Illness and April a write off

A flu in late March knocked me for a six and then Covid arrived on April 6.  I did however, have a fine and well day for my birthday in the gap between these two nasties.  The Tidy gardener made me a lovely carrot cake and Mum was still here to help celebrate my 59th birthday.  As a result, not a lot of action on my part happened in the garden nor in writing the blog, hence no April posts.  I am still coughing occasionally from Covid and still not back to my usual two walks a day with Rocket.

It has been a glorious summer weather wise with lovely fine days days one following after another.  But only glorious if you are not gardening or farming through the driest summer for many years - we've never had a summer like it since moving to Southland in 2005.  We started to get rain again in the first week in April and have had regular rain since.  It's raining again today but still need good rains to replenish the soil moisture.  Despite this the garden has looked lovely in places.  The long summer has meant the dahlias have been glorious and started into flower earlier too.  We have had a couple of frosts this month, but not hard enough to frost most of the dahlias - only Isla's little bedding dahlia has packed up for the season.

The apple and pear harvest was bountiful and it was so good to have Mum here to help with the fruit peeling.  Restricted freezer space required bottling of the pears, but there was so much surplus that we peeled and froze for people we knew as well as gave away a couple of boxes.  The main pear tree will take a lot to recover from the fruit load so I don't expect much of a crop next year BUT I must remember to thin much harder so as to have bigger pears and less of them.  I had thinned but not hard enough.  My thinning regime of a handspan apart for the apples really paid off - the amount of crop was similar to other years but less fruit and much bigger (approximately 16 white bins).  The birds started attacking the Mrs Peasgood NonSuch apple in January so this tree had to be netted.  I allowed this tree to have more of a crop than other years but the drought did limit the fruit size.  Harvest started with this tree on 4th March and finished with picking the Sturmer apple on 29 April.  Overall the codling moth infection was down but there is still a disease problem with the Black Prince and the Holt's Chance apple that I have not 100% identified.  There was apple scab on the Holt's Chance and Mrs Ryan's Hospital but this seems to be only cosmetic and possibly a result of the weather conditions.

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