GreenFly - A 'flylady style' gardening thread with weekly tasks to tame your garden

SandyShores

Brie said:

What's the texture like on a good apple?  If it's quite firm I'd suggest it's a cooker of some sort and so apple sauce would be a good place to start to see if a bit of sugar is all that's required.  

Funnily enough they don't look like Bramley's but that variety popped into my head when I bit into it.  At the moment the insects are having a feast, but it would be a shame not to do anything with them.  I should really have pruned the tree a bit more, but the instructions are fairly complicated.  Apparently the apples need sunshine to sweeten.  Maybe I need to get out with the shears this weekend.

Farway

SandyShores said:

Brie said:

What's the texture like on a good apple?  If it's quite firm I'd suggest it's a cooker of some sort and so apple sauce would be a good place to start to see if a bit of sugar is all that's required.  

Funnily enough they don't look like Bramley's but that variety popped into my head when I bit into it.  At the moment the insects are having a feast, but it would be a shame not to do anything with them.  I should really have pruned the tree a bit more, but the instructions are fairly complicated.  Apparently the apples need sunshine to sweeten.  Maybe I need to get out with the shears this weekend.

More than likely the apples are part of the June Drop and not really ripe anyway, TBH July is very early for any UK grown ripe apples

Keep those shears away from the tree!

Pruning sounds complicated, but really it is not, just need to be methodical and accept it is a two stage operation, not ten minutes when you get time

Around about now until end August is summer pruning, when you get the tree to start making fruit buds for next year.

And it can be as simple as counting leaf junctions, two & snip

Plenty on YouTube

Brie

Where I'm from (near Niagara Falls) there's a nice range of apples that start being ready to be picked as early as June.  Those are the transparent - the clue is in the name, pale green very thin skinned and don't store well at all.  but great for an apple pie which is easy as with such a thin skin you don't need to peel, just slice thinly.  Then we get the pippins, delicious (bleurgh!) and then macs, then swayzes.  Each type later in the season and with a thicker skin and so progressively better to store.  A mac or swayze stored properly (each wrapped in newspaper and put in layers in a bushel basket in my mom's garage) will keep nicely until spring and still be good as a tart eater or a great baker.  

Pruning was always done off season, late autumn once the fruit was off the tree.  But it wasn't (still isn't) a professional orchard and the family have now given up pruning as well as spraying as not cost effective.  We're just fussy about the apples we bring indoors leaving the rest of the wasps and deer.   

fyi - for those that have never seen a swayze - they look like a redish bramley but are huge.  6 inches across is fairly standard.  

redofromstart

@sandyshores, I have two mature cooking apple trees.  both are covered in fruit which is wind dropping daily, but nowhere near ready yet.  If I use any this early in the year as pectin for jam to help with the set.  (I only make lazy seedless jam so the fruit plus a chopped cooking apple, slightly covered in water, cooked for a little to extract the juice, strained for just juice and then 500ml juice/500g sugar, cooked to your preferred set. If you need help with jam then @Valli is a much better source of info than me)

Yesterday we decided to do something about one of the front garden beds - a 5 metre sided triangle marked out in blue brick  on edge.  Enough viable plants to make it not simple, but not enough for delicate weeding.  Terrible soil, eight inches on top of tarmac, on top of original cobbles in some places so poor drainage.  A few hours of work both days and we have taken out the worst of the weed roots from the majority of it, and added a top layer of compost. Tomorrow I plan to add my various seedling perennials and then top dress with bark once it has rained.  We finally visited a local farm and got 8x75l compost/£6.75 per bag and 3 x 1 litre purple salvias at £3 each. It was a lovely patch for some years, full of blue and purple shades, but then I was ill and it got ignored and everything died in a hot spell.  There are Spanish bluebells and frits so I don't want to clear it altogether.  There is a nice clump of euphorbia that I snaffled from my dad, spreading well, including onto the slate path with no soil so clearly a thriver.   must transplant some more.

Cant do much more till the green waste bins are emptied on Tuesday.

greenbee

After two days of hard labour buiding new beds in the veg plot, I've been back and work today so done nothing other than take some stuff to the compost bin. I guess I should go and water the greenhouse, although it hasn't had much sun or warmth today so might have enough to last until tomorrow morning. And the water butts probably didn't fill up much either. 

SandyShores

Thank you for the apple advice - I will look into the suggestions a bit more. 

Cherryfudge

I have apple tree envy! The house where I grew up had an orchard and I wish I'd planted fruit trees when we moved here. There's not much space now!

I've really come to cadge some sympathy - the slugs have totally destroyed my small crop of lettuce and spring onions. They were in pots so I've tipped the compost into the compost bin and am wondering about sowing some lettuce on windowsills, as that seems to be the only safe place. However, there's a huge crop of blackberries on its way, which will keep me very busy (unless the slugs discover them but I've never seen slug damage there).

Cheery_Daff

Much sympathy about your marauding slug fiends CherryFudge 😕 I confess I have been glad I chose this year not to grow any veg - everyone else's tales of slug damage have been dire! I've lost a few little flowers in pots but mostly the stuff that's survived this long in my garden is strong enough to withstand a slug or 70. Quite demoralising though!

I've been out this morning doing a bit of garden pottering 😊 I'm trying to use this thread to keep in mind that it's ok to just do 15 mins here and there rather than having to allocate a whole day 😊 Pleased to report water butt is working nicely (although it's barely rained since I fitted it, of course 🙄😂) and plants on patio are doing well, including the lobelia I planted between the stones the other day 😊

This morning I've been weeding the bed I can see from the patio, which was a right mess. It's not even meant to be a 'bed' as such, just a raised area with gravel (not my idea, it was here when we got here). It's got a couple of roses in, and I'm going to dig them out this year - they never flower, just throw out massive long 8 foot tendrils with GIANT spikes on which make it really hard to weed round them, which means the whole thing gets ignored. 

I'm cutting everything right back, and will eventually get some rockery plants in there I think 😊

redofromstart

Completely agree on the 15 minutes per day thing. I often start with that intention and carry on, but 15 minutes at the self seeding weeds saves a lot of time in the future.

distracted by 'diy fly' today but the grass got cut and a few more weeds have been removed. The roses we planted over the dry stone wall a few months back have settled in well and are flowering. They do match and are what we bought them as - not always the case!

redofromstart

Much sympathy on the slugs @Cherryfudge, if I'm lucky we will have tomatoes and leeks in any bulk from my plantings. Everything else has been the odd few.