Apples, onions and a toad in a hole

I’ve been wondering again about getting a pear tree for the garden, to grow my tiny orchard. I already have three apples and a plum and there is a cherry in the front garden. The plums are all finished now but there are jars of whole plum jam to look forward to. The apples are looking great too.  The earliest, Sunset, has been dropping fruits for a few weeks and I picked the last four today. I hadn’t thought much about the name of these apples before but you can see from this picture why they are called ‘sunset’:

The red Falstaffs are also looking rather good. We’ve had a few but most of them are still on the tree. This is actually the oldest of my apple trees. I bought it about fifteen years ago and kept it in a pot in our old garden, transferring it to the ground when we moved here. It’s never grown very big but it produces a satisfying crop of beautiful red apples each year.

Then there is the Howgate Wonder, which I rave about every year. This year is a stunner with about thirty grapefruit sized fruits waiting for our enjoyment:

And the cherry. Well it produced about ten fruits this year but they all got pinched by passing birds or other wildlife. I don’t mind. It’s very beautiful in spring and in autumn:

I’m still wondering about a pear to add to this little collection.

Meanwhile, down at the allotment, I sowed next year’s onions:

They don’t look very exciting like that but it’s all about the delayed gratification and the joy of home grown onions next year. I’ve never bothered much with onions before as I thought they were rather boring and that shop bought onions would be fine. But the allotment onions this year have been amazing, both in size and taste.

Maybe it’s because we ate them without storing them for too long. I’m not sure I’ll be able to buy a shop onion again.

It was a lovely sunny day at the allotment, improved even more by the wildlife:

A frog  and a toad in the compost bin and bees on the phacelia.  I also saw geese flying overhead, a mouse in the compost bin and a fox loping past the plot.