Our Abruzzo garden continues to develop. We're eating the first delicious produce from our vegetable plot – and the first fruits of summer in the orchard are ripening !

Back in May, I wrote about our vegetable plot. Now, belatedly, it's time to run the rule over the orchard.

The Italian word for orchard is frutetto. Nicer I think. The frutetto is about 250 square meters and like the veggie plot – or orto – faces due south.

English varieties predominate. Are they suited to a central Italian climate ? Only one way to find out…

Apples
Italian apples look great and taste of nothing. Modern hybrids engineered to provide huge yields capable of sitting on a supermarket shelf for weeks on end.

I'm growing four English heritage varieties: Laxton's Epicure; Egremont Russet; Blenheim Orange; and Ribston's Pippin. The plan is that these'll provide a continuous supply of apples from August through until about March.

Have absolutely no idea how they'll all stand up to the rigors of an Abruzzo summer – but so far so good.

Greengage Early Transparent and Damson Farleigh
I've grown both before. Again, both are heritage varieties. The Gage is a lovely translucent yellow-green and tastes wonderful; the Damson's for turning into jam and crumbles.

Because I can be a ham-fisted idiot, I recently split the trunk of the Gage while spreading out its branches. So I've screwed it back together. Should work. I once Duck-taped a wind-split trunk on a Cercis Canadensis 'Forest Pansy' and that bonded together just fine.

Redcurrant Laxton's No1
Produced four currants in its first season this year ! Next year – summer puddings and jars of redcurrant jelly !

Figs
One named variety – Brown Turkey – plus five others growing away merrily from cuttings I took from unnamed trees growing outside the rental property where we spent our first 18 months in Italy while Villasfor2 was being built. These produced excellent black and green fruit. Pruning these as bushes rather than letting grow into unmanageable trees.

Grape Italia
A muscat type being trained using the splendidly-named 'Four-Arm Knipf' system. Should get a bunch or two in 2011.

Apricot Reale di Imola
Good crop of a about a dozen large fruit this year. Sensational taste and texture.

Yellow Peach Flavor Crest; White Peach Maria Delizia
The yellow peach, cloaked in a deep red velvet skin, is of unsurpassable sweetness and lusciousness. There are about 18 fast-ripening fruit which I should've thinned a bit more but, being greedy, didn't.

The white peach seems to be a white nectarine. Hmmm… Then again it suffered badly from Peach Leaf Curl this spring so maybe the fruit went bald. About six rock-hard little fruit stubbornly hang from its branches. We'll see what develops.

Rhubarb Timperley Early
Bit of a challenge this as the dormant crown promptly broke into three pieces as I unpacked it. Our soil is too heavy and claggy even for rhubarb, so it's spending its first summer in multi-purpose compost in a 12" pot. Took ages to get going, but  it's developing nicely and in the autumn I'll transfer it into an 18" pot with some good soil and hopefully it'll produce a few usable sticks next year.

The one fruit I'd like to grow in our Abruzzo garden, but won't even bother to try, are raspberries. It's just too hot. Everything else I wanted is here.

The peaches, apricot and grape were sourced from specialist fruit-growers local to us in Abruzzo; the Apples, Currant, Rhubarb, Gage and Damson were shipped from Deacons Nursery on the Isle of Wight in England, arriving in very good shape and happily spending most of the winter heeled-in in a big bucket of peat.

Next: The Flower Garden  

This entry was posted on Monday, July 19th, 2010 at 3:36 pm and is filed under About Villas for 2, Daily Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.