Apples

As some of you will know from previous posts, Roche Fleurie is in a former meadow reverting to forest.  Most of the trees that have volunteered in that meadow are apple trees. These trees all come from seeds scattered by wild animals eating apples. They hybridize on their own, and all are edible. But most are too tart to be eaten raw, although the majority are good cooking apples. In fact, out of the lot some turn out to be quite tasty even raw. Here are a few pictures of some of these apples and what we use them for.

Unnamed apple variety

Garlic and Strawberries

You might wonder what these two have in common. In fact, nothing that I can see, except that I have spent the day working with both. First, I spent the morning planting garlic and then, in the afternoon, I made a new strawberry bed. Garlic is very easy to grow, so it is a mystery that, in winter, most of the garlic in stores comes from China. Besides, the garlic you grow yourself seems to keep much longer than the one you buy (perhaps because the one you buy is already relatively old when you get it).

Fresh Garlic Bulbs

Five Years in the Making

As I mentioned in a recent post, there are many "wild" apple trees around. When we started making the garden, one of these wild apple trees was growing in what was to be the vegetable garden. Instead of removing it, we decided to keep it as a rootstock and try to graft on it different varieties. Some of the grafts took and grew well, but we only had our first apples from the tree this year.

Yours for the Picking

The Bruce Peninsula in Ontario used to be an apple growing area. You can still see old, long-abandoned orchards and, on each side of secondary roads,  many volunteer apple trees. These have been planted by the numerous wild animals who feed on the apples, mostly the raccoons and the bears. These "wild" apples have self hybridized and produce fruits that often are not tasty or are woody. However, among the lot, are some delicious ones.

Blackcurrant Liqueur

Having had a bumper crop of blackcurrants this year, once we had used some, given some away and made all the jam we might want, I decided to make some crème de cassis liqueur. It is quite simple to make, and the result is surprisingly good.

Gooseberry Jam

Our gooseberries are not quite ripe but they are as big as they will get, and they have to be picked before the raccoons find them sweet enough. Besides, if you use them to make jam as I do, you get a tastier jam when the berries are rather tart.

Wild Strawberries

In our area, this has been an ideal strawberry year. South of us, I am told there was too much rain, and the berries tended to rot. Here, as you might have read in one of my previous posts, the garden produced a lot of strawberries, and it is not yet over. Inspired by reading about wild strawberries in other blogs, I thought I should check how our own in the field next to the house were doing. Just like we have of the cultivated ones, we seem to be having a bumper crop of wild strawberries.

Wild Strawberries

Strawberry Warfare

The strawberries were beginning to ripen, and the raccoons were keeping as close an eye on them as I was myself, checking them every night (as footprints indicated). In an attempt to fool them, I stretched a light nylon net over the strawberry plants, stapled it to pieces of lumber all around the bed. Then on top of the net, I stapled some "row cover", the fleece-like fabric especially made for gardens. The idea of the row cover was to hide the berries from sight. I reasoned that perhaps if they did not see them, they would forget about them. It has worked much better than I expected.