Few of the other varieties have any colour on the fruit.

The peppers – sweet, cayenne and chilli – are much better. They have plenty of fruit developing both in the greenhouse and outdoors.

The cucumbers – my usual failures – are also setting fruit better than the tomatoes.

I need to look at my tomato growing technique, as something is letting me down.

The tomatoes, peppers and cucumber are all grown in Vital Earth Organic Peat-free compost and fed with my own comfrey feed with the addition of regular foliar feeds of seaweed liquid.

I underplant them with French Marigold so the plants are free of White Fly.

: The cucumber are just setting fruit behind their golden yellow blooms.

So, where are things going wrong. Perhaps the tomato flowers are simply not being pollinated.

Tags greenhouse, peppers, tomatoes

allotments fruit and veg grow your own

A basket of fruit

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date July 22, 2011

: All in a day’s picking.

Is fruit picking the most enjoyable part of gardening? It is so satisfying getting sticky and sweet-smelling hands and defying the wasps who are after you. Just look at today’s produce – golden plums with red and green gooseberries. The huge green goosegogs are from a self-seeded bush in a shrub border at home, the tiny red ones from the allotment. How is it that the pampered bush produces berries half the size of the neglected bush? Simply another case of mother Nature knowing best I guess!

The chucks get any bruised or over-ripe fruit. They watch intently as we harvest and get wildly excited if we approach their run, ready for the race to the plum. The Sussex hen usually quiet and reserved becomes a thing possessed, a hen on steroids, the olympic 100m champion of hens. she gets to the plum as it lands and disappears deep into the Buddleia bush growing in the pen. The others see but a streak of white and black plumage and miss out yet again.

Meanwhile, we return to the kitchen for a bowl of ultra-fresh rose-tinted yellow plums topped off with ice-cream and fromage frais. We allow the freezer to look after some for the winter and for jam and chutney brewing.