The wind last weekend made the decision for us, however, blowing one of the massive fruit off its branch – thankfully unbruised – the second apple was duly picked and consumed.

Absolutely delicious. Crisp and sweet, somewhere a sort of Pink Lady type taste (it’s a cross between a Cox and a Pott’s seedling), it was enjoyed by all the family.

One more to go.

The anticipation we’ve had all summer of fruit ripening and being ready for consumption is beginning to diminish now. We’ve still got this year’s Blackberry picking walk to look forward to and there are still ripe blueberries on the bush, but the prospects for the greenhouse and the patch are looking dimmer as more rain falls and the days shorten.

Still, we have more potatoes to uproot, a few ripe tomatoes on the branch, and the pumpkins may last until October if I remember my Charlie Brown comics… and we’re off to a friend’s house for more substantial apple-picking this weekend – huzzah!

The patch in the sunshine. Idyllic, no?

A pumpkin begins…

Harvest. One plant worth of Lapland potatoes, a smallish yellow courgette and a fresh batch of Rhubarb, delightfully pink.

A tomato plant jungle!

Cucumbers in progress!

Our garlic drying – only one of the cloves I planted failed!

The Lapland potatoes in particular were a fantastic result. We’re getting about 1.5kg of new potatoes with each plant (we had five seed pots), and they work in every meal context – soft, creamy and delicious. We’re going to have to get out to Finland again next spring to pick up some new seed potatoes as think I’ll struggle to keep them fresh over winter otherwise!

I do wish I’d picked up the books earlier. Paul & Rach gave us Dr Hessayon’s seminal vegetable and herb grower book, and Lilt and Jason gave us an epic gardener’s bible. Both are filled with tips I should have noted earlier in the season that would have boosted our – tomato crop in particular – dramatically. Still, can’t complain about the results for our first year of veg production!

Absolutely loving this stage of the season. Slightly concerned that the two apples on our tree will not survive but really hoping they do – they look enormous and delicious – as my judgement of on-tree ripeness is not great. I’m pretty much just wiggling the fruit around and seeing if it drops off the branch of its own accord, and using that as a measure of its desire to be eaten.

I was absolutely wrong. Last night’s stiff wind blew the first ripe plum from its branches and I plucked a neighbouring one as well. On cutting, I had to trim around some slightly overripe flesh but the remainder – absolutely delicious. Amazing. Lush, even. Mega-lush.

This is what its all about.

In other garden updates, there’s continued cropping on the strawberry plant, the blueberries are ripening fast and the yellow courgettes are sprouting in force.

* technically the cucumber was the first fruit, and we have had strawberries too, but the ‘first tree fruit’ just didn’t feel right as a headline

Specifically: a whole crop of rocket fell victim to a weird creeping weed, as did half a crop of carrot seedlings. I don’t know what these things are but they’re small and insidious to begin with but as they grow they dominate and choke the life out of the other plants. Both those patches have had the equivalent of a gardening carpet bomb dropped on them – total rakeover.

Yesterday, our – to date quite successful – courgette plant (pictured) said its last farewell. Whilst it had done well for a time, something was afflicting it: it had stopped flowering and all its leaves were sprouting and growing out withered and filled with holes. No idea what the problem was… But as luck would have it, we had a second courgette seedling that had been sitting in its pot in the greenhouse awaiting a planting opportunity, which it duly got last night. We’ll see what happens.

There are also a couple of plants that I don’t think will come to (literal) fruition this summer. The chilli plants I think just went in too late – whilst the four or five we have are doing rather well, there’s no sign of flower or fruiting. The aubergine plant has been sitting sad and sullen in its greenhouse bag all summer and still only stands at about four inches tall. And whilst the pepper plant does have a fruit on it, we think it might be the only one. Its hard to say on the squash and the pumpkin – whilst the plants are doing very well, we planted them very late and they may simply not have time to get to where they need to.

Still, successful tomatoes, cucumbers, rhubarb, carrots, garlic, strawberries, blueberries, apples, plums, courgettes, potatoes (not to mention chives, sage, parsley, coriander, mint, oregano) is not a bad crop for a first summer of gardening…

We took a substantial crop off the rhubarb plant and a carrot to taste (want them to have a little more time to grow out), but imagine we will have to harvest more or less weekly now to the end of the year. Apparently the flowering on the Lapland potato plants means that the pots are ready, but I’m willing to let them grow a little more – or is this a bad idea?

Will do a rhubarb taste report when we get a chance…

Managed to make myself weed the plot on Sunday – I need to do that a bit more regularly. Some weird creeping weed had made its way into the carrot plot and finding its source proved impossible. A fruitless task, you might even say (sorry…).

The strawberry plant gives of itself daily – more sweet tiny strawberries keep materialising. The courgettes are starting to come in thick and fast, although cucumber production seems to have slowed – we might need to add a bit more feed.

I’ve finally got around to bug spraying the plum tree, which seemed to be suffering some kin of minor infestation. Will have to see how it pans out. The two remaining apples on our apple tree are perfectly formed. Quite exciting.

The tomatoes are ripening fast – there seem to be a lot of them. Emily’s slight allergic reactions to both tomatoes and potatoes has taken some of the fun out of these, but Amanda and I will enjoy them!!

The rhubarb is ready for a crumble and the tomatoes are ripening fast. A small pepper has materialised but the aubergine remains dormant. The yellow courgette isn’t flowering yet, and squash and pumpkin plants are still young.

The rocket has died – bad luck, ants and weeds stifled them we think – but we may have another go.

Next year – fewer potatoes, methinks.

Huge, delicious, fun.

We had a rather marvellous time on Friday with a slightly different flavour of corporate offsite; a few people around the agency researched and identified a CSR activity that would see us all contribute to something worthwhile – in this case the charity Thrive, which helps people recover or cope with debilitating psychological disorders, recover from extended illness or contend with dementia through the joy of gardening.

As someone that’s been spending a fair amount of time digging around in the dirt at home, it was a pretty enjoyable task. We were gloved up and treated to the standard health & safety disclaimer before being loaded up with strimmers, garden forks, shovels, wheelbarrows, hammers, hacksaws and the like and set to clearing a slightly overgrown orchard. We uprooted dead trees, disassembled disused raised beds, levelled out the soil and cut back the grass, digging up mountains of weeds along the way. The 60 or so of us on the ground made fairly short work of it all, getting through the clearing process in a few short hours.

After a lunch break we returned for the ‘main event’ – we’d been promised a wall to build and build a wall we did. Most of my time went into helping with the digging and levelling off a ditch so the wall would remain flat – which was a fairly frustrating process – but our architect-turned-CFO has a real talent for both project management and spirit levelling so we made good in the end.

In addition to the work teams building the two walls, my colleagues made fair progress in building a set of composters from packing crates, and others cleared a number of other raised beds of weeds. It was a pretty satisfying transformation to look back on as we left the Reading countryside and headed back to London for a performance by the Warm Leads… but more on that later…

I’d highly recommend it if you’re looking for a different kind of corporate day out, or if you live in range of one of Thrive’s gardens (one near Reading and t’other in Battersea Park), volunteer.

Specifically:

1. Another batch of cucumbers
2. Some new potatoes
3. The first cut of rhubarb
4. At least two courgettes

Tomatoes continue to be on the grow and the two remaining apples on my young tree are looking juicy. Let’s hope they last the rest of the growing season…

Click through for veg product key!

Further to the first few cucumbers, we’ve now got tomatoes, strawberries and courgettes in a state of rapidly increasing readiness, and have put the last seeds into the plot – more carrots, some rocket and a pumpkin and a squash plant. Hopefully they’ll thrive as everything else seems to be doing at the moment.

The rhubarb will be ready for a crop in a few more weeks – it’s been growing very well in the rainy weather we’ve had – and we’ve started the process of getting stuff fertilised as we get deeper into the growing season. The lapland potatoes collapsed under their own weight, so Amanda has staked them and we’ll have to rebury them in some fresh compost in the hope of increasing the crop / and to give them a bit more support.

The weeding hasn’t been too onerous, but given our laxity in planting I’ve had the luxury of just raking over the spartan half of the veg patch. Now that we’ve got plants in all around, it’s going to be a hands and knees job. Still, there’s a lot of satisfaction – and veg – to be had!

The apple tree has shed most of its fruit – unable to sustain them, presumably, as it continues to bed in – but that’s for the best, I hope. The tomatoes are yet to fruit but are flowering with wild abandon. The coriander has taken an unexpected journey skyward.

The potato plants are HUGE.

Looking forward to the harvest this year :-).

• All our Lapland potatoes have sprouted and will get buried under another layer of soil and manure compost this week
• Our cucumber plants are flowering!
• We’ve germinated a couple of yellow courgette plants, which will go in soon
• Our chilli seeds aren’t coming up yet, but we’re still vaguely hopeful
• We’ve planted aubergine in the greenhouse, and strawberries in the strawberry pot – both shop bought rather than from seed
• Carrot seeds have gone in the ground – no joy as yet
• We’ve relocated the rhubarb as it was too shaded where it was. It’s struggling to thrive.
• The other courgette plant is coming along
• The potatoes in the planter are growing like crazy!
• The tomatoes are getting tall, but no flowers as yet
• Tonnes of nascent blueberries, apples and plums on those trees
• The olive tree is growing but not fruiting as yet

We’ve got another batch of seeds that need to go in and I have to patch and plant some new grass to help the garden recover from the Fiskars session, but on the whole its really all coming together nicely.

The device operates by extruding four sharpened stainless steel teeth into the ground. You lower it over where you imagine the root of the problem to be (pun intended), apply pressure, and as you lean back on the handy foot press the teeth clamp over the root of the weed and pulls it out of the ground, alongside a small, manageable clump of turf and soil. There’s a satisfyingly clunky ‘reload’ mechanism which throws the weed off the end of the weedpuller.

Doing our entire garden – which is relatively clear of dandelions, but has a few other weed issues – took about an hour and a half and resulted in a wheelbarrow load of weeds. I’d estimate that in about two thirds of cases I got the whole root up, which I thought was a good result. Hopefully as an iterated process in the future it’ll be pretty quick and painless – and more eco-friendly than weed poison alternatives.

The small holes dotting the garden may or may not need filling with compost and replanting with fresh grass seed at some point, which I guess is the only negative – but then, this would be significantly worse if you were trowelling weeds out of the ground by hand! I need a backpack mounted metal-detector shaped compost deployer to save my lower back from the patching work…

My plan is to leave it for a bit until there is more discernible growth and to try to make a less than completely arbitrary judgement then. That’s when I read of LeafSnap – Leaf recognition software developed by Columbia University in the US. You take a picture of a leaf and it pattern matches against a database to tell you what it is. Could this make the difference?

Reviews of the app are not good on the Appstore. “Only works on US trees,” “Primitive pattern matching that returns dozens of matches”… and then there’s the fact that it only makes claim to cope with tree leaves.

But it’s a start. Technology will find a way to help my garden grow…