I know this is weird but I have a Raspberry glut. My Autumn Raspberries are producing at such a rate that the three of us can’t keep up with them. Infact, we’re a little bit sick of eating Raspberries (when I say we, I don’t mean a certain 2-year-old who is happy to eat them for breakfast, dinner and tea!).
So, I decided to make some Raspberry milk with the surplus. Just a cup full of milk in the blender with a handful of Raspberries. That’s all. No sugar needed.
Then serve to your waiting customers.
My Pear’s are nearly ready to be picked. They should be ready in late August or early September and I know that I should really pick them when they are unripe and ripen them indoors for the best results. The trick is knowing when to harvest them, even though they are still unripe.
Here are a few tips that I’ve found useful:
- If the Pear is difficult to pull of the tree, it isn’t ready.
- Cup the Pear in your hand and give it a light squeeze, if the flesh is slightly springy then it’s ready. If it’s rock-hard then it’s not ready.
- If you see other fruits dropping from the tree it’s likely that the fruits still on the tree are ready.
- If your Pears have changed colour from green to lighter green or even yellow (depending on variety) this is another sign that they may be ready to pick.
Pick a Pear by grasping the fruit and twisting or rolling it to make the stem pull away from the branch. You want the stem still intact.
Happy harvesting!
I picked a few of the first Autumn Raspberries today. They were amazing! I copied Harry Dodson’s way of harvesting them from the ‘Victorian Kitchen Garden’ DVD by picking a few leaves and putting them in a wooden box. A bit of overkill I think for the size of harvest, but still, it made it feel special.
I might have to think about culling the number of canes I have this Winter as they’re starting to take over that side of the garden. Maybe if I take out every other one I should be able to thin them out in that way.
But for now I’m enjoying Raspberries every morning from my bumper crop! I love this time of year don’t you :)
It’s time to harvest the Blackcurrants. They’re so ripe I can actually smell them as I walk past the bush. I only have one Blackcurrant bush but it’s always dripping in berries so I always have more than enough.
I usually use the Sarah Raven method for harvesting Blackcurrants by cutting whole branches out with berries on them and picking them at my leisure. This solves two problems in one by pruning the old wood out and making it easier to pick the berries.
I didn’t prune all of the fruiting branches out because that would make the bush too small. I only pruned about a third of them out and next year I will prune the rest. Those branches will still fruit but just a little further up on the new wood.
I’ve made a few things in the past with my Blackcurrants:
This time I made Blackcurrant Cake from a recipe I found online. It was lovely, however next time I would put more sugar in as the Blackcurrants were still just a tad sharp.
Have fun with your Blackcurrants, if you have any, if you don’t then get some for next year :)
My Strawberries are almost ready to ripen. They’re quite big but still green. It was mid June by the time we were eating Strawberries last year and what with the set back earlier in the year it could be later than that this year.
I just hope they ripen before we go on holiday! Arghhh! the thought of Strawberries going to waste makes me faint. Basically, I just want the garden to stop, stop everything, while we sit on a beach for a while and then when we get back everything can start again. I’m asking too much, aren’t I?
The Tayberry that I planted back in March has flowered and is now setting fruit! I hadn’t anticipated seeing fruit this early. I thought they would come at the same time as the Raspberries which are only just budding up. But they must be earlier in general.
I haven’t really done anything to the bush since I put it in. I have watered it a bit because the pot is quite close to the wall and sometimes misses the rain. But apart from that the plant has done everything itself.
There must be around eight or nine Tayberries on the bush and I can’t wait to taste them. I’m going to wait until they’re mega ripe to pick them so I get the full flavour. Under gardener is worried that the birds will take them (he’s still traumatized by what happened to the Blueberries last year) but I don’t think this will be a problem since the birds don’t go for the Raspberries and it’s a similar situation.
Does anyone have experience with a Tayberry - do I need to net against the birds?
It’s time to clear out all the seedlings from my coldframe to make room for my Melon plant. Most seedlings have been planted out but there are still a few left. From bottom to top there is Drunken Housewife Lettuce, some Greyhound Cabbage, and a solitary Courgette plant. Once they’re planted out in the garden then I can transfer my Melon plant in.
The seedlings you can see in the top of the frame are too small to transplant yet but will make their exit soon. My Melon is the variety Ogen. I’ve grown it from seed and I have one back up incase it doesn’t thrive. It will spend the rest of the summer in the coldframe with the lid propped open. Hopefully, this will create the right conditions to produce two or three ripe Melons. Fingers crossed!
A few weeks ago I was on cloud nine because my other Pear tree flowered this year, which means I was in with a good chance of getting some pollinated flowers. And guess what? It worked. The flowers did pollinate and there are tiny Pears growing on the trees. Hooray!
I have Pears growing on both trees (Conference and Doyenne du Comice) and I counted a total of 18 Pears. Whoohoo!
I have never tasted a home-grown Pear but knowing how good Pears ‘can’ taste even from the supermarket my mouth is watering just thinking about it. I can’t wait. I’m hoping the taste will be worth the wait of almost three years!
My Redcurrants are in full flower and dripping with bunches of these gorgeous green and yellow flowers. They’re so tiny and delicate even my mega powerful lens is having trouble capturing them here. I love the fact that they are so small and perfect and each one will make a miniature red, transparent jewel in a month or so.
They don’t last very long. They’ll be gone in a week and in their place will start to develop small green dots that will grow into Redcurrants. But the bees are loving them right now. They buzz from one to the next and it takes them a good five minutes to cover the whole plant before moving on to the next one.
Ah… Spring really is cool isn’t it?
I’m so excited this year that we might actually (fingers crossed) get some Pears. I planted two Pear trees coming up for two and half years ago now. I trained them as oblique cordons (with means one branch on a 45 degree angle) because my garden isn’t big enough to sustain anything bigger.
They’ve been growing happily for the last two years, last year one of them even flowered! But the problem is it’s no good if one of them flowers, I need both to flower because they need the other for pollination.
One of them is Conference and the other is Doyenne du Comice (or Comice Pear to you and I). They’re the kind you see in the shops. Conference is the long green type and Comice is the short yellow type. I didn’t want to go too exotic as I’ve never grown Pears before and I wanted to ensure that I had good strong varieties that I was sure would pollinate each other.
Well, this year, both are flowering. And I’m over the moon. I know that it takes Pears usually three years to get established and to start fruiting so I wasn’t expecting anything until next year. But now both of them have tons of flowers on them. I’m just hoping those bees do their job so I can eat juicy Pears. Come on bees!
