Fruit thinning 101, and SEND RAIN!
Hello friends!
Such glorious weather but you know what? I'm gonna put my head above the parapet and say I want some rain...actually not SOME rain...LOTS of rain. Heat is one thing. Unrelenting heat is quite another, and as you'll see below, most of my gardening time has once again been spent watering.
Monday
I water all the wilting ones. I loathe and detest watering the garden proper as I feel like it's a horrible waste of a very important resource and my plants should be able to withstand most weather. I do have a water butt, which is now empty, so it's pottering about with the hose from now on (until the inevitable hosepipe ban). I find it much more time efficient (and better for the plants) to put the hose on a teeny tiny slow trickle, and leave it at the base of each particular plant for an hour or so. My main priorities are:
1. Trees and shrubs (box, hydrangea standards, amelanchiers etc)
2. Shade-loving perennials (Anemone x hybrida, etc)
3. Other perennials
I have left annuals to go to seed and fend for themselves
Watering the pots has become a nightly exercise as always in the summer, and I do it automatically now; it's my wind-down time once I've put the children to bed and I love it madly, especially with a glass of something nice.
Tuesday
I spend a lovely few minutes thinning out my plums, only to discover that they've been attacked by saw-fly - they are covered by little spirals of what looks like spun sugar, or some sort of resin - very pretty indeed but it does mean that there will be unwelcome visitors inside.
For this reason I abort the thinning mission and instead take pictures of them, resolving to make jam when they are ripe. It's strange but sometimes a bit of a relief when decisions are made FOR me like this. There will be no frantic picking, just slap-dash shaking of the tree to gather all the fruit.
Wednesday
The weather is mercifully cooler today and I take advantage by throwing down my kneeling pad and starting to weed. There is lots to weed out at this time of year.
The rest of the grey, dusty forgetmenots, the pale brown skeletons of the alliums, creeping buttercup which loves the shade of nearby perennials, dandelions (ditto) more convulvulus, trying to sneak its way into my life and obviously chick weed and all the rest. Care is needed with seed-heads when removing them, because I don't want the seed blowing off and finding a new niche, and this is why if I were a proper gardener I would have removed them before they flowered.
Thursday
I spend some time cutting back a few geraniums that have gone wild and are threatening to choke the entire border. This is a truly wonderful one called G. 'Orion' - It is like Johnson's Blue, but less tidy in its habit (which I love), using neighbouring plants to prop up the gorgeous flowers. This flush though is now over, and it's time to yank out the flowering stems (just a firm tug will do it) and chop back some of the more unruly foliage. I then water and hope it'll have another go at being as marvellous later in the year. It's a great feeling to have created more space for some of my other, late summer stars to find the light and grow apace. But basically it's too hot to do anything very taxing, and although the look of the garden will suffer rather from my lack of attention over this heatwave, I'm still not down with sweating over it. Sorry.
The lawn is another disaster. If only I had left the entire thing to grow long, rather than shaving the outside edges. It is basically brown right now. Catastrophe. You live and you learn.
Friday
I am so hot. I feel like one of those women in a Chekov play...just fanning myself endlessly and waiting for something....something, (ie RAIN) to HAPPEN. Lots of sighing. Ugh. Things I HAVE to do, like picking up children and making them food, come top of the list, obviously, and everything else just feels too much. The lethargy is agonising. Still, in the spirit of five minutes, I drag two large pots of argyranthemum into the shade and start deadheading madly. It is highly addictive, not least because this is a plant that's easy to deadhead, but also because something has been eating the blooms; I had at first suspected slugs but now realise it is caterpillars. They wriggle alarmingly when I separate their carefully knitted-together petal beds. I toss them aside, take a photo and it looks all arty and good.
Some news:
Very excitingly, The Five Minute Garden is going to be a book!
A small, illustrated guide full of five minute things you can do each day to keep on top of your space, however big or small. I'm VERY excited; getting commissioned to write a book is a massive deal. It doesn't matter how many books you've written. I feel so lucky. More soon!
Thinning fruit; the whys and guidelines
We lucky custodians of fruit trees often miss out on their bounty either because the fruits are too small, or we have left them too long, or simply because the harvest is so vast as to be overwhelming. Even if you’re an ace harvester, thinning it can make the whole process a lot easier. The advantages are essentially three-fold: Fruits, although fewer in number, will be larger and of better quality, the tree will be less likely to suffer the effects of over-bearing, which can lead to biennial bearing, (where the tree only fruits every other year), or the breaking of branches due to the weight of the fruit. And then there is the matter of having a manageable harvest which I touched on before. Start by removing any and all fruit that doesn’t look perfect, and then wait for the tree to finish its own thinning procedure (the June drop), after which you can get in there with the following in mind. For cooking apples, you're looking at leaving one fruit every 6-9 inches, a little less for eaters. Pears can be thinned down to two fruits per cluster. Pluck plums with abandon, leaving just one or two every 6 inches. It may all seem like a bit of a production, but ultimately it’s a huge amount more fun than picking up rotten fruit in the freezing cold, especially when you could have eaten it in a pie.
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