What's going on in your garden (2018-2022)?

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rascal said:
Butter beans are up X 6, along with corn X 24 our kids will take some of these. Tomato plants planted in greenhouse. Chillies also in greenhouse .

Russ
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Once again I am envious! We have returned to full-on Autumn, frosts and all. Tomatoes, chillies, aubergines and runner beans all on their last legs. Huge crop of apples which we are giving away by the bag full. The only upside is that the game season has started.

Russ, I tried to find your post about your lemon trees. We did some research on them and apparently a hybrid between lemon and mandarin trees, and that the fruit is a little sweeter than regular lemons? The trees are available in the UK and can be grown in sunny, sheltered, frost free spots, but they are quite expensive - around £100 for a 1.5m tree that may be near to bearing fruit. My wife is very tempted, but I think £100 buys a lot of lemons!
 
epicuric said:
Once again I am envious! We have returned to full-on Autumn, frosts and all. Tomatoes, chillies, aubergines and runner beans all on their last legs. Huge crop of apples which we are giving away by the bag full. The only upside is that the game season has started.

Russ, I tried to find your post about your lemon trees. We did some research on them and apparently a hybrid between lemon and mandarin trees, and that the fruit is a little sweeter than regular lemons? The trees are available in the UK and can be grown in sunny, sheltered, frost free spots, but they are quite expensive - around £100 for a 1.5m tree that may be near to bearing fruit. My wife is very tempted, but I think £100 buys a lot of lemons!
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Related to your giving away apples, I had a peach tree in my yard at the old house. All the peaches came ripe in a 2 to 3 week period in June -- sometimes 300 peaches! We ate as much as we could, and froze some, and gave away most of them. Both my wife and I gave them to our favorite customers. They went nuts over them! They were REALLY good.

CD
 
Last summer I planted some saffron Crocuses. I didn't get much of a harvest last year, but this year they've come through rather well:

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This morning's harvest (and there are some which haven't flowered yet):

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Not sure how much I have.....definitely less than 1g.....my scales aren't sensitive enough to weigh it :happy:

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epicuric said:
Once again I am envious! We have returned to full-on Autumn, frosts and all. Tomatoes, chillies, aubergines and runner beans all on their last legs. Huge crop of apples which we are giving away by the bag full. The only upside is that the game season has started.

Russ, I tried to find your post about your lemon trees. We did some research on them and apparently a hybrid between lemon and mandarin trees, and that the fruit is a little sweeter than regular lemons? The trees are available in the UK and can be grown in sunny, sheltered, frost free spots, but they are quite expensive - around £100 for a 1.5m tree that may be near to bearing fruit. My wife is very tempted, but I think £100 buys a lot of lemons!
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Morning glory posted some info on lemons. I'm pretty sure we only paid about $20 for our lemon tree. The kaffir lime was $35 and wife said I hope it's worth it. She couldn't believe the fruit is not edible. Only the zest and leaves are usable. My wife wraps citrus trees in winter with breathable mesh. Our lemon trees fruit at different times, I don't know what that is about??. Make the investment, we get 100s every year. I have about 200 frozen cubes of lemon juice that will last til next year.

Russ
 
epicuric said:
Russ, I tried to find your post about your lemon trees. We did some research on them and apparently a hybrid between lemon and mandarin trees, and that the fruit is a little sweeter than regular lemons? The trees are available in the UK and can be grown in sunny, sheltered, frost free spots, but they are quite expensive - around £100 for a 1.5m tree that may be near to bearing fruit. My wife is very tempted, but I think £100 buys a lot of lemons!
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That sounds very much like our lemon tree as well. It is sweeter than standard lemons. To the point of being able to drink the lemon juice without sweetening it! But it is a very heavy cropper. Seriously so. Even over the course of just 1 season we save on the cost of lemons over buying a tree. Ours is only about 1.5m high, no higher than the fence that protects it from the rain and gales and the worst winter throws at it.
But it is also roughly 2m in diameter or more. It is a prolific fruiter. When I use lemon juice, I use it by the ½ pint to make my almond nut feta cheese and I barely dent what is on the tree. Fruit is often taken by the ants as well, so I guess it is very sweet when it's over ripe. They will eat a while through the rind and then eat the fruit from the inside out. Quite fascinating to watch. I can remove several kilos of fruit at a time and all that happens is it flowers roughly twice a year (drought does strange things to plants) and crops heavier than before. I'm going to try to get another, perhaps a standard lime... only trouble is where to plant it. The 2 fig trees we have a vast, despite me halving their diameter and height over winter. Apples, nectarines, peach, apricot and pears are all around with it being a farm, though we rarely get anything except apricots because of the wild birds and the drought. Anything vaguely ripe gets eaten by them and the descend in vast numbers eating through an entire crop in a couple of hours whilst you're sleeping or out doing the weekly shop!
 
SatNavSaysStraightOn said:
That sounds very much like our lemon tree as well. It is sweeter than standard lemons. To the point of being able to drink the lemon juice without sweetening it! But it is a very heavy cropper. Seriously so. Even over the course of just 1 season we save on the cost of lemons over buying a tree. Ours is only about 1.5m high, no higher than the fence that protects it from the rain and gales and the worst winter throws at it.
But it is also roughly 2m in diameter or more. It is a prolific fruiter. When I use lemon juice, I use it by the ½ pint to make my almond nut feta cheese and I barely dent what is on the tree. Fruit is often taken by the ants as well, so I guess it is very sweet when it's over ripe. They will eat a while through the rind and then eat the fruit from the inside out. Quite fascinating to watch. I can remove several kilos of fruit at a time and all that happens is it flowers roughly twice a year (drought does strange things to plants) and crops heavier than before. I'm going to try to get another, perhaps a standard lime... only trouble is where to plant it. The 2 fig trees we have a vast, despite me halving their diameter and height over winter. Apples, nectarines, peach, apricot and pears are all around with it being a farm, though we rarely get anything except apricots because of the wild birds and the drought. Anything vaguely ripe gets eaten by them and the descend in vast numbers eating through an entire crop in a couple of hours whilst you're sleeping or out doing the weekly shop!
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I don't know about the rest of the world, but lemon trees usually produce fruit twice a year around the eastern Med. Orange trees only produce one crop per year and I can't remember how many limes do.
 
epicuric said:
I don't know about the rest of the world, but lemon trees usually produce fruit twice a year around the eastern Med. Orange trees only produce one crop per year and I can't remember how many limes do.
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I know everything was out. Totally confused. Back in February when the drought broke, my Apple trees, apricots, pears, roses, lavender, olive trees, anything that usually flowered once in spring flowered again. Nothing set fruit mind you because it was autumn (except for my lemon tree which is still covered in lemons) and the frosts got to everything (except the roses) .

It wasn't just my trees either. In Canberra, many gardeners were commenting on the same thing. Apples and pears, apricots, nectarines, Sharon fruit, all sorts flowering a second time. Even the flowering cherry trees lining the streets flowered again. The walkways were covered in cherry tree petals in March. It was beautiful. Native plants such as the bottlebrush and wattle (an acacia) also flowered again.
 
Spot my dibber
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