Apples and Strawberries

I picked a bowl of strawberries yesterday. The smell of the strawberries as I was picking them was divine. This is one thing that people who grow their own fruit and veggies understand. So ripe and so fresh there is nothing to compare. You would never get this quality from any supermarket.

It is a really good year for fruit. I think the long, hard Winter ripened fruit buds on fruit bushes and trees. Look at all these apples on the end of one branch. If left like this, I would end up with a large number of really small apples.

A difficult job to rub off most of these little apples but in order to get much bigger apples they must be thinned.

So I thinned out each bunch to just one or two apples. I chose the best one on the branch and discarded the rest.

A strange phenomenon in my greenhouse as I look at these tomatoes developing in the greenhouse. This variety is Pink Berkeley Tie Dye, an American beefsteak variety sent to me by Dan on his Urban Veggie Garden. It looks as if 3 tomatoes are developing from this one flower. It also looks like they are all joined together! Siamese triplets! I wonder what will develop?

Finally, I managed to get most of my courgettes and squashes into the ground. I have Black Beauty and Defender courgettes. This year for a change I am trying to grow them through black plastic. These are just compost bags split open. I hope this will warm up the soil a bit more and keep some of the weeds at bay. Fingers crossed.