Blossom Time is one of my very favourite times of the year, when fruit trees and bushes are filled with the simple beauty of their un-fussy flowers and the promise of good, fruity things to come.
Here’s a quick gallery of some of the fruit blossom I’ve been thoroughly enjoying of late.
A couple of weeks ago I enjoyed the opportunity to work on a rather lovely Bramley’s Seedling tree that hadn’t been pruned for a while and was starting to get too big for its space. The owner of the tree – which was highly productive last year – was very keen that it shouldn’t just […]
Last Sunday I girded my loins against the chill and headed down to Platt Fields Park in south Manchester for a day of restorative top fruit pruning. The session was organised and run by The Orchard Project, with The Friends of Platt Fields Park, and was led by Mark Simmonds, a Hebden Bridge based orchardist […]
Earlier this year I talked about establishing our air-pot mini-orchard; three apples and a morello cherry that we’re growing in Air-Pot containers. At the time I mentioned that I was planning to use a Modified Lorette system of pruning in an effort to develop the best possible network of fruiting spurs without over-taxing the trees. […]
The three apple trees that we potted up into our Air-Pot mini-orchard are all doing very well so far. After blossoming profusely back in May they’ve all set fruit quite well; a couple of them maybe too well. Here’s a cluster of developing fruitlets on our ‘Cornish Aromatic’: As you can see, there are four […]
I’m very happy to report that the fruit trees we bought from Grow at Brogdale and potted up in Air-Pot containers back in February all seem to have settled in nicely and are producing a healthy flush of blossom. Here’s our Malus domestica (apple) ‘Herefordshire Russet’, putting on a lovely show in shades of pink […]
With the weather turning a little warmer and the immediate threat of frost receding this week, I took the opportunity to pot up our newly-delivered fruit trees. Even more importantly, I gave them a formative pruning to set them up for their future roles as small, hopefully highly productive, fruit-bearing trees. Here’s how I went […]
Last summer, on the way back from our garden-visiting holiday in Kent, Jo and I stopped off at the National Fruit Collection at Brogdale. It turned out to be the day of their annual cherry festival, which looked like a huge amount of fun, but we weren’t there to eat pie or spit pips. No […]
Pete Brown’s new volume of entertaining investigation into the social history of a subject dear to his heart looks at apples and the orchards in which they grow. Anyone who has read any of Pete’s other books – I’ve hugely enjoyed all of his beer- and pub-themed works to-date, including Man Walks Into a Pub, […]
The do say a picture is worth a thousand words, but I’ll briefly walk you through the above. From the top-left: a bag of apples and plums donated by a plot-neighbour; the last of this year’s maincrop ‘pink fir apple’ potatoes, with three giant black radishes on top; (in the box) autumn raspberries and Japanese […]