Apples and peaches and pears, oh my.

Allow me to start talking about fruit trees, as they are what I've been thinking a fair bit about lately.  In our garden are five feijoa trees, three pears, one of which is double grafted, two apricots, one cherry, a fig, two plums, a double-grafted peach, two apples (a single variety and a triple-grafted one), a crab-apple, a lemon, a kaffir lime, two elder(flower/berries) and I think that's everything.  And a tamarillo and a quince.

What is this grafting business, you say?  It's where one tree is grown on the "root stock" of another - for example, a plum tree is melded (is that a word?) onto the roots and young trunk of a quince.  Quinces seem to be used a lot for this, perhaps they grow very strong roots - or not (see below). 

Many of the trees were planted in the first year, and fingers crossed, will show the wait has been worth it and explode with fruit.  The cherry's had a couple of promising years, and one of the plums gave us 11 fruit. 

The reason why I've been thinking about them all, though, is that I think I'm a bad fruit grower.  I seem to think that I can put a tree in the ground and walk away, or worse, play musical trees with it until it's in place.  Amongst my probable failures:

1. the quince tree is definitely showing wear and tear, it's covered in moss and hasn't grown in the slightest for a very long time.  But it still has bendy branches, which tells me there's life in that thar tree.  I think perhaps it needs a good staking, all that wobbling in the wind is not letting it settle in place to grow big and strong.  
2. one of the pears decided to run around topless, so I cut off its head and bodice so it might grow nice and bushy, the way it ought to 
3. the feijoas have been chewed on and the flowers are not turning into fruit
4. the apples never really ripened 
5. the peach got curly leaf and that transferred to the plum
6. the apricots I think may just be in the wrong city and turf.  I have them in rather moist soil and they don't like moist soil.  They like a good freeze over winter - which they got last year alright with all that snow, but no fruit. 
7. the crab apple turns out to be "ornamental" (read: useless in the kitchen), and
8. the fig produces lots of fruit, but just as it's getting cold outside so they don't ripen.

All because, apart from a six monthly dousing in compost tea of some sort, they really are quite neglected.  Oo, and a half yearly addition of fertiliser.  There, I said it.  I am not an organic fruit grower - yet.  I still use synthetic feeder.  I started doing that when the lemon got really sad looking, and then it came right again.  According to my favourite famous gardener, who I shall tell you about another time, I really shouldn't need to as manure, compost, sheep pellets and other good things for the soil should really be doing all the good stuff for me instead.  I am making it my mission to change, starting with what's I am about to read up on: organic spray.  Once I know more, I'll tell you all about it. 

Preparing the soil

The rain's pouring down outside, so it seems a fitting time to get this blog underway. What to talk about.  What do you want to know?  I'm a thirty-something homeowner with three cats, a nice husband, and fourteen hens that we share with the neighbours.  The garden, which this blog will largely revolve around, is four and a half years old.  It was all lawn when we moved in and now there is no lawn.  I'll be reinstating some in the Spring, but for now the main lawn is a large vegetable patch.  

My mother's family is full of gardeners - Pop (Mum's grandfather) who used to grow victory gardens so dense that Nan couldn't hang the washing on the line, Nanna and Poppa (Mum's parents), who converted two acres of farmland into a beautiful rhododendron and magnolia garden, and Mum who developed the third acre when she took on the house and worked the garden into something that would turn the Queen of England green.

It wasn't until we bought our house that I took to gardening, and like a maniac.  I thought about it all the time, read about it every night and spent all weekend, every weekend gardening. Now I'm going to try my hand at writing about it, and perhaps a little of what happens with the food that comes out of it.  

Here goes.