Autumn Harvest. Did Those Fruit Trees From The Supermarket Grow? ~ Slugs & Snails & Yorchard Tales.

It’s late September and I really should be back at school. Thankfully I’ve written two hilariously brilliant children’s books which will keep me in milk and honey so I will never have to go back to school again. If, for some unimaginable reason, my beautifully illustrated children’s books, what I wrote and drawed don’t pay up or off, I’ll teach online and still manage not to go back to school ever again. I hate the smell of boiled cabbage. 

It’s been a funny old year in the yorchard (yard orchard). The four fruit trees I planted with such dramatic satisfaction in the early Spring gave an introverted performance. After all the storming in and out of websites, poached eggs and compost humping, I felt a bit sorry for the baldy creatures, standing there outside all naked and bare and exposed. They did take a long time to settle in and it was weeks before a few buds appeared. Probably shy, or maybe just cold.

Cherry tree leaf buds - the first of the fruit trees to sprout in Spring.

The first to flash a bit of foliage was the cherry tree and it continued to be the most verdant grower. She is made of stout, sturdy stock and I am very found of her, she has a reliable and loyal character (George).

Cherry tree leaves attract me like no other fruit leaves.

Then came the pear with a few meagre leaves sprouting from the tips of the branches that eventually formed a really enchanting display, it’s a very pretty leaf the pear leaf, quite seductive. Along with his physical charms he seems a bit needy in nature and not someone who could cope in a crisis, but after a lie down doubled in height and fluffed out on his own (Paul).

First year growth from the beautiful pear tree.

Thirdly, the apple tree, I had put it in the corner thinking it was what it wanted but I don’t think it liked it, it is the hottest nook in the yard and possibly too shady for it, so I’ll relocate it before next Spring. Seems a bit touchy and aloof, not a giver (John).

Apple tree - first year growth is fancy on the outside, empty on the inside

Coming in late and last was the plum tree. It took so long to grow a bud I was convinced it was dead and on the day I had marked as it’s departure I saw a tiny little flash of green and realised it’s heart was beating away in the background all the time. Thrilling. Not much of a looker (Ringo).

Plum tree growing for it.

Freshly planted fruit trees at the beginning of Spring.

The Fab Four fruit trees with their first year’s growth at the end of Autumn. John, Ringo, Paul & George.

Although their growth was slow and blossomless, and obviously fruitless, the conditions out there in the yarden this year were awful. The season started out with endless dark days, thick cloud and relentless rain, then shocking periods of scorching sun, followed by more torrential rain, then extreme heat with blistering sun again. 

As a result of the brutal weather I had very few flowers on anything, even from the most robust established plants, however the most damage was caused by a biblical plague of huge demonic snails who decimated everything, including the bloody cardboard plant labels. Freaks.

I could hear the beasts chewing and they shredded three trees, including a magnolia, a flamingo willow and a cherished cytisus, along with countless hardy perennials and the bee’s favourite bed - the bronze dahlia. All dead. 

Two sticks of rhubarb and a dead dahlia - no pudding for me or the bees.

They were everywhere, in the walls, in the flowers, all over the ground, on the kitchen windowpanes. I’d come down in the morning and see the sleazy slimy undercarriage of twenty well fed snails shitting my plants out onto the glass before my eyes. They grew too big to kill, crushing something the size of a rat with a face you could pick out on an identity parade was too harrowing, so I took to the drink.

Snail ale.

I went out into the yarden one evening and they had gone too far. They had attacked my beloved mini pfishish peaches that I had been incubating and adoring since they emerged out of the blossom. The slimy bastards had peeled every single peach on the tree and left the skinned carcasses hanging there. I loved that wee tree from the moment I laid eyes on it. I stood and watched the fruit fatten. I read care articles about it in the night. I told strangers in the street I had peaches growing. The blighters just gnawed the skins off the fruits the like Hannibal Lecter. Shits. 

The mini peach tree with mini peaches.

I flew down to Tesco in a snail-rage to buy cheap cans of larger like a loser, burst through the sliding doors, stomped straight towards the shelf of shame and just as I was about to snatch the Crucial Brew for the sad and lonely I heard the terrifying words in a soft voice: “Hi Betty!” Oh no. I had to of course explain I was not the kind of woman who lives alone with her cat and buys one can of cheap larger on a Friday night to the new friend I had met that week, no, I was going to drown slugs in it. Anyway, must dash. Ciao. 

The beer trap worked better than I could have hoped for really. I had cut a letter box slit just wide enough for them to get their massive shells through, but not climb out again when pissed. The vision the next morning was PTSD inducing. The bottles were rammed with bloated bodies and gaping gobs. I’d witnessed similar scenes before when I lived in Newcastle, but I still wasn’t prepared for the horror, nor did I have a plan to dispose of the bodies. It was too vile, I just left them to ferment in the heat of their own greed. They’re still there now.

Escargot en Crucial Brew, or boiled dead drunk snail soup in a beer trap.

I kept setting more beer traps, but it was a losing battle, they kept coming in their thousands. I was outnumbered, defeated and eventually left them to it. All of the Fab Four fruit trees doubled in size with sporadic growth spurts and were only slightly snailed, the soft fruits surprisingly not attacked at all - the heat and the caterpillars got to the red and gold raspberries.

Not a bad raspberry crop for the first year - one each.

The caterpillars can have the Gold Raspberries this year, bumper crop for me next year.

The gooseberries and blueberry grew some healthy leaves and remained intact, the tayberry got vine-weevilled and the strawberry produced a bumper early crop then rotted in the rain for the rest of the year. The jury is still out on the rhubarb. 

Red Gooseberry shrub in full leaf.

Can’t wait to find out what plague and pestilence next year will bring. Will there be blossom? Will there be pie? I’m expecting big juicy things.

Bumper trailing strawberry crop.

Home grown peach stone. will race the snails next year.