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Ripening apples

The ‘Ellison’s Orange’ espalier apple is ripening - and it’s not just the F&F gardeners who are impressed.

This is always an exciting time of year. Our beautiful ‘Ellison’s Orange’ apple tree is bearing fruit, even though we very, very naughtily dug it up from the allotment in June and raced it across town to our new garden and and scattered its rootball with mycorrhizal fungi and watered it feverishly and crossed our fingers that it would survive. Do not try this at home, folks. Fortunately, it did survive, and has a good number of apples on it for a young tree.

ellison's orange apples

ellison's orange apples
ellison's orange apples
ellison's orange apples

Indeed, it had many more apples on it, but I pulled them off so the poor plant wouldn’t exhaust itself as this is only its second proper year of fruiting. The immature fruits went to a good home: this espalier borders the hen garden, and the chickens were thrilled with their little treats.

apples in hen garden apples in hen garden

You can see here that they’re still pretty keen for any falling fruits. So recently when I was in a National Trust orchard, I found they were giving away windfalls to anyone who fancied them.

apples

Sometimes I use decent windfalls to make slow-roasted apple slices, but these were a bit far gone, and besides, there were four squawking birds back home who I couldn’t quite forget. So they’ve been having a daily treat of windfalls for the past week or so.

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