Ripening orchard fruit

Please don’t make me walk all the way down to the orchard to check the fruit varieties I’m posting here.

I’m basting in my own juices from the last foray out into the heat. And that was just to empty the contents of the compost into the bin. (Australian translation, I had to take out the chook bucket.)

I’m hiding indoors freezing berries for future cordials and jams. There is no way I’m going anywhere near a stove or an oven right now.

I’m even starting to think that living off chick peas, tomatoes, capers, basil and mint with a vinaigrette is a perfectly balanced meal. Twice a day.

But I did go down to the orchard earlier to inspect Nicolas’s work from earlier in the week. He dragged all the branches out of the forest which I need to chip to make mulch.

He strimmed all around the stables area to make room for these branches first.

I don’t fancy reaching into a pile of branches and coming out covered in nettle stings.

All I need to do now is get the zip and vim and any other three letter words you care to think of and get out the chipping machine and turn all these waste products from the forest into a mighty mulch.

Oh yes. The fruit.  Apples are ripening nicely. The nectarines look no riper than they did two weeks ago. I wonder if they really are fruit. Right now they are marbles.

And these Cevennnes apple varieties I planted two years ago are now bearing fruit. See, sometimes clichés really are appropriate.

Cool beer and a nice lie down. That’s my favourite sentence this week.