Brr!..but beautiful!

A leaf hammock for some of our best beneficial insects in the orchard. Aphids are one of the biggest pests in orchards. One ladybird can eat up to 60 aphids a day! Or up to 5000 in their lifetime. That's a lot of help. At the moment, they are hibernating and having a well deserved rest.

Well, Strawberries have the cutest true leaves I have ever seen!!! 🍓 #strawberries #strawberry #strawberryseedlings #gariguette #strawberrygariguette #fraise #fraisegariguette #maradesbois #strawberrymaradesbois #fraisemaradesbois #gyostrawberries #gyofruit #growyourownfruit

It does make me laugh that the Kiwis are absolutely fine every single day. Then the first proper frost makes it say "nope" and every leaf comes off. Some plants have proper personalities...or maybe I've been around them for too long! 😄 Anyway, the kiwis are harvested, that is now all the fruit in!

Hello, I'm on the hunt for the Golden Harvey apple. Any ideas? Full story linked below. #goldenharvey #goldenharveyapple #scionswap #heritageapples #heritagefruit #fruitsearch #variety #cultivar #apple #malusdomestica www.instagram.com/p/DRErWiOiMH...

Medlars are now harvested. Let the bletting commence. After grading the tray on the left is unbletted and the fruit is still hard and has that lovely golden colour still. The tray on the right are bletted so they are a darker brown and squashy.

A few days in the life of some of our apples. These will come back to Le Manoir as apple brandy in 5 years time. A big shout out to Capreolus distillery who we have worked with for a few years now. I love seeing the outcome of so much work over the growing year.

It's not over yet!

New favourite! 😄

It doesn't look appetising I grant you, but look at the colour of the tickled pink apple pulp before pressing. 🍎 I didn't take a picture of the juice but you can imagine how red that was. 🍷

Probably the best smelling trailer in the world....ever! The Quince harvest is in. We have Champion and Portugal and it's about 220kg! Red falstaff and Granny smith apples are there too. Hiding underneath we have Christmas Pearmain, Orleans reinette and Chivers delight.

This Bramley has watercore. The flesh goes translucent and is very sweet and watery...not what you usually associate with a Bramley! We wouldn't generally want this in the UK but in places such as Japan, they market this as special. Particularly with their Fuji apples.

The Quince are absolutely stunning this year, a bit small but stunning nonetheless! A few splits but so far so good! As with everything else they're early this year and will be ready in a few days!

This week I had the pleasure of visiting Coton orchard @BonkersBusway and doing a talk for Coton garden club on growing fruit trees organically and working with nature. I can't possibly fit what I want to say in a smaller post. www.instagram.com/p/DOi8nJHiEK...

Some of our heritage fruit varieties. I love picking over these trees and seeing all the colours and differences. It's a happy picking bucket!

Varieties you can see... 🍎 Tickled pink (yes, they're a little under ripe but that's how the chefs want them.) 🍏 Blenheim orange 🍐 Beurre hardy 🍐 Gorham 🍎 Santana

Next up. Katy, the first pick of Red Windsor and Keswick codlin. That subtle pink is the most colour I've seen on the Keswick codlin.

Precoce de Trevoux is our first pear, much earlier than the others. Look at the size of this one, not bad for such a short growing season. It's from France and goes back to 1862. I think the one in my hand has to be the finest one I have grown!

The colours of the 2025 harvest are continuing with Discovery and Scrumptious. It hurts the eyeballs!! It's almost a shame to pick them as the trees look so bare now. This year these apple varieties are too sweet for my tastes, the flavours are incredible though!

Devonshire Quarrenden is our next apple variety to go into the pastry kitchen. This box is ungraded but once graded the best apples will go into the hotel rooms and breakfast buffet.

Just like that...it's harvest time again. Three weeks early due to the warm dry spring. I wonder how the rest of the season will go. This is George Cave and he's very prolific this year! In apple terms he is a youngster and was bred in 1923 and put to market in 1945.

Attending the Raymond Blanc Gardening school today were our Redcurrants, Blackberries, Blackcurrants, Loganberry, Blueberries, Strawberries, Raspberries and Figs. Plus some very lovely guests!!

I'm very excited to see sandy muddy "doors" covering these canes. It was all leaf coverings last year. I wonder what they are? Any guesses? The theory definitely works though, we have guests for the second year running.

The #ladybirds found their own bug hotels! It's usually #earwigs I find doing this in such numbers.

If you squint your eyes, aphids are quite cute really...just not in huge numbers on our trees and plants! 🤔🪲 #aphid #greenfly #roseaphid #macro #closeup #entomology #pest #insectcloseup #britishwildlife #wildlife #wildlifephoto

Last weekends orchard dining. 🍎🍏🍐🙂

My take on this unusual spring. The website is currently going through an overhaul so bare with if there's any issues at all. Have you got a similar story to us? thegroundedorchardist.co.uk/2025/07/02/m...

So we have sunburn on susceptible varieties already! 😔 Our susceptible varieties are Rosette, Red Devil and Discovery. Thankfully most of our 153 varieties are fine.

I just took delivery of the new apple "rainbow" from @frankpmatthews You can see the leaves are starting to get their variegation which is unusual on an apple, the fruit and bark are stripey and all the one year growth has very red stripes too.

The Quince are looking amazing...picture perfect in fact. There are lots and they are naturally perfectly spaced out. That puts the pressure on a bit as they are VERY thirsty trees and the weather is not looking like we are getting rain.

Taming the apple and pear espaliers. I quite like how where I've been snakes off into the background. Pruning these now keeps the shape, allows air and light into the tree, takes out unwanted growth and knocks back that energy into the tree.

A great day yesterday visiting Capreolous Distilleries new Quince orchard and stunning meadow! It's wonderful to see orchards going in....rather than coming out! I'm really looking forward to watching this grow and I've never seen an orchard of just quince before. Exciting stuff!! 🙂

The start of the "June drop". A welcome sight where the tree naturally sheds some of its fruit. The ones that drop are usually small, poorly pollinated or damaged in some way.

I'm absolutely amazed! I have found one apple with scab so far....just one. There's also no obvious signs of primary infection on the leaves either. I have never known an orchard with no scab. It must be down to having so little rain. This is an unsprayed orchard too.

Look at our little soft fruitlets! 😊🥰 🍇Blackcurrants 🫐Blueberries 🍇Blackberries 🍇Raspberries 🍅Redcurrants 🍓Experimental climbing strawberries 🍈And Gooseberries. A bit of artistic licence with the emojis there! .

In keeping with plenty of aphids this year there are more Rosy leaf curling aphid numbers then I have seen before. Tell tale signs are the curled leaves on apple trees but even more helpful is the red on the leaves! If you open up the curled leaves you can see the aphids inside.

In less exposed areas of the orchard, we have help! 🐞 🪲

Ugh, when the aphids get to the trees long before you do. That's another years rest for the Damsons then. (a bit of positivity there!) It was a bit of a shock as the leaf quality over all the other trees is fantastic this year!

🎊 Happy Birthday to us! Today The Orchard Project celebrates its 16th birthday. Founded in 2009 as the London Orchard Project we remain the only national charity dedicated solely to creating, maintaining and celebrating community orchards. #CommunityOrchards #GrowYourOwn #CommunityGardening

Well I've never seen that before. A floating strand of woolly aphids. I left them out of curiosity and they're a little stuck anyway. Thank you Mrs Spider. 🙂

Apples are so diverse, here's 20 apple blossom pics of our 153 varieties of apple. Masses of blossom, no major spring frosts, a lot of sun and barely any wind, meaning all pollinators are out and pollination is not a problem at all this year.

The apple blossom weevil wiped out a third of our crop last year before the season had even really begun. Thankfully there isn't much this year.

Happy Easter from our Easter pear in the heritage section. This is Pysanka and originates from the Ukraine, 1950's. We call it Humbug in the UK due to its stripes. A warm summer will give an orange hue. Even the one year whippy growth is stripey. Sadly, the blossom is not.

Twenty blooms of our thirty pear varieties. All with very subtle differences. Ornamentally beautiful and a bloom for every garden I would say.

Tiny, very hungry caterpillars taken off our Quince!

Now for something similar but a little bit different. It's very exciting but I grant you, there isn't much to see yet. However, in this bed we have Redcurrant 'Rovada', Gooseberry 'Mucurines' and Gooseberry ' Captivator'.

With apple #blossom season just around the corner (in our neck of the woods at least) now seems like a good time to reprise my article from a couple of years back, 'Lifecycle of an Apple, From Bud to Blossom to Fruit'. The story of a single apple, in 50+ photos. orchardnotes.com/2023/03/28/l...

Pine ladybirds are already helping with the pest control. Here they are, happily chomping away at the woolly aphid on this crab apple. Highlighting what we are trying to achieve in the orchard. A desire to not spray anything and work alongside nature.

Orchard pruned! It's absolutely beautiful! Bring on the blossom. (and no frost or apple blossom weevil please!)

Precoce de trevoux is winning the pear race. It was the colours that got me, like fruit salad sweets!