Wednesday 9 September 2009

Fruit and nuts

Although we do have a few trees actually in the ground in our garden the majority are currently living in pots. I, or other members of my family, have grown most of them from seed and they currently range from a one inch tall norway spruce to a two foot tall horse chestnut. There will, however, come a time when all these trees need a new home. Hopefully we shall own some land by then. Fingers crossed.

Most of the trees are native species, but I do have a number of others, the majority of which are fruit or nut trees.

These pear and apricot trees were grown from seed.





I do hope that they produce edible fruit, but the majority of fruit trees being grafted these days they probably won't taste anything like the fruit that they came from.

This damson was bought from a garden center (I haven't seen damsons in the shops for years and therefore couldn't grow one from seed). It produced a single fruit for the first time this year:



Ian's grandad gave us this grape:



Pretty much all the white mulberry seeds I bought from Nicky's Nursery germinated, but my black mulberries from the New Forest Otter and Owl Center have yet to germinate:



This is an almond I grew from a nut in one of those big multipacks of nuts that they sell in supermarkets at Christmas.



I also tried growing walnuts at the same time, but although they germinated they went mouldy before the seedling made it to the surface. Will have to try again this Christmas.

These varieties of walnut are more exotic and therefore bought as seedlings:





White walnut or butternut.



Heartnut.

I particularly like that the heartnut is supposed to readily split into two halves.

3 comments:

holdingmoments said...

A great selection of trees Helen. All the more special that you've grown them yourself from seed.
Hope you get your land :)

Graham Edwards said...

I've never heard of a heartnut.

At least we now know that the nuts you get in those huge packs are real.

Seriously it's lovely to see the progress.

Scriptor Senex said...

Love the damson! And so good to see how many of the trees are thriving.