This Year's Crop

We planted fruit trees in our garden in the first couple of years we were here -- a cherry tree, a redcurrant bush, three apple trees, a pear tree and a plum. The plum died almost instantly; the redcurrant succumbed to woolly moth after a few years and had to be dug out and burned; one of the three apple trees took years to produce its first flowers and for years afterwards never gave us more than a couple of fruits, so was eventually dug out as well; the cherry produced lots of fruit every year but was generally stripped bare by the birds before we got anything, so that eventually went as well. That has left us with two apples and one pear tree, plus a blackcurrant bush purchased later and inserted into a likely-seeming gap, and a blackberry bramble which The Wugster introduced and which we have to keep severely under control lest it take over one whole side of the garden.

So that's round about fifteen years that we've been growing fruit in one form or another, and for most of those fifteen years we've never got very much -- the blackcurrant and the blackberry are fairly reliable, but the apple and pear trees generally crop poorly. They give us lots of blossom in the spring, but then seem to lose a good half of their buds in the "June drop" while those remaining are either nibbled by squirrels or invaded by coddling moths. Most of the time, the fruit is boiled for its pectin, used to help jam set; we seem to eat very little of the fruit as fruit.

Except this year. This year, for what must be the first time ever, we have a bumper crop of apples and pears -- fruit which looks as though it's staying on the trees to ripen, which is not being pecked or nibbled or attacked, which is starting to give me the lunch I take to work every day. Here's some photographs:




Our tomatoes are also doing rather well -- there's a lot of green fruit at the moment, because the weather's been rather cool and damp, but those in the greenhouse are starting to turn and soon those outside will follow. Ace!

Another Visit

This afternoon we went to Fulham Palace in west London, but saw rather less than we expected because parts of it (the Tudor Great Hall, the Gallery, the Chapel) had been taken over for a private function (a wedding, by the look of it) and therefore weren't open to the public. (Hire of venues such as this for private functions is one of the many things that small museums in local authority ownership have to do these days in order to support themselves. As the chair of the Friends group for our own local authority-owned museum, I understand this completely.) As the museum's helpful volunteer staff pointed out, the fact of the closure was posted on their website; we should have checked beforehand (and therefore only have ourselves to blame. Poot).

Oh well. It's only in west London, after all, so we can always go back in the autumn. In the meantime, here are some photographs of, in order, the Tudor west court (seen through the gate -- we were allowed to at least look at it); the Tudor chapel with its diagonals of darker brickwork (fired clay bricks were then a new and expensive building material, and those who could afford them wished to show them off); the 1814-1818 extension (creating another court to the east of the Tudor original) with its "gothick" windows allegedly inspired by Horace Walpole's gothick "castle" at Strawberry Hill; the restored interior of Bishop Sherlock's room in the 1814-1818 extension (much of the decorative plasterwork had to be recreated from scratch because decades of municipal use had damaged the original work beyond repair); and The Wugster seated in a chair carved from (and attached to the stump of) a huge elm tree in the grounds of the palace which was felled in the Great Storm of 1987. Zena will undoubtedly recognise the jacket as one she donated way back when.