Allotments 4 All

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I think it's time for me to highlight "Ashmeads Kernel" an apple with the perfect balance between sweet & sharp but also both crisp and juicy.

A lot of experts think it is the best apple in the world & I agree
with them. I also agree with the increasing number of US enthusiasts who grow it because flavour is more important than "not invented here". If I recall it is a Gloucestershire apple that achieved fame in the mid 1800s.

It's becoming easier to find in nurseries since the RHS gave it an Award of Garden Merit for being trouble-free with an amazing flavour - (and sometimes a hint of pear).

It's appearance really should be of no interest whatsoever - the 7 most important things about any apple  should be the flavour, the flavour, the flavour, crispness, juicyness, reasonable cropping (if there are no fruit at all there's no flavour), & no need to mollycoddle or spray.

(Unlike Cox's Orange Pippin which needs a spray regime that most amateurs wouldn't be allowed to use).

I will say this about Its appearance - it's nothing special,  even nondescript. This can be an advantage. Nobody's going to say "I know that one - get me a bag right now while nobody's looking".

Sadly, the ring-necked cockatoos (which ought to be wrung) can smell the flavour as they fly by.

My tree's fruit started to show a slight blush in October, so I thought the next time it stops raining I'll bring my ladder & pick those. 3 days later I went back and the whole upper hemisphere of ripe fruit had disappeared completely. So more than 50% of the crop was gone with only a few leaves, a few twigs and empty branches left in that hemisphere, with the occasional dangling halves or quarters of apples that looked like they'd been hit with an axe.

I set to picking everything left whether it was ripe or not, and ended up with about 15kg of ripe & 20kg of unripe (netting the tree would have been impossible - even if I could find steel mesh hard enough to beat those beaks).

I finished the job just before the flock returned at sunset. I've never heard such screaming & chatter - they were obviously furious to lose 'their' favourite resource.

It was deafening for about 15 minutes before they shot away into the dusk, screaming as they went - the weird thing was that there were plenty of other ripe apples I could see on other plots, but they chose to ignore them - maybe they knew of another Asmeads' to the NE. 

I had to take a lot of kit back home that day so I only took about 5kg of apples and left the rest hanging in 2 big tarp-type bags inside the polytunnel, with whole newspapers on top held down with planks.

The next day I could see the ripe bag had been raided, the covers lifted and a top layer of a dozen fruit left shredded in various states of mad axe attack.

That's it until next year.

Of course there is a dark side to the trouble I've taken to bring this story to you - PLEASE for your own sake and mine put an Ashmeads in your plot or garden. It really is the best, (unless you prefer supermarket apple pie to fresh apples) and the more people that have trees the more likely you'll get a good crop even if you do have parakeets.

The wring-their-necks parakeets have to eat all year, so there won't be any more of them because of a week or so of more Ashmeads.

Please help everyone to get a bigger crop for themselves by collectively growing a bigger crop than the damned pests can cope with.

Especially if you are in London - Please.

Cheers.

PS. Don't assume that keeping apples improves the flavour - it doesn't. If the apples are ripe eat those first - to paraphrase a music expression - "it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that Zing".

Ashmeads have been a noted keeper for hundreds of years because their crisp sharpness fades more gradually than most - but eventually like all apples they end up bland. We don't need to store apples any more, because fresh apples are available all year round. In spring I eagerly wait for the NZ Braeburns to arrive in perfect condition - with zing.

But Beware - the growers in UK & France cottoned on to this years ago - they are lurking in the background, and release their stored Braeburns as soon as the NZ ones appear - and despite high tech storage they really ain't got that ZING!

Supermarkets know they will make more profit if they hide where these apples came from - and by blurring the distinction they confuse the learning process that makes customers more picky.

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I am looking for diagrams of historical vegetable
garden plans and layouts from books,magazine, pamphlets. 
if know a source of such diagram please post it, the website
you found it or post the bibliographic source where is can be found.
I already have copies of the ones in the WW2 dig for victory leaflets
so please don't post them. my goal is to find ones that I have no seen yet.
so far I collected over 200+ from 5 countries  between 1880-2024. 
                                                      hope you can help.

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I've been buying raspberry canes recently to go into a raised bed in my plot. You know the ones where you get several canes in a pot then split them out and plant separately. I've bought them before
I rang a local garden centre a few days ago and asked if they had "raspberry canes" and they knew straight away what I meant and said they were getting them in stock in a few days. So I went over yesterday and sure they were in stock but very few summer fruiting ones so I got some autumn fruiting ones . So I just bought Autumn fruiting ones.
Today I rang up another large garden centre a bit further away and asked the same question to get Summer fruiting varieties and they said they were in stock. Took the bus down there and couldn't see them. Asked one of the assistants but he hadn't a clue really what I was talking about. Eventually got to talk to a manager and he took me to a small section of shrub fruit with a few pots containing single raspberry plants in containers at nearly £10 a plant. Certainly not what I was expecting. I asked about raspberry canes sold in the way I'm used to and he said we don't stock them as they don't last. He said he was a professional horticulturalist and  when the single plants grow canes they call them raspberry canes and that was what they thought I was after! Needless to say I was rather miffed.
Never heard of this confusion in terminology before. If you look at a website like say Dobies they specifically distinguish between raspberry canes as I know them and raspberry plants in containers. The latter being of course much more expensive per plant.
Anyone come across this before?

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I may have mentioned this before, but at my place tzatziki on battered fritters of baby squash or baby pumpkins are (massively) preferred to the relatively tasteless courgette version - no matter how fresh, no matter what landrace/variety. In fact courgettes are worse for any and every purpose (except possibly disappearing into the background of a dish quickly). I do the same with aubergines, and they are always good - but only baby squash/pumpkins come close to that intensity of flavour.

I'd already decided to grow only one or two courgette plants this year - ideally I'd grow less - but the young ones are slightly nutty they are 2 or 3 weeks earlier.

They are even earlier in a polytunnel, but sadly, genuine self-fertile varieties are getting so hard to find that I seldom bother these days (and when I do I bury them in 10L pots so I can move them outside ASAP for a better crop (ie. re-bury or transplant).

However, this year I used my own saved seeds - and you've guessed it - they all came up as squash crosses...

So - OK - I get more babies and better tasting fritters.

But there's an extra angle now - I came back from holiday 3 or 4 weeks ago, (I've been too busy to post until now) and I was delighted to see that (for once) I didn't  have any huge, seedy, horribly tasteless, armour-plated marrows to blunt my axe on their way to the compost bin.

It's obvious now (I can be slow on the uptake).

While you're away the baby squash turn into delicious adolescent squash  - absolutely no waste at all this year. The longer you're away the bigger the squash & pumpkins get - they just get on with it - it's all good.

I'd recommend sowing some squash late, so they're making babies during your summer holiday - but I haven't tested it yet - and no Indian summer might mean no babies anyway.

The moral of this story is that 2 courgette plants and 6-10 squash (depending on their final size) is a win-win, and 10 squash and no courgettes is almost as good!

Cheers.