Today’s main job – Apple harvest now safe in the cellar, not bad for two trees which have never had more fertiliser than nature supplies…. :) Mostly the variety Aroma…
Category Archives: Fruit
Autumn in my forest garden
My forest garden continues to be super-productive, my udo is on its way back to the soil and is preparing for next year as are my three devil’s walking sticks, Aralia elata as well as Aralia racemosa and A. californica.
There are a lot of apples to start drying soon!
Waxing crescent moonglow salad
My lovely daughter Corylus avellana is home again and I made this salad for her with a tomato called Moonglow, grown in her old bedroom in the loft, so it had to be a moonglow salad :)
Perennialen II: Alvastien Telste
An album of pictures from my short Perennialen II visit with Eirik Lillebøe Wiken and Hege Iren Svendsen at and around Alvastien Telste in Hardanger. Impressive nature, good beer and fruit, good company and just relaxing this time! It poured with rain on the morning that we’d planned to look properly around the Forest Garden, so that will have to wait for next year! Watch this space for the announcement of the next Perennialen event at this wonderful place, now a Permaculture LAND centre, next summer!! Hope to see you there!
Prune plum harvest
Amazing how many plums you can get from one tree and this is only about 2/3 of the crop! Due to the lack of night here in May when they are flowering there is never a crop failure due to late frosts…so I can get this every year! The variety is called “Sviskeplomme” (literally prune plum…although they don’t look much like prunes when dried. All these are to be dried…so a bit of work de-stoning ahead of me!
Sour cherry harvest!!
My favourite dried fruit is sour cherry / surkirsebær. A good yield this year, untouched by the birds!
050916: Added a picture of the dried fruit…trying hard not to eat them all straight away…so delicious!
Lars Westergaard’s legendary Danish nursery!
Most people into permaculture in Scandinavia know of Lars Westergaard’s nursery in Denmark as one of the best sources of a range of hard to get (and unique, from Lars’ own selection work) fruit and nut trees. Lars has been working with production of organic plants for many years and commercially since 2009. It seems much longer! He specialises in walnuts, heartnuts, hazel, sweet chestnut, peach, mulberries, figs, haskaps and many more! I’ve been wanting to visit for some years and an opportunity finally arose after I’d given a couple of courses near Copenhagen in August 2016. It was a pity that Lars was “distracted” by several customers during our visit, so we didn’t have too much time to talk together…..but I was impressed by what I saw. Thanks to Aiah Noack for taking me…and looking forward to his plants becoming available in Norway soon :)
The nursery page is here: http://www.westergaards.dk
Homegrown watermelon berries
Streptopus amplexifolius is a shade loving woodland plant known, amongst others, as twistedstalk, wild cucumber and watermelon berry and has an extensive wild range including North America, Europe and East Asia. It has been used traditionally by Native Americans for its edible spring cucumber flavoured shoots and the delicious berries are now in season and I’ve been dining on them recently! I’m saving the seed as I eat! Beware that they can be laxative in large quantities, but it’s unlikely you will be able to grow that many in your forest garden!
060916: Added pictures of Streptopus lanceolatus from Eastern North America and a comparison of the berries with amplexifolius!
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Olive climbing Hablitzia
A 1m pot grown olive that is now in full flower together with a clambering Hablitzia also in flower…
Knud Poulsen’s gardens
Søren Holt suggested I should visit Knud Poulsen on my latest visit to Denmark. He’d visited Knud through meeting him through the Danish seed savers Frøsamlerne.dk.
Knud has a traditional parsellhage (small hut with garden) and two allotments, one of which belongs to his wife! A wonderful mix of unusual fruit and breeding of ornamentals! Here are a few pictures!
