All About Fruit.

A few more days.

To be honest, I don't very often go into our back garden. A case of out of sight out - of mind as it is tucked behind the barn and thus invisible from our house. Never mind, every few days I go and empty our food scraps onto our compost heap and today I ventured a bit further into our fruit garden.

Pears, apples and plums are our staple and half the trees are almost ready to be harvested. That's going to be a tad bit tricky as they are tall trees. The plums are fine and within reach though. Even this afternoon I managed to find one that was on the cusp of being ripe but tasted plummy nonetheless.

Next to it stands an old apple tree filled with apples. Nice. Quite a lot of them had decamped to the ground and when I picked up one that looked very nice, whole and worm-less, I took a bite and had my taste buds regress to childhood and the sensation of biting into a freshly picked apple. Yum. Another week or two should do the trick and save us buying apples. Hard to find good tasting apples anyway but as they are so healthy I try to eat one a day.

As you might imagine, we don't prune those trees and again mostly because of that out of mind-out of sight reason but this afternoon I took some shears and chopped a few dead branches of it. I swear I felt the tree give a sigh of relief as it shook off the dead weight. Next year in March I promise to make a success of pruning ahead of time.

Lofty ideas often float through my mind such as making batches of apple pie, plum cake and pear custard but let's be honest...stewed apple might be the height of them. Country life, the good life, our life...

Biggi