My Tiny Plot

Now you see it.

Now you don’t.

I decided to prune my Grape vine early since I may be slightly busy with a newborn baby come the end of November. So I’m trying to get organised and do some of my garden chores now.

It shouldn’t make any difference that I pruned it early as the leaves were starting to fall anyway. The only downside is that I don’t get to enjoy the beautiful Autumn colours of the leaves. Oh well.

I’ve written a longer post on how to prune a Grape vine here. This will tell you what system I’m using and how to do it.

Since I’ve been pruning the Grape vine it’s been producing very well and we had lots of Grapes this year, even though they were only really useful for Grape juice. I might consider planting another Grape vine and training it in a different way just to have experience of a different variety and training method. Now, I just need to magic up the space!

Does anyone have any recommendations on a nice white, seedless, eating Grape I could grow outdoors? I’m thinking about Perlette.

I have to confess I hadn’t much idea what a Perry Pear was before I went to Dyrham Park’s Perry Pear Day yesterday. I was lured in by the promise of a tour around the ‘old orchard’ and turned up with hopes of being let into a secret garden full of perfectly manicured fruit trees.

In reality the trees were a little, erm, larger than I imagined. But hey-ho you can’t have everything.

Having only attended an hour’s talk I won’t pretend I know everything. But there are some great resources (Gloucestershire Orchard Group) online that can tell you everything you need to know about how to choose, plant, and even juice Perry Pears in detail. But I will share some of the facts that I found interesting.

To harvest the Pears someone must climb a ladder next to the tree and shake the fruit out with a very long stick! And be sure to stand clear because Perry Pears are rock hard and totally inedible. You can’t eat them, nope, not even if you cook them for three hours first. Sheesh!

What you can do with them is make Perry, a fruity, and as it turns out very nice, alcoholic drink (it’s alright, I didn’t drink much in my state of impending motherhood). So like Cider Apples, Perry Pears are grown just to be made into Perry. In its hey-day Dryham had a vast Perry Pear orchard and in-house brewery. They produced flagons of the stuff, presumably to keep the servants and estate workers drunk very happy.

And the National Trust guide let us into the old orchard through this wonderful old gate in the orchard wall. It was like stepping into Narnia through the wardrobe.

I’m always amazed at how my childish fascination with walled gardens excites me anew every time I find one. There is something magical about the secret garden, locked away from view, quietly overgrowing itself until someone who cares comes along to reinvent it.

Anyway, if you’re inspired to get out into some secret orchards near you then this handy guide to the UK’s local orchard groups is a good place to start. Many orchards will let you ‘sponsor’ a tree and take home the lion’s share of the fruit each year. Maybe I’ll sponsor a Perry Pear tree and take home the lion’s share of the Perry – no, wait, bad idea.

Nothing says, ‘England’ to me like an early Apple harvest. The fresh taste of cold, sweet but a little tart, Apples is the taste of Autumn in our garden. My espalier Apple tree is now on its fourth tier and this year it has produced 33 good-sized eating Apples (last year we had 17).

It’s a Queen Cox, a self-fertile tree that does well in our damp climate. The taste is sweet, but not too sweet, with just the hint of a tang on the green side of the Apple. It’s perfect. If I had the room I would have a garden full of Apple trees, trained as espaliers, and cordons and over arches (because I like the challenge of training them). But sadly I don’t have the space.

One day (yes one day) I will have an orchard. And just like they do at Granchester I will sit on deck-chairs and have afternoon tea from delicate china. Until then I’m happy with my one Apple tree. But that doesn’t stop me wanting to go to the myriad of Apple Day’s coming up and tasting as many single different varieties as will fit in my mouth.

Here is a brilliant list of Apple Days in the UK
And there are quite a few popping up on the UK Veg Gardeners network too.
Once I’ve eaten all my own fruit I’m tempted to buy a selection box of heritage varieties, just so I can savour the different tastes.

Happy munching!

Hold the front page – we have two Melons growing in the coldframe. I only noticed them after I came back from a weekend away. I must admit I had given up on the Melons. I planted them waaaay back in May and have been madly trying to pollinate the little blighters since. It seemed that nature was conspiring against me though. A male flower would open but no female. Then the next day a female flower would open but the male flower had withered and died – doh!

So I flailed around with my pollinating brush (a paintbrush to you and I), wildly dabbing here there and everywhere and crossing my fingers that something, somewhere had hit the right spot. It had. Two spots infact, as I have two tiny Melons about the size of an egg.

I checked in my books what to do next and dutifully snipped off the plant two leaves after each ripening Melon. I am also feeding them once a week with Tomato fertilizer, closing the lid at night and opening it on sunny days. Phew! this Melon growing business is hard work.

The only worry I have, and it’s a big one, is that they pollinated too late and they are too small to ripen in time. This is the first time I’ve grown Melons so I’m just over the moon to have any at all. I think I will let them fly and see how far I get with them. No doubt there will be photos if they ever ripen. Watch this space!

More Raspberries….urgh! I can’t cope anymore. As you can see, Jackson has his own ideas but really, I need a recipe and quick. Don’t want to make any more jam, have made Raspberry Pavlova, Raspberry Muffins, and eaten about as much Yoghurt with Raspberries as I can take. Anyone, anyone?

While on my knicker-making course the other week (I know, weird) I had a great idea what to do with my ripening black Grapes. One of the other attendees was drinking grape juice and I thought, ‘yes! that’s it, a great way to use up my Grapes.’

Why not just eat them, you say? Well, unfortunately the vine I have was already in my garden when I moved into the house and as it turns out the Grapes are small and very sweet but they have quite large pips in them. Which, if you’ve ever eaten non-seedless Grapes, is a bit of a pain in the booty.

So, here’s how to make your own Grape juice. Firstly, harvest and de-stem the Grapes making sure to pick out any damaged or rotted ones.

Next, give them a good wash to get rid of any nasties.

Then put them into a sturdy pan and mash them with a masher. The idea is to burst as many Grapes as possible. Heat them to a slow simmer for about 10 minutes. Stirring occasionally to ensure they don’t stick to the bottom of the pan.

Lastly, pass the mixture through a fine sieve or cheesecloth. I used a sieve and pushed it through twice just to make sure all the bits were gone. Then bottle, chill and serve. You don’t need to process the jars if you plan on drinking it quickly. And if you have matching nail polish then apply now – the juice tastes so much better :)

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:

• Summer Berry Hotchpotch
• No Bits Blackcurrant Jelly
• Blackcurrant Juice
• Cassis

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 :)