Confused Blackberry

In my previous post here earlier this month, I uploaded a photograph of one of our apple trees which had put out some new blossom. (It seems to have been pollinated -- the petals of the flowers are gone and the buds at their bases seem to be swelling.) This morning, I came across another confused plant -- the blackberry, which had also put out some new blossom....presumably, to judge by its appearance, a few days ago. And that too appears to have been pollinated.

We wait to see what happens next. Perhaps not so much a white Christmas, as a petal-strewn one?

Confused Tree

Spotted this morning, although they've obviously been there for several days and I just hadn't noticed them until now: new blossom on one of our apple trees.

It's very unlikely that we'll get a second crop of apples -- the colder winter weather will kill off whatever fruits do form -- but it will be interesting to see just how far they do get.

Mangy Fox

We get foxes on our allotment: usually we see the evidence of them (nesting amongst the potatoes, rolling over young broccoli, little grey sausages of dried poo) rather than the creatures themselves, although yesterday one sauntered boldly past us as we were about our work of planting out peas and breaking up a fork lift pallet, and sat down on the neighbouring plot long enough for me to take its picture. As you can see from the photograph above, it's in terrible condition: presumably mange, although it also appears to be nearly blind. I imagine that whatever it's suffering from is what caused it to lose its natural fear of humans; I also imagine that when we go back to the allotment (probably next weekend) we'll find a dead body to be disposed of. Such is life.

Ticking Them Off One By One

I posted last month about our visit to Rye House Gatehouse and Rye Meads Nature Reserve; yesterday, we ticked another item off the list in my filofax with a visit to the former Royal Gunpowder Mills at Waltham Abbey -- a small town on the Hertfordshire-Essex border in whose church the body of King Harold was allegedly interred following his death at the Battle of Hastings, and which we first visited around ten years ago. At that time, work at the Gunpowder Mills had ceased and the site had been mothballed pending a decision on its future; it was eventually decided to transfer it to an independent trust and open it to the public as a tourist attraction.

Unfortunately. visitor numbers weren't anything like those expected, and the plans for the site were drastically scaled back: it is now open only at weekends in the summer months, in part because it is run largely by volunteers and subsists entirely from entry fees and donations. We didn't donate, but we did buy some stuff in the shop; and also bought tickets for a trip on the land train into the more distant parts of the site, which is otherwise closed to visitors because the remaining structures there are simply unsafe and because it's a recognised SSSI -- we saw evidence of badger activity (their latrines), many birds (but not the herons who were once there, and seem to have moved away), and I glimpsed a group of fallow deer which disappeared into the woods as we approached.

I even took a few pictures. (What a surprise, eh?) Here are, in order:

1. Part of the canal system used to move gunpowder, nitroglycerine, cordite and other explosive materials around the site;

2. One of the (partially restored) flat-bottomed barges used on the canal system -- the stern half would be canal-worthy were it attached to something that would float, but the bow half has decayed wood and holes in the bottom;

3. The so-called wildlife observation tower, formerly the concentrator for one of the explosives manufacturing processes. Note the round-arched bridge over the canal to the right of the tower; this is a characteristic of the site. The rules were that no one was allowed to cross a bridge while a barge was passing underneath, in case something fell on it and set off an explosion.

4. One of the buildings from which explosives ingredients were loaded onto the barges. You'll note that the canal has dried up. Note also the thick walls between each of the building's bays: these were intended to ensure that an explosion in any one bay did not set off a chain reaction in the others by directing the blast up through the roof of the bay, thus containing it. You can also see, just to the left of the picture, part of an enormous brick "traverse", again to guard against the spread of explosions.

5. A derelict gunpowder milling and pressing plant. The mill is the building on the right (the water wheel is the give-away) and the press is the contraption on the left, which would have squeezed the gunpowder into flat cakes to ensure its consistency and stability. The press would formerly have been housed in a wooden building, which has now disappeared. Between them is an enormous brick traverse, intended to protect the mill (machinery was expensive -- men were not) should the gunpowder go off while it was being pressed.

The Weight of The Fruit

After two wet summers in which the little fruit produced by the one pear and two apple trees in our garden -- most of what didn't fall off when still unripe was pecked by birds and nibbled by squirrels -- we've done rather well this summer. So many apples, indeed, that we've had trouble keeping up: most of them have had to be processed into jam (where the pectin helps set the blackberries, gooseberries or elderberries with which they're mixed), and others are being stored in the refrigerator until they can be eaten (either on their own or chopped into the morning muesli). And now the pears are coming ripe, too....

So here's a couple of pictures, of branches bent low by the weight of their fruit. Once free, they should spring back up -- but even then I think we'll have to do some heavy-duty pruning, to get the trees back into the shape they're supposed to be. That's "minarette" shape, as in keeping short branches close to the trunk, but obviously our trees have failed to RTFM and are behaving like full-size trees. But we'll learn them!