Wild Hope Homestead

After the craziness of Christmas I now have some time to catch up on my gardening and blogging. There are so many things to write about! I will start with the fruit. Oh, yes, and happy New Year people! Our hot, sticky New Year’s Eve was spent trying to get The Little Fulla to sleep so we could go to sleep, so I am somewhat less enthused about it than usual. But really, it’s just another day and isn’t any more exciting than any other. Every day has a chance to hold excitement, dreams and new adventures, so here’s to a whole year of new days!

Big Fruit

We have plums! I harvested the first ripe plums on 30th December and more yesterday. Just look at the branches laden with red fruit. This is so exciting! They are very tasty too, with red flesh. I still suspect that they are Billington plums due to their appearance and early timing but I don’t know enough about plums to tell from eating them. I’ll just have to eat some more.

The apricots are almost ripe but they are a different story. While the plums seem to be coping just fine, the apricots have been mercilessly attacked by birds before they are ripe. The birds aren’t even eating much, just pecking holes in as many of them as they can, it would seem. Something must be done.

There are also little apples forming on the apple tree and figs growing on the two fig trees. I haven’t gotten around to checking all the trees yet.

Small Fruit

It’s not just the big trees that are fruiting around here. We have strawberries, which I’m fighting (and badly losing) a battle with the birds for, ripe blackcurrants on the young bushes and a couple of other discoveries. The strawberries got off to a good start but then the jolly birds discovered them and started getting them before I could. Where are you, fur child?! I need a netting system pronto.

After moving in, a scraggly bush by the back carport was spared because I thought it might be something in particular. It turns out my fruity guess was right again. I’m on a roll! Somebody put a net at the bottom of the hill to catch me! So, what do you suppose this bush is, with its little green berries? It’s a blueberry. I’ve never grown blueberries before (The Husband isn’t fond of them) but I’d always thought you needed more than one variety to get fruit. I have just read that the highbush varieties are self-fertile but having more than one variety will improve fruit production and performance, so it must be a highbush blueberry. Time to learn about blueberry care then! I will see how it goes with its fruiting before deciding what to do about future blueberry endeavours.

There is also another small fruit shrub/tree that I discovered along the side of our property, which is a mish-mash of bushy things at the moment. I had small fruit on the mind, and couldn’t figure out what on earth these little fruits were until I looked at the photo – it’s a pear! Oops. It is only a small shrubby looking thing at the moment. There is a big pear tree down the back but this is the first time I have seen pear fruit developing on a tree. Perhaps supermarket pears are a thing of the past. There is also another grapevine in there somewhere, which I forgot about. My goodness! I can’t keep up with all these fruit plant appearances! I have some bushwhacking to do.

I am still struggling with pruning procrastination. Who wants to be doing hefty fruit pruning in this hot weather? And with so many things to do around Christmas time? I did finish pruning the lemon and the tangelo before Christmas and I pruned a chunk of the feijoa. The next time I had the energy to do some pruning I pruned a bit of the plum beside the potting shed. Pruning the plum was procrastination for pruning the feijoa. Oh dear. I am leaving the rest of the plum pruning until after fruiting but it really needed some light let in. Likewise, I will leave the apricot until later in summer. That pretty much leaves the hulking great feijoa. Hmm. Oh, look! There’s another gardening task over there…