Fruit Machine

Our back garden is a very productive place.

It has been for the 18 or so years that we have lived here.

The plum tree that we planted in an enthusiastic family ceremony one afternoon after a visit to the local garden centre did eventually bear fruit, so much so that the larger boughs buckled, split and fell under the sheer weight of Victoria's.

It did take a decade to reach such a stage.

In recent years it has remained prolific so much so that we have hoped that trespassers and scrumpers may wander in and just help themselves to the plentiful bounty. There is only so much that one family can cope with in terms of plum jam, plum chutney, stewed and steeped plums, plums in various alcoholic liquids, raw plums, plum wine, plum brandy, whole plums, halved and quartered plums and so on.

The neighbourhood does reach a point of saturation with all things plum and people cross over the road, take an alternative route or just use the car rather than risk walking past our driveway gates and be assailed with all things plum.

In stark contrast is the pear tree that we planted alongside and at the same time.

Whereas plums have been in over supply and therefore of lower perceived value as a delicacy and treat the pear tree has been the equivalent of the bearer of the golden fleece.

Just two pears have been harvested in the near two decades of careful nurturing and tending.

The same loving care has been lavished on our two tree orchard. There has been the autumn cutting back of the dead wood. Pruning according to the experts in the early spring. Spraying to discourage the parasitic and nuisance bugs. The struggle to secure a sticky strip around the trunk to challenge the climbing insects. We have even had a fine gauze netting on hand to cover up and protect both trees in the event of attack by swarms of predators or a biblical descent of locusts as a worst case scenario, more in the imagination of the children than an actual possibility in this part of Yorkshire.

The elusive brace of pears were also inedible being rock hard in density, positively woody in texture.

Still, we appear to have reached a watershed in the fortunes of our two ecological plantings this year.

The plum tree is completely devoid of any signs of fruit bearing and yet the pear is already sweeping and weeping low to the ground and that is just with the first bud growths that promise much.

I cannot say why this is taking place.

Nothing has changed in the immediate environment at the bottom of the garden. I did leave a bit of a wilderness due to the lawn mower breaking down half way through trying to cope with the long, tough, grainy grass in the first cut of the year.

It looked wonderful.

A splash of colour with grape hyacinths, the odd wild flower, random dense foliage and this seemed to attract a swarm of insects and early season bees. It may have been this cocktail of pollination that served as the catalyst for the pear over the plum.

It appears that springtime is late in the calendar this year, perhaps postponed by the long and persistently sub-zero temperatures early on. We are hopeful that the plum may yet activate and have a late rush to fill its boughs.

That will give us enough time to source the old faithfuls, the recipes for plum and pear jam, plum and pear chutney and the full range of plum and pear products.

The neighbours are in for a real treat but we won't tell them about that just yet. It would be strange if they all went on holiday in the same week in late August as they always seem to do.