Fruitful Spring

Spring has definitely sprung in the yard. Such a lovely time of year and especially exciting this year as I've been planting more fruit out over winter and giving existing fruit trees a bit of a prune back to help them keep their strength up.

The old damson trees (above) along our boundary are looking great after a good prune over winter. These are making such a beautiful backdrop right now to our first little area of forest garden.

The raspberry canes are also starting to produce little flower buds now. Those in the photo above are our summer raspberries, but we've also got hold of some autumn fruiting plants too. So long as I get round to planting these out, the two different types should give us a good spread of raspberries this year.

Some new fruit bushes that went out on the yard this winter include four lovely gooseberries, of which one is pictured flowering above. Such sweet little flowers when you look up close! We've also planted out three black currants (black currant cordial, mmm) and I have a number of red currants in pots that I'm hoping to get in the ground too.

It's been a good year for potting on strawberry runners. It's so worth the effort of doing this each year to increase your yield - home-grown strawberries picked and eaten while still warm from growing out in the sun really can't be beaten! I've got a few plants in the greenhouse for an early crop of the beauties and the rest are to form a delicious ground cover to go under some of my trees and bushes on the yard.

And finally, our new fruit trees are looking great. Mostly. One of the pear trees is flowering magnificently (photo above). The other is putting out some lovely leaves but doesn't seem quite up to flowers yet bless it - and this is despite being in a more sheltered spot! Perhaps it's got too used to the cozy lazy feel if its corner and is going through the molly coddled teenager phase where it can't quite muster up the energy get on with the serious business of working for its living! The plum, RIP, is looking very sad and I've not had it in me yet to dig it up. Cows. Ba****ds. The apple is looking very happy to be out of its little pot at last and is leafing up merrily.

Hooray for spring! I look forward to a lovely, fruitful year!