It has now rained consistently for several weeks and our apples have been gathered and are safely stored. But it has been a fight this year.
Firstly, after my husband's heart attack, we cancelled the gardener who was due to prune our two trees. They grew tall and unchecked. But their roots are deep and in this season of drought they bore fruit.
In the circumstances we didn't refill our codling moth trap. Codling moths struck for almost the first time I can recall in eleven years. Some apples ripened early and fell from the trees with the telltale rot and hole that indicates a horrid little grub has been resident in the core.
'Beaky' our blackbird of the fourth or fifth generation demonstrated his appetite for ripe Discovery and pecked a hole in fruit within reach. To my dismay he was copied by the magpies and even the jackdaws who roost among the chimneys of the house at the end.
Squirrel (m or f) decided it would be fun to climb a tree, detach an apple from the branch and eat it on the shed roof.
Wasps fed on the windfalls that I could not reach beneath the unpruned branches.
Hedgehog visited, I presume, also to benefit from fallen fruit.
In the autumn I put out apples by our front drive for the neighbours. This is usually well received.
One night I left some cooking apples in a new and clean washing up bowl. My husband heard the remarks through the window which was slightly ajar. His hearing is better than mine. In the morning the bowl and the apples were gone.
Take the fruit but leave the receptacle is my unspoken convention for free food. I am not sure that I want to do this again.
