Our Fruit Garden – Berries, apple, pear, peach Miniature trees in June.

18th Jun 2024

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We moved into our house two years ago and all we brought with us was 2 blueberry bushes and a thornless blackberry bush and obviously our furniture and belongings!

If you haven’t seen our garden yet, see how it came from nothing to flourishing in my story here – If you Build it, they will come

We now have a 6 x miniature trees and a lot more berry bushes!

This year you’ll be hearing a lot about our Fruit Garden. Last year we added a Loganberry to our fruit collection and trained it along a fence. We are hoping it will produce some tasty berries in the summer.

Loganberry

A Loganberry is a cross between a raspberry and a blackberry. It seems to be a very vigorous grower, reaching the span of a 8 foot fence last summer. (No berries in the first year).

As a family, we love berries. I’ve not tasted a Loganberry so I can’t wait to taste some berries on it, it will be it’s second year.

Raspberries from plug plants

Last year, a new addition to the fruit garden were 6 Raspberries ‘Glen Carron’ from plug plants. They have started growing leaves already in March and they look healthy. They have also been supported by a wire between two posts system. The soil they are growing in is Clay with added multi purpose compost.

The flowers and fruit have started growing in June. They may need another year’s growth first before we get a huge harvest from them.

Raspberry ‘Yummy’

We bought a potted Raspberry plant last June 2023 called ‘Yummy’, it is compact variety with smaller fruits which fits in a pot.

We potted it onto a bigger pot this year and it has put on loads of new leaves however again the berry harvest is small.

Apricot and Peach miniature trees in pots

I planted the apricot and peach minutes bare root trees in pots last year in January. They spent a bit of time in the unheated greenhouse between October and March and then in March they got to go outside on our sunny patio against the wall of our house to shelter against the wind.

Peach miniature tree in a pot

The Peach trees, got Peach Curl last July which is where the leaves get diseased. These leaves have to be quickly removed and destroyed so the disease doesn’t spread totally the other leaves. Luckily we caught it in time. The peach went back into the unheated greenhouse in late October before the frosts.

This year the Peach and Apricot tree have been out since March. They both have been re-potted into bigger pots with fresh compost and they have started producing blossom.

The Apricot is quite fragile and I don’t think it likes our windy garden, it has flowered but hasn’t produced any apricots yet. I think I’ll need to move it to a better suited place in the garden.

Blueberries

We have Blueberries varieties:

Blue Gold,
Chandler,
Duke.

Our 2 blueberry bushes are in pots and have produced a great crop of blueberries of which one plant the berries are going purple already. We love harvesting the blueberries as a family.

Miniature Apples Trees

We have a few Miniature Apple trees:

Apple – Empire,
Apple – Golden Delicious,
Apple – Lobo and
Pear – Clapps Favourite.

They were planted 2 years ago as bare root trees in January.

It’s the first year we have had apples!

Thornless Blackberry

Blackberry trained on wire up the fence and across the shed

You can’t have apples and not have a BlackBerry bush especially if you love crumble.

Our thornless Blackberry ‘Loch Ness’ is now 3 years old and it has sent out a massive long vines this year, so we had to suspend it on wire across the shed structure.

The flowers were an amazing display, loved by insects and all types of bees and now the berries are forming.