Pots of Fruit

The Black Flies and the Cherry Tree

Last year our cherry tree took a serious beating from a colony of ants that decided to farm black fly on its branches.  They seemed to appear out of the blue and there were suddenly thousands of black flies clinging to the under side of the cherry leaves.  I'm not sure if it's the ants or the flies that then make the leaves go curly so as to hide them from predators, but it might explain why I didn't spot them immediately.   Either way, the black flies were sucking the cherry dry .  I didn't  know how to get rid of them apart from picking off the leaves but the ants just brought more back, all the while collecting the sweet stuff that the flies exude from their rear ends.  Eventually I put the  whole tree into a basin odf water for about two weeks and that seemed to do the trick.  However the cherry tree was now seriously deformed.  It's surprising how much damage some tiny little flies can do to a tree.  But it was just a couple of years old and it was in a pot that was definitely too small.  All the effected branches ended up staying really stumpy and barely grew at all.

The cherry tree is now seriously lopsided but I hope that over time I can sort it out with some clever pruning. You can see from the picture that ther is one nice and healthy branch on the left sticking straight on and a nice healthy stem going upwards, but all the other branches are very small.  Overall the cherry didn't grow very much last year :(

Over the winter I re-potted the cherry into a nice big pot with plenty of manure and I've been watching it carefully ever since.  But guess what, those clever ants managed to hide their farm again and a few days ago Chris suddenly spotted them, running up and down the branches and then we uncovered a few pockets of black flies.  Luckily there weren't quite as many as last time and also it is much earlier in the season so we knew that if we took action quickly the cherry would probably be fine. 

So we made another trusty moat.  There are two large trays of water with some bricks put into them.  The cherry stands on the bricks and is not in contact with the sides of the trays containing the water.  The idea is that the ants either aren't able to or are not inclined to cross the water,although I'm half expecting to come out one morning only to see a few hundred of them hanging onto each other for dear life as the try to make a live bridge. 

So for the moment we're hoping that the ants' nest isn't within the pot itself and that the cherry will thrive from now on.

There is at l east one fruit developing and I'll be doing my utmost to make sure that we actually get to taste our first ever home grow cherry.....mmmmmmmm

Fig - Limb Blight

Sounds awful doesn't it?  Well I think our fig got it as I watched two of the stems go blackish and withered before deciding to cut them off.  I wasn't sure what it was for ages but I looked it up on the Texas Plant Disease Handbook and what they describe as limb blight sounds like what we've got.  It says this..."The fungus enters at a spot along the main or secondary limbs, and all leaves die beyond that point. The fungus enters at a dead fruiting spore or at some other injured spot. All dead twigs and limbs should be removed by pruning so that they will not serve as infection sites."

On the left you can see the limb of the fig going black at the top (this was in the start of April just as it was waking up after winter).  It's in close up on the right and you can see that the bud at the top never developed it just stayed a pasty shade of greeny brown. 

You can see the general shape of our little fig below with its one healthy branch, on the right, and two branches that are doing very little in the way of growing, on the left.  These two branches are the oldest ones so that may have something to do with why they have become infected.  One of the branches had started to grow some lovely new leaves and a little fig. But unfortunately it took a sudden turn for the worse and just started to die.  At this stage I decided that action needed to be taken and I cut the whole branch off.  I found it quite hard to actually cut the whole thing off (psychologically) but I knew it had to be done.  The fungus should not be allowed to spread to the other branch which has 8 lovely figs on it.  Also I read that if  you prune a fig branch low to the ground that it encourages growth from the base of the plant.  This means you get a multi stemmed bush eventually which is one good way of maintaining a fig in a containers.  In other words, lots of stems grow up from the ground rather that just one or two.  We'll see if this actually happens.  It's a little hard to see where I cut the branch in the photo below but you'll get the idea. I didn't have the heart to cut it right to the ground so I left about 4 inches intact. 

At the moment the fig looks relatively healthy but overall it seems like a complete mystery to me.  I'm still confused about the fruiting, but over the next few years I will just have to watch it carefully and try and get my head around it.  If anyone out there has any experience of growing figs please pass on any tips that you have.  For now I'm just crossing my fingers and hoping that the eight remaining figs don't drop off.  They did last year :(

 

Pinching off the Physalis

It's time to start pinching off the physalis in our garden.  We are just starting to harden them off after their winter in the green house and one of them is already beginning to get a bit too spindly.  They seem to be very vigorous plants and grow like the clappers, wanting to grow extremely tall very quickly.  The fruits start to appear at the tips of the shoots so if you want more fruit you must encourage the plant to make more shoots rather than tall shoots.  The plant on the left is still fairly small and stubby so I'll leave that one alone but another one we have is at just about the right phase to start pinching....as far as I know. This bush is actually starting to produce flowers so I felt very guilty picking one off but I know that in the long run there will be many many more.  Pinching off basically means that you cut off the growing tip of a shoot. This encourages more side shoots to develop. Once the new side shoots grow long enough you can repeat the same procedure with them and so one main shoot with one tip turns into  possibly  20 side shoots with obviously 20 tips.  So the amount of fruit that can be had is greatly increased presuming all other factors go well. 

To cut off the tip you can simply pinch it off with your nails as the physalis is very soft and you can make a clean cut very easily. 

Just to see exactly how effective this is I have left one of the stalks "unpinched" in order to see how it develops in comparison to the others and I'll let you know how it gets on in a month or two.

In the mean time I'd love to get some feedback on whether or not the photos that I use in these posts are clear enough.  Can you understand clearly what I am trying to get at or would more photos be useful?  Are they big enough etc?  This will help me to improve the clarity of posts.  So please leave a comment or email me at the link provided on the left. 

Early Strawberries

Well, I've read that you can bring on earlier strawberries by moving them into the green house in early spring.  So this year I thought I'd try it out.  We only have a very small green house but it gets lots of use and make a big difference to anything that is frost tender. In order to get a good idea of how much difference this actually makes I chose to take in a pair of strawberries that were the same age and in the same size pots as two other strawberries that would be left to take their chances outside.

I only thought of doing this in mid March so they won't be as early as they could have been but I can have another go next year.  As far as I know strawberries like to be nice and cold during the winter so don't take them in too early.  I'm not too sure on when is the earliest you can bring them in however.  I'll do more trials next year :)

At the start of April I took some photos to compare the two sets of strawberries.  The photo on the top is of the ones in the greenhouse and you can see a huge difference already.  The strawberries that are outside have no real signs of waking up after the winter yet while the ones in the green house have loads of new leaves.

And yesterday I took some more photos .. You can see that there are loads of flowers on the ones in the greenhouse and non visible on the ones outside. In fact one of the inside strawberries has the beginnings of fruit on it...yay. The outside pair have a couple of sprigs with flower buds developing but it's clear that they are about 3 weeks behind the other ones.  If I had brought the indoor pair in sooner  they you would probably get strawberries at least a month earlier.  By the way this is an unheated greenhouse as the winters here are fairly mild.  Another experiment that I am doing is to see how much difference liquid fertilizer like comfrey and manure make to the number of fruits.  With each pair I am fertilizing one and not the other and I can see that both the fertilized ones are a little ahead of the non fertilized one. I like doing these kinds of experiments so that I can see for myself how effective our methods are.  Also we can learn how to improve on our methods each year.  This year I'm just doing some basic trials but next year I'll get a little bit more detailed.  Basically I'm looking for simple and natural ways of increasing our yield.  I'm not going to look for the absolute maximum possible, just a little more.

 

Swap Your Plants

I was thinking about what I wrote in my post on experimenting and I inspired myself to simply begin a project that I have been mulling over in my head for a couple of years now.  I plan to build a walled garden,  as part of a small holding that we are somehow going to get our hands on.  On the outside we will get another two horses to keep our first one company and also to provide all the fertiliser needs of the garden.  There will be courses on liberty training and other natural ways of looking after horses.  There might be a meadow if we're extra lucky and have space and on the inside there will be lots of vegetables, many many types of fruit and lots of scented flowers and herbs. 

The garden will be used for education, for fun, for dreaming and more.  It will be built entirely from old discarded items and will be run on completely sustainable principles.  It will use money only if all other ways of achieving something have been exhausted and so will rely on people's imagination all the way.  As the idea develops in my head I will write more about it but for now I'm going to start collecting plants.  I'm looking for fruiting plants at the moment mostly, but also perennial flowers and herbs.  Anything that you have that you can either take a cutting of, gather seeds from or donate the whole plant will find a home...soon.  If you would like to do a swap then I can give you a physalis plant, or a melissa plant.  I'm working on get some cuttings from other plants that I have so watch this space. 

I want to gather the plants now so they have a little chance to grow and be ready for planting when the time comes.  There are many other things that I will be throwing out requests for as the whole idea takes off and if you happen to have any ideas that you think I would like then please email me(link on left).
I've no idea where this will go and how it will actually work but I'm really excited to be simply starting.  Stand by for more information...

Physalis Seedlings

In behind this mesh lies maybe a hundred physalis seeds, maybe more.  When the little fruit pods of the physalis dry out they leave a skeletal lantern behind and all the seeds stay safely tucked away inside.  It's just as well because we left them lying around in the green house over the winter, not paying them much attention until one day Chris decided to open up a lantern and plant some seeds. He simply scattered them in a little tray of potting compost and covered them with some more potting compost.  A few weeks later one little seedling started to  stretch up out of the soil. In the next couple of days lots more followed suit and suddenly there were about 40 seedlings in the tray.  Now there seems to be about 100!  I'm hoping to pot all of these on and see if I can swap them for other plants with some people.  If you live in Ireland and want some physalis plants them drop me an email and you can come and collect some.  I live in Limerick City and would love to swap any kind of fruiting plant for some of these.  I've a feeling they won't fruit in their first year but they will definitely do well in their second year if put into a large pot and kept indoors during the winter.  We're still learning about them and it would be great if other people experimented with them in different types of pots, in polytunnels, on balconies or whatever your growing conditions are.   If anyone from overseas would like to swap some seeds then  please get in touch.   I'm dying to experiment with all sorts of fruit but it can be hard to know where to get either the seeds or the  mature plants.    I'm sure there are some  interesting fruits out there that I've never even heard of and that might grow well in our temperate climate.   In fact now that I've thought of it a seed exchange would be a great idea...mmmm.  I'll have to give that some thought.   

Back to the physalis seedlings.  Some of the m got attack by slugs and were completely killed so I scattered some seaweed meal around the little plants.  This salty granular seaweed  deters slugs  as long as it stays dry.  They won't venture on to it a s the salt would harm them  and so they turn back.  And the trace minerals in the seaweed  are good for most plants as far as I can tell. I'll be keepin g them under close scrutiny  for the next few weeks  to make sure a good number of them make it to the next stage....being planted into little pots.

Willing to Experiment?

When I was in school I hated problem solving in maths because I never knew where to start.  By the time I got to university to study physics it became an even bigger problem and after a very long road I finally figured the whole thing out.  You've just got to start.  There seems to be a huge difference between staring at a blank page and looking at a couple of scribbles.  Once you've put something down, well, you might as well put something else down that is linked to the first scribble to keep it company and suddenly you're going somewhere.  You might have to back track or even start again, but now you're on to something.  The mind has picked a direction and that makes it easier to focus.  As a maths teacher I have been constantly amazed at how many other people are too nervous to simply start and to just try out a solution.  It seems to be asumed that you shouldn't start unless you are sure you are going to succeed.  But what is very very clear is that you definitely won't succeed if you don't start, but that you might succeed if you do. 

When originally thinking about growing fruit in pots I was constantly thinking that there were so many restrictions and that things surely would not work. Surely the experts would say, "this isn't suitable, don't be silly you can't grow grapes in Ireland in a little pot."  Out of desperation and no other choice I tried anyway, but still with some lingering doubts and little voices saying, "this is silly, you need acres and acres of ground for this".  But the other day it dawned on me that even though conditions are not perfect for our fruit and even though I know only a tiny amount of what I should know there is no reason for me not to enjoy having a go anyway. 

It struck me that a lot of people may be slow to grow a fruit tree or bush just because they don't know anything about them. But we should throw caution to the wind and just have a go, put a blackcurrant in a pot, and see what happens.  Watch it grow and develop and learn a little something along the way.  Give it a little water and we might be surprised that it produces some fruit all by itself.  A year later, what have we lost?  Nothing.  What have we gained?  A lot more than just fruit.  And even if the worst came to the worst and the bush died....awe...what have we really lost?  Maybe €5.  What have we gained?  A pot, some soil, a stick for the fire or the runner beans, some fresh air and maybe enough knowledge to have a better go next year.

When Chris, my boyfriend, decided to plant some seeds from some cape gooseberries that we bought from a supermarket something was telling me that it surely wouldn't work.  All the way along something was telling him to just have a go.  And lo' and behold they actually worked.   We got fruit, ate most of it and saved some for seeds.  Now I am watching the second generation of seeds coming up in the greenhouse.  I'm still amazed.

From now I'm determined to just try things out even if they sound ridiculous.  I'm going to take the top off a pine apple and plant it in a pot and all I know for sure is that I'll enjoy telling everyone all about it.  I'd guess that it will at least grow leaves and if it decides to grow a full blown fruit, well that would be great too, but I will thank it anyway for teaching me some interesting lessons if it doesn't.  I don't think it is possible to fail at growing fruit if we at least give it a shot.  It just depends on how you define failure and success.  After three years I still haven't gotton a single fruit off our redcurrant bush but I've discovered that I love propagating new plants and that I might even like to open a fruit nursery sometime.  That sounds like a positive outcome to me. 

So I'm sending out a challenge.  Will you grow something that you would normally think just wouldn't work?  Something that you think would melt your brain if you read all about it and tried to extract the right propagation methods, something that you think wouldn't work in a pot, in your climate or your shadey position?  Just have a go and see what happens.  Have a laugh if it all goes pear shaped, have a huge smile if you actually get even one fruit. I'd love to hear your stories of the silly things you've tried and I'll make a page specially for them here on this blog.  If you have photos or simply words send them into me.  We don't have to be experts, we just have to be willing to have a go and enjoy the experiments.  Who knows we might actually discover something very useful along the way....and it might even be about fruit. 

The Flowers of our Fruit

These are flowers from our cherry tree.  If they turn into fruit I think we'll have to have a party :)

I've never tasted a jostaberry so it will be interesting to see what this cross between a gooseberry and and blackcurrant will do.

These tiny flowers are coming up on the blackcurrant cutting.  The mother bush doesn't even have leaves yet for some reason.

Raspberry flowers buds seem to be in abundance this year...yum.

The blueberry flowers seem to be the most understated of all.  In general I have noticed how low key the flowers from our fruit are....I wonder why.

Our little alpine strawberry, holding out after a shower.