Sunday 18 July 2010

The Edible Garden

The fruits of our labour....well to be honest not that much labour. Once we got these started off they've been a bit neglected but they didn't seem to mind. I've been re-reading Noah's Garden: Further Adventures in Backyard Ecology by Sara Stein. I picked it up cheap somewhere a couple of years ago and realised that it was reaffirming exactly what I'd decided. The garden backs onto a wood and we seemed to be constantly battling with the wood. It wanted to reclaim the garden. I realised that it was winning anyway and we loved the woods that's why we bought the house, so why fight. And so we gave in to the woods and have a rambling overgrown garden. Except for the bit of lawn, and look how it's rewarded us.

The best crop of lovely creamy pink sweet cherries ever, that we shared with a million birds and a few neighbours.
Tasty courgettes planted in an old bucket.

Our first decent crop of strawberries.
I missed making elderflower cordial in June....I was determined to do it this year but too late. At least there will be elderberries in the autumn.
Apples
Tiny baby blueberries
'A's' precious, precious mulberry tree that reminds him of the ones back home.....
Tiny baby sour grapes.
Hot chillies
and teeny weeny baby green beans.

5 comments:

  1. Your garden looks divine! So fruitful too. Only have a very small inner city plot here, so will have to keep dreaming!

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  2. We're really lucky Rel and appreciate it so much....but a lot of the stuff is grown in containers like the courgettes and beans...

    Hope you get your dream garden.

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  3. Such a great garden. I am envious.

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  4. Oh, the bounty! I particularly love the fact that you are growing mulberries. My grandfather's family owned a very large property on what became the main road from Melbourne to the Victorian goldfields in the 1850s. They ran cattle there but also had a small bluestone pub. Just outside the pub was a mulberry tree.

    By the time I was 5 or 6 the pub was well and truly in ruins but the mulberry tree was still there old and gnarled but producing fruit every year. We used to go there every Summer and pick the fruit (eating much of it then and there)and go home happy and purple stained.

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  5. Thats a lovely memory Caz.

    The mulberry tree was in the garden when we moved here. It was the pride and joy of the previous owners they had planted it about 11 years before. It must be thirty years old now and just beginning to produce decent fruit. It makes amazing sorbet that we can even enjoy at Christmas time, long after the leaves have fallen from the tree.

    There are a few very old ones in the gardens of some of the colleges here with abundant fruit. I have a vivid memory of Ahmad's sister visiting about ten years ago and sitting on his shoulders eating the berries off the high branches and descending with scarlet palms.

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