Remember Gabriel Gate - that french chef fellow who used to be on Bert on the tele and talked about hunions and hepples and cooking in the huven?
Well, that rather took my fancy and forever more, to me they will always be "hepples".
Anyway...
Guess what I know about growing hepples?
Nuthin.
Well...
Remember I spoke of how about 3 or 4 years ago we wanted to buy an investment property in a country town but we accidentally ended up living in it? Well, we had another crack at it about a year ago and bought a lovely brick home built 45ish years ago by Mr and Mrs Pendlebury.
One of the wonderful things about the Pendlebury's house was, that it was built on nearly half an acre and it had a street at the front and a street at the back.
That meant that
half the yard and the house could be for the tenants and the other half - the huge backyard and garden shed could be for us!
And there I could plant all the stuff that wouldn't fit in our own home yard.
So far, at
Pendlebury Hill (see what I did there? It's on a hill and the Pendleburys built it - genius!), I've planted a Quince, an Olive, a Pomegranate, Raspberry Canes, a Blueberry bush, a Dahlia patch, and the beginning of a rose garden.
(This is to accompany the White Mulberry, the Black Mulberry, the Lemon, the Navel Orange, the Washington Orange, the Emperor Mandarin, the White Nectarine, the Tahitian Lime, the Kaffir Lime, the Bay tree, the Passionfruit vine, the Grape vine and the Loquat I have already planted at our own house - and the rose garden, and the vegie patch and the 35,000 (maybe an exaggeration) different ornamentals and natives! Lawdy, lawdy, I've been busy the last 3 years!)
Anyway....
before he died last year, Mr Pendlebury dropped in to see me and wish us well for the future and we got talking about the garden.
He told me about the two apple trees he had planted and how they had six different varieties growing on them.
Isn't that amazing?
You can just splice different fruit onto one trunk and they will all live together quite happily doing their own thing.
So....
because I didn't really know anything about caring for apple trees and at the time I was a little pre-occupied with other stuff - I pretty much left them to their own devices for the last 12 months.
Ha!
As if they needed my help!
The two little trees are FULL of apples.
Stupidly, I didn't ask Mr Pendlebury what exactly the different varieties were.
I'm pretty sure I've got a Granny Smith.
A Golden Delicious.
A Red Delicious.
Does anyone know what these ones might be?
Photos: March, 2011
