Low-hanging fruit

Here are our fruit trees in situ... They're all several years old already so we should have a harvest within the next two years.

• A blackboy peach. This is what J remembers eating stewed with ice cream when he stayed at his grandmother’s house right down south in Invercargill.

• A sultan plum – juicy and big, perfect for eating from the tree and also for bottling. They should be right for wine too. Sadly there was no Victoria plum available so I couldn’t recreate a corner of my parents’ garden.

• An apple with three different varieties grafted on – Splendour, Royal Gala (the best NZ eating apple) and Braeburn, not too bad for cooking. Hopefully we’ll work out how to make or where to source a cider press soon so that we can make juice and cider from the excess fruit. Otherwise we’ll be eating a lot of crumble.

• And finally a Meyer lemon which already had four or five fruit on it. Just waiting for them to ripen now... We've planted it next to our lime tree as the start of our citrus grove.