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| Apple blossom in spring |
I do love eating apples. My mother used to buy a big box of Cox's Orange Pippins in autumn and we could pick an apple from the box and eat it at any time. So I was delighted to find a Bramley apple tree in the middle of the garden when I moved in here.
Since then I have added two cordon apples against the right hand wall, a Fiesta (one of whose parents is a Cox's Orange Pippin), and a Pinova, produced in Germany in 1965. Both have medium-sized apples that end up nicely red, crisp and not too sweet.
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| Pinova apple cordon in September |
The cordons took a few years to settle in and have since produced a good crop of apples with no problems. The Bramley has always produced plenty of really heavy apples that bruise themselves when they tumble to the ground. But this year, most of the apples were occupied by grubs which had eaten their way out of the apple core, producing nasty black marks and lots of bruising. If an apple is damaged by any of these things, it is immediately open to getting a horrible fungus problem called brown rot, which makes the whole fruit go brown and ugh.
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| Less than perfect cooking apples on a bench |
Partly my fault, because I usually tie a sticky band round the trees to catch winter moth maggots and in summer hang up codling moth traps, attracting male moths and catching them on a sticky surface. The female moths can't then lay their maggots. This year, for some reason, I failed to do this and the result was some very imperfect apples. Fine for me, but hardly something I could share with friends.
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| Codling moth trap |
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| A healthy ripe Fiesta apple |
I love your smiling maggots ! gabriel
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