A Fruity Glut, or is that a Fruit Glutton? April 9th 2013

I have been a bit neglectful of this blog of late. That is not because I haven't been doing anything but more that I am just repeating things I have already posted about.

We have so much fruit ripening at the moment it is hard to keep up with it.  All the peaches are picked and while a couple of kilo are still sitting in a bowl in the fridge, I have bottled, jammed, stewed, dried and eaten lots already. The Golden Queen variety that I grow is a clingstone which makes it more fiddly to stone them to do things with but the flavour is magnificent, much better than the early freestone peaches that I bought in early summer just to taste. When bottled or stewed, the taste takes me back to childhood when a special treat was a tin of cling peaches for dessert.  One casualty of the wet spring of 2012 was the nectarine tree which, despite several sprays of  fungicide at bud burst, was really badly affected by curly leaf. This meant the entire crop consisted of about 8 nectarines. Perhaps that was a good thing as what would I have done with more?

I seem to find ripe passionfruit on the ground every time I walk past the Nelly Kelly vine.  We are now onto our 3rd and 4th apple trees almost ripe while there is still a big box of the Cox’s Orange Pippen in the cheese fridge/mini coolroom.  And finally the raspberries are now onto their second crop for the year and I am picking every couple of days. What more is there to do but make a fruit salad of a mixture of everything that is ripe.

With the windfall apples I have been making juice and cider with the second hand juicer I bought recently . This replaces the one I have had for 30 years which although still working, is not the best design for large amounts of fruit. I am hoping that kiwi fruit juice is tasty as I see that as an easy fruit to juice when the huge crop starts to ripen in the couple of months.