Crop: Coe's Golden Drop

My Coe's Golden Crop had a very good set this year, and looked to have a promising crop for once. But one by one, nearly every fruit has turned brown and either dropped or rotted on the tree. As the crop has been so small in previous years, I haven't really paid it the attention I should have, I probably assumed the rot was due to wasps nibbling the thin skin causing brown rot to set in. But this year I have religiously opened every spoiled fruit, and found every single one infested with plum moth. I'm slightly at a loss to know why the infestation is so severe; neither the wild plum nor the Denniston's is affected, and there aren't many plum trees in neighbouring gardens. I was left with about 7 unaffected plums from a 8 foot standard which had previously been over-loaded.

Not sure what to do, I'm not sure it's worth the bother of pheromone traps/spraying for one sparsely producing tree. The fruit is good, but not as outstandling a yellow plum as the catalogues suggests, and the few unaffected fruits ripen very unevenly, the area near the stalk shrivels whilst the other end is sometimes hard.

My husband's favourite plum is the Warwickshire Drooper that grow rather ferally in his parent's garden, as unusually this variety does very well on it's own roots. The flavour isn't as rich as Coe's, but large, sweet and juicy, skins are equal in terms of thickness/bitterness, but it very reliable, seemingly pretty immune to silverleaf and only mildly affected by moth. The drooping habit is attractive, and somewhat self-limiting re. height which is nice.

I know the poor soil here means that plums are very slow to come into production, maybe it's simply too poor for a fussy variety like Coe's. I'll give it one more chance.

Keepers Nursery Open Day

I wish I was nearer, I'd love to go to an open day at Mr Habibi's orchard, sadly Kent just too far for us. Although I now graft all my own fruit these days, I have bought from Keeper's Nursery in the past, maidens trees have been a nice size and always come true, unlike those bought from another well-known fruit supplier (Deacon's). On the rare occasions I've asked for follow up advice it has been very good.

Pear or Apple?

Russet pretending to be a pear.

Today's pickings

Total 4 boxes. Smaller quanitities (1-2kg) of Ellison's Orange, Sunset and Egremont. Very disappointing yields from apple cordons. I need to do something to reduce vigour, I might start with root pruning.

Crop: Red Comice

This is the first year when Comice has produced a full crop, very good quality with large fruits, total over 5kg, the largest few weighing in at about .5kg or 1lb each! These are my great hope for the village show next Sunday. I usually like to pick the night before, but the danger of damage from the mini-hurricane that is predicted tomorrow is too great. I hope they won't look too tired after a week in storage.

Crop: Worcester

Worcesters, about 3kg from young half-stantard M26.

Crop: Comice

A good quality crop of Comice, some nicely blushed from the (non-existant) sun. Moderate crop of 4kg. Box filled out with Glou Morceaux, probably about 2 kg worth (can't be bothered to measure small quantities on young trees).

Crop - Concorde

Decided to pick as much mid-season fruit as possible today, as there ex-tropical storm Katja is on the way for tomorrow, and I don't want the crop wasted as windfalls. Crop was a good 5.5 kg.

Also picked kg of Conference.

Windfalls

We had the first Autumn storm a few days ago, and with it a lot of windfalls, signalling that most of the remaining pears and some of the apples are ready for picking. I picked a box of Conference, most of the Glou Morceaux, Bishops Thumb, Beurré Hardy, also some Comice and Concorde. Elison's Orange and Egremont had started dropping, so picked all that parted easily, plus the Sunset's that had fallen. I had to pick all the Worcesters early too, as they started to drop.

Will have to give quite a bit away. I haven't tried to sell any more as the quality of both apples and pears simply isn't that good. The Worcesters taste metallic and rubbery, neither they nor the russets have that slightly honeyed quality you get with maximum sun ripening. I wondered about trying to leave them longer but there has been no sun in the interim since picking. So much for this being a good year for fruit. Certainly the extremely warm early conditions ensured a good set, but the quality is awful. Also the ripening period has been brought forward, meaning that mid-season cultivars are ripening along side earlier ones, with little succession.

Mulberries

This is the first year that our King James Mulberry has had a useable crop. Although it started to crop from about it's second year, the crop has been light. This year there has been a steady number of rip fruits from late July. Through early August there were enough fully ripe, black fruit to snack on whilst gardening; in the third week of August there were enough to fill a small desert bowl to have with cream. However, even when refridgerated they keep very poorly. I picked a bowl one day; they were forgotten that evening, but I decided to eat them the next afternoon. They tasted a bit mildew - when I looked the ones at the bottom of the bowl were completely mouldy, with very obvious white mycelium fibres already covering the fruit.

By the last weekend in August, black fruits picked straight from the tree were tasting a bit mouldy. Not 'winey' as some fruits go when overripe but mildewed, very strong mould. To be fair, the weather really hasn't helped, it's been very damp over the last few weeks and I've noticed blackberries shrivelling on the bushes too, the Devil has been spitting early this year.

Today, even some of the mid-red coloured fruit look a bit shrivelled so I decided to pick the remainder of the reachable crop and jam them, just over 1kg, enough for a small quantity of jam.

There aren't really any guidelines anywhere for how to use mulberries, but I think we will be better prepared next year. I have to say that using them is made more difficult by my husband refusing to eat them unless they are completely black, when they lose a lot of their acidity (my palate can take them just a tad 'redder'). They drop so easily at this stage, it's easy to lose most of them. But there is about a week in early- to mid- August when they can be eaten like other soft fruit. From that point on I think it's better to pick in stages, freeze, and then jam (or wine) at leisure. Mulberry jam rivals strawberry in the most delicious jam stakes (the fruits that don't break down are wonderfully chewy, like finding bits of fruit toffee in your jam), but is very hard to come by as so few people have mulberry trees, and they are tedious to pick. I wouldn't be without a mulberry now though, the taste of a really ripe fruit is on a hot summer day is indescribable, no other fruit matches it for intensity.

Post script

Husband made the jam (usual method of 1kg dry fruit to 1kg sugar), but for some reason decided to add pectin, as he wasn't sure how much mulberries have naturally. The answer is plenty; adding pectin made it far to thick. Personally I like my jam slightly runny or jelly-like in consistence, not completely solid (technically this would be fruit 'butter' anyway). Also I should have been a bit more careful in picking through them, as I let through the odd woody stalk that didn't break down on cooking. Live and learn, the flavour is good regardless.