Fruity

Bar my poor hammock trees, all the old ones left in the garden that have been spared culling are now producing lots of tasty fruit. We mostly have apples and pears. Out of all of them, this little fellow has been most prolific.

It's the smallest of our old trees and hasn't seemed to grow at all the the three summers we've been here. Every year, though, it drips with juicy pears.

Nice pear!

We think our apples trees were planted with cider production in mind - a safe presumption to make around here. Even so, they're very tasty as eating apples, although they go very mushy and lose their flavour if you try to cook with them. (We have a cooking apple tree on our garden shopping list for the winter.)

It was discovered yesterday that an old, ivy covered tree at the bottom of the garden is in fact a plum tree, possibly a wild one. Either it's not produced any fruit for a couple of years, or we're extremely unobservant because this year it's covered in small, sweet red plums, unfotuantely we've left it a bit too late for picking - they're so ripe that as soon as you catch hold of a branch most of them fall off into the undergrowth in the field next door. Next year I shall be prepared, a nice plum jam would go down very well methinks.

On my afternoon tour of the garden (now in full sun, hurray!) I also noticed lots of these cute little fellows. Despite the best efforts of our three cats our lizard population is still going strong, not really surprising as the young ones move incredibly fast. This one tried his best not to be photographed and it seemed he turned his head in disgust upon hearing the click when I took it.


Oh yes, I picked three courgettes today too and am currently succeeding in my objective of avoiding marrows, thanks to daily vigilance. I resorted to making a courgette and blue cheese soup with all of our previous harvest a couple of days ago, it was that wet and miserable. Now I shall have to conjure up something summery with this tasty triumvirate.