The fruits of our labour 2016

We grow a lot of fruit on our plot. I guess you could say that the value of the fruit harvested more than covers our allotment rents. Having said that maybe it would be wrong to say that the fruit that we harvest saves us money. In truth we just would never buy the equivalent amount of fruit to that which we harvest so it would be more accurate to say that in growing our own fruit we eat more fruit than we otherwise would. 

The collage below shows just some of the fruit that we grow - I haven't included all the different varieties nor the fruit that didn't produce a crop this year - cherries, kiwi berries, figs and honeyberries. I haven't included the crops that although technically fruits we call vegetables or the fruits that we don't harvest such as medlars, cranberries and crab apples. Even so there is a surprising variety as I'd never considered the whole picture before.

This year's fruit harvest spans six months - that is if you count the rhubarb that technically isn't a fruit at all. 

Each year some fruits perform better than others so let's look at how our fruit has performed in 2016.

It hasn't been a good year for stone fruit.

Despite fruit setting we didn't harvest a single nectarine or cherry. The wood pigeons strip the leaves from the plot cherry every year. Next year we will make a concentrated effort to protect it earlier.

We harvested just one peach and two greengages. Both were a treat to eat but we hope for more next year,

The plum harvest was poor and about 25% of the fruits had been spoiled by plum moth larvae. Plums and greengages do tend to crop well every other year but why do they all chose the same year?

The star of stone fruit category is definitely the apricot that exceeded expectation.

Moving on to the hard fruit. Some of the varieties of apple are best guesses as they were harvested from our inherited apple hedge.

It's been a good year all round for hard fruit, although one apple - Fiesta is missing from the list having failed to produce a single fruit. Discovery was the most productive apple and Invincible was the top pear. We also had a larger proportion of large fruit in spite of our no thinning policy.

It was a bumper year for quince. There are even some fruit sill left on the tree as we just couldn't pick them all before the weather spoiled things.

On to the group that I am going to call the currant family. There are lots of unknown varieties here. The gooseberries mainly came from cuttings we were given and we inherited the red and white currants. When we bought the jostaberry it was just called a jostaberry as at that time I think there was only one type.

The redcurrants always seem to produce a good harvest. We only picked as much as we needed so the amount above could have been doubled.

The whitecurrant only produces very small currants so I am going to thin out the branches to see if that improves things.

Generally speaking I don't think the currant family have had a very impressive year.

Finally on to the berries.

We have been happy with our berry harvest. I posted a full review of our strawberries in an earlier post here. I don't intend to repeat myself, suffice is to say that we were more than happy with the harvest. The alpine strawberries were newly planted this year so I would expect a better harvest next year. After I had made the charts the alpine strawberries produced more fruit which I picked in November but there was no way that I was redoing the charts!

Our Glen Ample raspberry canes suddenly died and I dug up all the Joan J canes as the bed was infested with bindweed. Canes were split and replanted but will take at least until next year to recover. Fortunately Tulameen and All Gold did well. Glencoe never really produces a large harvest for us.

It was our best year for Japanese Wineberries - I posted about them here - and blueberries. The blueberries benefited from extra protection which meant we dared leave them on the bush to fully develop and ripen before picking them prematurely. The blackbirds were less impressed.

The Loch Ness blackberry is a prolific fruiter and we could have gone on picking berries for longer but we had more than enough and left the remaining berries for the birds.

You may have noticed that I haven't reported the rhubarb harvest. The reason is that we picked as much as we wanted but in effect this was only a small amount compared to that which was produced.

I wonder what sort of fruit harvest we will have in 2017. We are thinking of adding a few unusual new fruits, a black raspberry, a pink blueberry and a Chilean Guava. Has anyone any favourites that we should consider?

Copyright: Original post from Our Plot at Green Lane Allotments http://glallotments.blogspot.co.uk/ author S Garrett