Tag: gooseberry

Fruits of Summer

On By tontowilliamsIn Garden / Allotment4 Comments

2016-06-25 08.28.02

It’s that time of the year when the soft fruit is ripening, and there’s an almost daily supply of fresh loganberries (a cross between a raspberry & a blackberry) and gooseberries, it’s one of my favourite times on the allotment. Last night I made loganberry ice cream, and tonight I’ll be making gooseberry ice cream. Tomorrow, there will probably be more to make something else with.

This week has been extremely unpredictable weather-wise. It’s been hot and sunny one moment, and then we’ve had yellow weather warnings for rain. The weather warnings were lifted on Friday morning, and then this happened:

I suppose given the inaccurate science of weather forecasting I shouldn’t be surprised, but six inches deep water sloshing around the back door, and across our garden in less than a minute was pretty spectacular and frightening, but at least I won’t have to water this evening!

Allotment Catch Up Sunday

On By tontowilliamsIn Birds, Garden / Allotment, Uncategorized, Wildlife/Nature

 

Cabbage White Butterfly
 I spent this morning on the allotment as I hadn’t spent much time there yesterday with having to pick Ruby up from the vet. As she was clearly much better I took a couple of hours to do some weeding and watering, as well as harvesting a few things – broccoli, red gooseberries and loganberries in particular.

  It was an overcast morning, which thankfully kept the temperatures down, there were also a number of birds about, in particular blackbirds singing and my robin friend was back, keeping a check that I was doing the weeding right and uncovering insects for him to eat.

Checking on insect provision

Splitting Time Between Allotment and Writing

On By tontowilliamsIn Garden / Allotment, writing

If you follow me on twitter or know me in real life, you’ll know that next weekend I’m heading off to Bristol for CrimeFest. Consequently this means that I’ve been trying to get all the work on the allotment and in the garden that I would normally do in two weekends, squeezed into one.

Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, as to be honest leaving things for a week doesn’t normally cause too many problems. Having said that, when I went down to the allotment yesterday I noticed that my gooseberry plants have quite a bit of fruit on them already, and there’s a chance that if I didn’t cover them up I could loose the crop to the birds.

Gooseberry

Birds have an uncanny sense of knowing exactly when the fruit is at it’s perfect moment of ripeness, and then manage to strip a plant clean without so much as a second look.

So I decided that I would net the fruit bushes before next weekend, otherwise I might be too late, and miss out on this years crop. I suspect I won’t, but am not taking any chances!