The Promise Of Things To Come

The anticipation of harvest is a wonderful thing. We like to grow fruit and vegetables in our garden and things get rather exciting in spring, it's a miraculous time when Mother Nature does her stuff.

Apricots

This is our 22 year old apricot tree. It has been the source of great pleasure over the years, after dinner wanderings to eat dessert straight off the tree, not to mention the many litres of wonderful jam, but it has been misbehaving for the last 3 seasons, barely fruiting at all. Steve gave it a massive prune in autumn, taking the whole top out of the tree, and things are looking promising! It never ceases to amaze me that every year without fail, the first fruits ripen in the last week in November, I can set my calendar by it.

Figs

This is our 20 year old "Black Genoa" fig tree which faithfully produces masses of fruit every year. The main crop starts ripening mid January, but this photo is of our precious early crop, which only survives if we manage to have no late frost. If we are lucky we may get up to 30 fruit in the early crop which ripens just before Xmas - a real treat. This tree is a particular favourite of the local parrots, who spend most of the summer in the top of the tree. We have an arrangement, the parrots scoff the fruit at the top of the tree that we can't reach, and the bottom half of the tree is our territory. :-)

Sultana Grapes

This is our 25 year old grape vine which, suddenly this year has squillions of tiny bunches of grapes on it. Normally we get maybe 15 bunches, but this year the roots must have tapped into some sort of fertile goldmine. I have given up trying to count the bunches, I reckon there's over a hundred.

Lime

We've had our lime tree for 5 years now. Currently there are hundreds of tiny fruit developing but in the past most of these drop off and last year we ended up with about 20 mature fruit, which was very exciting for a little tree. I think we only had 3 the year before. It must be the poo tea. :-)