Sunday 12 October 2014

Tree Fruit Harvests Over the Last 4 Years

I decided to stew some of our quinces with sugar to make a sort of quince compote. It’s the first time we've had enough fruit to consider using them on their own without apples. 
This is the first couple of batches stewed and awaiting containers so that it can be squirrelled away in the freezer. Having tasted this gorgeous stewed fruit for the first time it’s strange it’s never become more popular. I'm assuming as it can’t be eaten raw that’s a bit of a draw back. Perhaps the ornamental quinces and their rock hard fruits are something others remember and decide to stay well away. 

With our quinces harvested that’s completed our tree fruit harvest for this year. We might still have the odd medlar to pick but as we are still searching for a favourable way of using any of this fruit I'm not going to include it in my tree fruit summary. The table below is a summary of our apple, cherry, greengage, pear, plum and quince harvest over the last 4 years.
I think it’s clear from the table that we have good years and very good years usually managing to harvest a decent crop of fruit although we can’t be sure exactly what fruit it will be. Amazingly our ‘ancient’ apple hedge made up of old cordon apple trees, which are full of canker and other nasty looking problems, produces a reasonable crop each year which is more than can be said for some of our newer trees. Our plot grown pear trees owe us a good crop, especially ‘Delsanne’ with a crop of only 1.4kg over the last 4 years. The other big disappointment is our cherry “Summer Sun”. Each spring it produces masses of flowers and looks very pretty, promising a bounty of cherries which never materialise. 

2 comments:

  1. It's interesting to see the crops all set out like that. As you say, some excellent years. Hopefully your cherry tree will come good next year.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Now here's me believing it was a bumper year for all fruit this year...Our plums produced a crop when we thought it was a "no crop year" in the alternating cropping scheme of things and our neglected ballerina apple produced a dozen edible fruit. Still nothing from our Mulberry.

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for visiting my blog and leaving a comment - it is great to know that there are people out there actually reading what I write! Come back soon.
(By the way any comments just to promote a commercial site, or any comments not directly linked to the theme of my blog, will be deleted as soon as I spot them) Please do not follow links from any comments that appear to be spam - if in doubt ignore.