Sunday, 12 April 2020

Lockdown Day 20 - Spring Blossom in the Allotment

It is perhaps fitting that on Easter Sunday I put a few photos on the blog of the blossom in the allotment on the apple, pear and damson trees. After being dormant for the winter months, first the buds appear and then when the weather is warm enough, the trees burst into blossom and the bees get busy!

This is the Chivers Delight minarette apple tree. This produces quite small but tasty yellow skinned apples although does tend to get overshadowed a bit by the hazelnut tree to the rear of it.
This is the damson tree in bloom. Last year the quantity of damsons from this tree was overwhelming, perhaps over 300 of them, in fact we still have two bags in the freezer! We don't expect quite as many this year, most other years it has produced about 60-80 damsons.

This is the Falstaff apple tree, trained along the back fence of the allotment. These are quite long storing apples, although this is generally the first tree to produce ripe fruit, followed by the Chivers Delight then the Gala (not pictured), the latter of which can still have unripe apples on well into November, and a few still pickable in December.


This is the Comice pear tree. All our apple, pear and the damson tree are minarette sized trees as there's a restriction of height in the allotment rules. If we ever left the allotment we'd have to uproot them and take them elsewhere!

The Comice pears are very much a dessert apple and one to be eaten pretty quickly after picking, whereas the Conference pear tree next to it has longer storing pears.

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