2007 is a Good year for fruit

[Neil Bromhall]

2007 has been a good year for fruit.
This Cox's Orange pippin (which happens to come from my fiends garden who discovered white truffle) was delicious.
Blackberries were also in abundance as were my late fruiting raspberries.

I gather that this year wil be good for the UK wine growers

[Paul Narramore]

Neil

My late father used to buy a big bag of Cox's, his favourite apple, wrap each one in tissue paper and place in a wooden crate which went in the pantry (Do you remember those? We also had a scullery too!) We started to eat the apples at Christmas by which time the apples had acquired a magical juicier flavour.:)

I guess the Cox is also my favourite although the Spartan is pretty good. In our last garden we'd inherited an apple someone identified as a Laxton's Epicure. It was a very poor tree and fruited every second year. The tree also suffered from canker and a gardener unsure of pruning apple trees.

Golden Delicious - spit!

[sue1002]

This year has definitely been a good one for fruit, we had lots of fat, juicy blueberries this year and we are inundated with Golden Delicious apples. We picked the apples off the tree last week as the birds had starting pecking at all the good ones. We are storing the unblemished ones in a cool room, and trying to think of what to do with the ones that are not quite perfect. So far some have been used in pies and crumbles, and I'm going to make some apple sauce.

I remember the pantry Paul, when I was a child ours was a short way up the staircase and quite often one of my brothers and myself used to creep down in the middle of the night to help ourselves.

[Paul Narramore]

Sue

When I ran down Golden Delicious, I was talking about those tasteless foreign imports. I've never tried 'home grown', are they much better? The 'Egremont Russet' is another I tried years ago. Very tasty and with a rough almost sandpapery skin.

Our small pantry was painted in whitewash and the coolest room in the house. The small window had no glass but instead a sheet of perforated zinc so there was always fresh air in there. There was a marble slab for the cheese - we had no fridge then - shelves with quart bottles of homemade ginger beer. Who makes that now? My father used to work at a local bakery and brought back boxes of broken biscuits and cakes. Yes, as kids, my brother and used to slip in there for things to eat.

[Miranda]

We had a lot of fruit on our Bramley Seedling but unfortunately the apples had bitter pit. I'm not sure how this happened as the tree has been well fed and watered. As far as other fruiting goes, all the berry plants have masses of fruit on them - they look beautiful but won't last long once the birds get started - and the nut trees over in the woods have produced an enormous amount.

We also had a pantry and it was painted white too. It was always cool in there. I remember, on a high shelf, there was a transparent box with a red lid where our sweeties were kept. One night, when I was about seven, my parents went to a Mensa meeting about children's health and the following weekend they had a bonfire and threw the box onto it. That was the end of sweet stuff for us, except for what we could get with our pocket money. Naturally, we were outraged, and became obsessed with sugary things, but at least we never got fat.

I remember my dad buying his mother her first fridge in 1971. Before then, things were kept in the cellar. It's interesting to think back on how our grandparents lived - in my maternal grandparent's house, they had a scullery and there was no sink in the kitchen. Can you imagine that now, a kitchen with no sink?

[sue1002]

The home grown Golden Delicious do taste much better than shop bought ones, they are also a different colour, they have a red tinge to them unlike the dingy yellow ones you see in the shops.

I believe our pantry was white too with the concrete slab which the milk etc stood on, back in the 70's we didn't have a fridge either. My mum used to put the frozen peas on it for them to keep colder for longer, which came in handy one day when I got stung on the corner of my eye by a wasp.