Home grown cherries..

Are the single nicest thing I have EVER eaten in my life, ever. Even nicer than Christmas dinner and chocolate and birthday cake and trifle and strawberries and cream and all my other favourite foods.

We don't have many, again. Last year we had around the same amount but all but 5 were eaten by birds. This year the birds did start pecking at them before they got ripe, so a few had holes in and went mouldy, but there are a fairly decent number left considering the tree's only on it's second year.

Pudding!

The remaining cherries, still ripening

Millie with her cherry. Yes, she does have one plait and one pigtail. I was using her gorgeous Rapunzelish hair to practise fishtail plaits on, and her other side was inaccessible ;)

Posing, with cherry juice on her face. And in her teeth. And down her top.

In other news, this weekend we went raspberry picking at Our lovely local fruit farm. We picked from the tunnels and they were amazing. I am definitely going to attempt to avoid supermarket fruit where possible because it's nothing like the freshly picked stuff! Anyway, I made the raspberries into a jelly, and got my standard 2.5 jars out of the batch (I seem to get this number no matter how much fruit I use!)  Jelly making is so satisfying. I'm going to try and stockpile a load to get us through til next Summer. I'll try strawberry and redcurrant next, also from Primrose Vale fruit :)

The garden is enjoying all the rain. I am not. Where's Summer?!

Today Millie and I harvested the first bag of potatoes. These are actually the 'second earlies' and shouldn't have been the first ones we harvested, but the plants had died and rotted away so I thought we might as well get stuck in. I tipped the contents of the potato bag out onto a binbag and Millie gathered all the spuds. She loved it :)

We've begun to harvest quite a few things. I've been helping myself to sugarsnap peas for a couple of weeks now. They're quite yummy but I think I should probably try cooking them to tempt the children with.

The fruit is doing well. The cherries have started to turn red all of a sudden, which is a pain because I still don't have my fruit tree nets (they're on order). Some of them have been attacked by birds already :(

I can't tell if the plums are looking any bigger or not. I had hoped that the photos in this blog would make slow growth more obvious, but I'm not convinced!

 The mini cucumbers are almost ready to pick. They're SO cute! Apparently each plant (we have 2) can produce up to 20 of these per week. I hope that's a gross exaggeration because the three of us can definitely not manage 40 mini cucumbers in 7 days. The guinea pig might help though :)

June Drop hit the apple trees quite heavily, but as my dad has pointed out, I'm very lucky to be getting any baby apples at all in the first and second years of planting. I think we'll have enough to enjoy, anyway, and only the pear and Bramley haven't produced anything this Summer.

Finally, look at the cute little tomato! I moved the three Tumbling Toms out this week, and planted out the Super Marmandes. I hope not to have to buy any tomatoes at all from July-September/October (wishful thinking I know, they're bound to sucumb to blight as usual)

Hopefully it won't be too long before I actually get to make something out of all this lot. I'm hoping to go raspberry picking at the PYO place soon, and then to make raspberry jelly which is probably one of the nicest foods I've ever tasted.