Monday, August 18, 2014

Variety

The garden seems to have taken a bit of a battering this Summer with the high winds, torrential downpours, thunder, lightning and the occasional hail storm but despite the weather the garden has now reached a turning point sliding into autumn as many of the plants start to bare fruit.

The two apple trees we have are situated in Bunnyopolis so every morning three happy rabbits come skittling out to look for windfalls. Once found they then have a bit of a competition to see who can eat the most so we have taken to removing the windfalls before hand and deviding them up equally before handing them back to our eager and hungry bunnies. It's either that or watch Iona scoff the lot!

There are two types of apple to help with the pollination and both are providing impressive fruit with incredible sweetness. In the garden though it's strange varieties of anything that we like to grow. We have normal stuff too like pencil beans and mini sweet corn but the oddest varieties are kept for the green house.

This year we have ten varieties of tomatoes starting with this wonderful one, the black tomato. A bite of this is a cross between a citrus fruit tang and a sweet after taste, certainly different and unique enough to give tomatoes a completely new taste. They don't go completely black though, just a very dark red / brown colour, still strange to see hanging like a bunch of grapes.

My favourite at the moment is the striped tomatoes with their lovely marbling pattern that changes to red and orange as they ripen. Again the taste is quite different from shop bought ones and we like nothing more than a few of these straight from the vine popped into a salad.

So a bit of a reflective morning before I start work, the change in the garden and the dwindling light at night reminds me that Autumn is close and although I like Autumn I can't help feeling that we haven't really had our Summer yet. September as usual is our busiest period at Impossimal HQ, it would just be nice to have a little bit more sun before it all kicks off again.

 

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