A bowl of cherries

Well, yes.

But this bowl was the easiest fruit I have picked this month.

Not off a tree on my daily walk.

Not up a ladder at the end of the orchard.

Not even plucked off the trees I plod past when I mow…

I grabbed every ripe cherry as I prepared to remove the broken tree and put it in the chipper.

We had the most tremendous 80km per hour stormy winds for a day and a half here on Friday and Saturday.

Really vicious wind.

I feared for the potager.

Especially the little redcurrant bushes I had only just planted. But I didn’t even think about this Noir de Meched tree in the orchard.

But down it came.

And I didn’t act fast enough. Naturally a few hours later I realised I could have done heaps of things. Like put it back up and tie it securely and hope it would ‘take’. Whip off those gorgeous branches and hastily graft it onto a wild cherry somewhere on the farm…

Oh, the garden things I could have done.

But no.

I decided that the tree is obviously in the wrong place if a storm can bring it down. We are having wilder and more ferocious storms every passing year.

So I will not replant. Even if this was the first year the little tree really bore fruit.

Well, I will. But something completely different. I think I’ll extend the hornbeam hedge.

This is doing marvellous work just around the curve in front of the house. It screens a rather unsightly rock face which collects weeds faster than I can collect cherries. And it is disguising somewhat the new extension.

Have a few shots of the progress. The roof is almost ready. They have to add extra OSB to keep out the pine Martens. OSB? Chipboard? Whatever it is in English, it is a useful barrier to protect one ceiling at least from the expanding pine marten colony.

We currently house at least five families across the roofs on the farm.

A surfeit, believe me. They make a mess. Worse than possums in Sydney.

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If I do plant a few dozen hornbeams in the autumn, I would be leaving a gap for the absurd olive tree of course.

I can’t believe that is still standing after the heavy snow storm last autumn.

We are way too high up a mountain for olives. Two trees remain.

So there you have it. Bit of a bugger to have lost the tree.

The cherries were delicious, by the way. But even I have reached peak cherry. It has been quite the season. We slide into jostaberry glut now.