Wednesday 27 January 2016

Soft Fruits.



We are quite short on soft fruits in the garden. I have a good row of tayberries, a large red currant bush, and some newly planted black currants.

Above shows part of a neighbour's long line of soft fruit bushes. He seems to specialise in exotic hybridised fruits, amongst which are huge yellow 'blackberries', orange ones, giant red ones, and all sorts of other varieties that I've not seen before.

Being a frugal chap, I've been taking my early morning walks with my secateurs in my pocket, and discreetly taking a few cuttings as I walk by (all gardeners do this). They are now all planted, and I await to see which will take, and what varieties they will become.

I particularly like growing soft fruits as they are not only delicious fresh, but also freeze extremely well.  

I'll let you know the results in a year's time.



47 comments:

  1. I have GOT to buy a house this year so we can begin to plant fruit. I dream of soft fruits as well as peach, plum and fig trees. I like your idea of sneaking cuttings. Actually, most folks I know that love gardening are happy to share, no stealth required!

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    1. Fruit growing can be very frustrating, but when it goes right it's wonderful.

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  2. My dad takes sneaky cuttings He was even chased outcomes somone's garden once For this act of pensioner rebellion my brother is very proud! x

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    1. Oops meant 'out of' not outcomes. Damn predictive text!

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    2. I half-inch all my cuttings when no-one's about. It makes it all much more fun (and sneaky).

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  3. Oh, the frustration of waiting to see if the cuttings take - and the immense pleasure of the first fruits !

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    1. All the currant cuttings will take; they're easy. It's the blackberry type ones that might prove tricky.... only time will tell. They may have been grafted, in which case cuttings may revert to something less interesting. We'll see.

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  4. 'All gardener's do that'?......Moi?......As if!

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    1. I can see your crossed fingers behind your back!

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  5. We have the Autumn raspberries Cro which are now fantastic. After a couple of failed attempts of planting them in the Autumn the we then ignored the perceived wisdom and planted the last lot in the Spring instead. If you cut them down to the ground in the early part of the year they produce fruit in the autumn but if you cut them down to 12" they produce summer berries. We now have so many runners that we are digging them up and passing them onto friends with allotments etc.They produced masses of fruit for us last year.
    Arilx

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    1. Our Tayberries are a bit like that, they produce so many runners (ours ran to us from next door), that we supply everyone.

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  6. I agree about them freezing well Cro and I have a freezer full to prove it. Strawberries are, I think, the exception.

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    1. Quite right; strawberries have to be eaten fresh.

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    2. Years ago in the days of huge chest freezers, and bulk buy freezer shops, one of the things we all said was how nice it would be to eat strawberries out of season. We all picked them, froze them, and then complained at how tasteless and unappetising they were when we'd defrosted them!

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  7. My Mothers garden was full of plants from purloined cuttings, even from a certain large house in West Norfolk.

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    1. My mother was the same... she was always discreetly taking tiny cuttings as she went. Very embarrassing.

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  8. I wanted to grow some blueberries but apparently they're very fussy about their soil conditions. I guess black currants might be something to try though.

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    1. Blackcurrants grow well here; I've not considered Blueberries, I believe they're difficult.

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    2. Blue berries are yuk when you can have beautiful blackcurrants Sue. Blackcurrants are yummy, especially if you cook them with raspberries or tayberries or red currants.

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    3. I think Blackcurrants taste much better than Blueberries.

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    4. So do we. We were only talking about the subject last night for some reason.

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    5. We're renting a house that has several giant blueberry bushes that thrived for years with no care at all. Maybe they needed lots of special attention when they were first planted, though. I love blueberry muffins and pancakes. And blueberry jam is nice, too.

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    6. You must be in the States or Canada, Jennifer. The Brits don't seem to appreciate blueberries, perhaps because they have never eaten wild ones.

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    7. Yes, I live in South Carolina. And when I was a kid my family used to pick the most delicious wild blueberries that grew on the banks of the Pee Dee river. I'm very fond of blueberries.

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  9. Several times we have tried growing raspberries, but have had no luck possibly because once planted we tend to forget about them. But blackberries! We grow them in profusion, plenty of runners, plenty of fruit...shame that they are the 'wild' sort and not the cultivated!

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    1. My Tayberries grow like crazy; maybe you should plant those. They're just like Raspberries, but almost twice the size.

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    2. Are tayberries 'pippy'?

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  10. since my mother died what i remember most about her is her great love for gardening ,her garden really misses her

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  11. I see that you cannot wait till spring. Neither can I.

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  12. Domestic blueberries are large lovely looking and practically tasteless. Wild blueberries are a whole 'nother animal. You haven't lived until you've had warm wild blueberry pie with lattice topping. All you need is a tiny piece. The flavour is so intense.

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    1. The only ones available here come in small transparent plastic boxes, at a huge price. They're not that good, but people buy them because they're told that they're a Super Food.

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    2. Wild blueberries have taste, blueberries in plastic containers have none.

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  13. Very good. I had a raspberry bush once and the small amount of fruit produced was always worth the wait. Then it died. Around here it's rather difficult to grow soft fruit, but it's a nice challenge to have.

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    1. Fresh Raspberries are gorgeous. Those first fruits every year are really worth waiting for.

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    2. Raspberries are my favourite, and I'd love to grow them here. They are very expensive in the supermarkets, so I tend to buy mainly frozen ones, which are better value. Funnily enough most of them come from France !

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    3. I should have said that fresh ones are very expensive.

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  14. We have quite a few soft fruit varieties, blueberries do quite well here in Oregon and freeze nice. I planted goose berries last fall and I am hoping to taste them this summer.

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    1. My people had a whole area devoted to Gooseberries. There must have been 20 different varieties. When I sold their house, the idiot who bought it just destroyed the whole lot. What a fool.

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  15. That made me laugh with your snippers. I bought some thornless blackberries in a catalog once and they came with a warning that any transplanting (even the plant spreading itself) was against the law. They can come do DNA tests as they have the patent on the plants. Crazy.

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    1. The biggest plants in the photo are big thornless blackberries.... sounds like I might be in trouble!

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  16. I've been looking in my fruit cage in despair, it's grown completely out of hand, blackcurrants have seeded themselves all over the place, raspberries spread into an impenetrable mass and it's weedy underfoot. As soon as warm weather comes the bindweed will rear it's ugly head and twine round everything. I really need to clear the whole lot and replant, but oh, what a job!

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    1. We tend to neglect our soft fruit bushes, don't we. I do try to keep the grass down a bit under my Tayberries, but that's about it.

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  17. I've really enjoyed this post and all the comments. All of it fed my dreams to have a garden. I had to ask Mr Google about what tayberries look like, and now I do think I might have tasted them.

    Thank you all for keeping my garden dreams alive.

    Best wishes.

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    1. Tayberries are just BIG raspberries. I love them. Most of mine are eaten in situ, straight off the bushes.

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  18. I like mulberries, seems like no one eats them anymore. When I was small my brother and I had silkworms that we used to feed on mulberry leaves. We were allowed to climb a neighbour's tree and the neighbour wouId joke (I didn't know it was a joke then) that I was not allowed to eat the fruit and when asked if I had I would reply, promising I hadn't touched a single fruit, saying this while my fingers, tongue and mouth were stained with its juice! Greetings Maria x

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    1. I don't think I've ever eaten a Mulberry. I have friends who have trees, but I've not seen any fruit on them.

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