This week we take a look at the different fruit trees and shrubs I'm growing in the north of Ireland in Zone 9a.
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00:00 [Music]
00:09 Hello, I'm trying to film here in between showers. It's been atrocious and chilly for June.
00:14 And the weather has just been not playing ball at all. Lovely May and then a washout so far in June
00:22 for the first two weeks anyway. I'm just going to show you some of the fruit that I'm growing here.
00:27 So I'll just turn the camera around. So here is a blackcurrant. This is from a slip that I bought
00:35 in just a discount shop. And you can see it's very healthy looking. A lot of growth on it.
00:43 There's literally a stick when I got it. Down here are some alpine strawberries which I've
00:50 been growing from seed. Very slow growers but starting to put on a bit of growth now. They've
00:56 been outside for the whole time really and since the seeds went on. But they're looking quite healthy
01:04 and probably need potting on pretty soon. Here's one of the best performance so far this year.
01:13 And it's early days yet but there's a lot of strawberries on these strawberry plants.
01:18 I have another one I'll show you in a minute. But you can see here
01:22 the wee white strawberry flowers and then the center of them becomes the strawberry.
01:26 That'll, the petals fall off that'll grow and turn red. And here you see some in development here.
01:34 At the moment. And you should get quite a few of them. These are last year's
01:41 strawberries that have come back absolutely fine.
01:48 And beside that I have two blueberries that were again were just wee slips that I bought in the shop.
01:57 And they weren't really coming on. They're potted in different soil. Aracaceous soil,
02:02 acid loving soil. Because blueberries need a different kind of soil. But I fed them with
02:08 some aracaceous plant food and noticed a bit of growth. So I'll just keep doing that now.
02:15 I doubt I'll get any blueberries this year but hopefully they'll survive from the next year.
02:19 Here is a tomato plant. I have quite a few of these growing from seed. Quite big as well.
02:25 This one's in a smallish pot. The others are in bigger pots.
02:30 But you can see there's loads of flowers on them. On all of them. So
02:35 should get some fruit. Two varieties of money maker and
02:43 also cherry tomatoes as well. You see there's a little yellow flower that'll become a tomato.
02:52 I mixed up the... I put them all in the one tray so I don't know which is which.
02:58 And here we have more strawberries here.
03:01 So you can see there more fruit coming in around there.
03:12 Hopeful for a bumper crop of them. And they should keep flowering and fruiting as long as I
03:19 remove any suckers that come out of them. So that's everything there. And then I'll just
03:27 turn around now and show you some of the fruit trees that are on the ground and stuff.
03:31 So we've been having some terrible weather. This last few weeks it's been very
03:39 very cold this start of June. First two weeks in June. It'll probably be May
03:44 most of the time. But it's become a completely different picture now this last two weeks.
03:51 Just hope it ends soon. It's been cold, one day, rain, even hailstones yesterday.
03:58 But I'm just going to take you around some of the fruit that have been growing.
04:00 Here is a red currant bush. You can see there it's loaded with berries at the moment and
04:09 they should ripen very soon. They are green turning on. Just see if I take a close here
04:16 you can see that they're starting to develop that red colouring. And the birds will be all over this
04:23 as soon as that happens. That has been on the ground for a long time. It'll be a decade.
04:33 Over here there are gooseberry bush. And again that's laden with young gooseberries.
04:42 Just see a couple there. They tend to be hiding under these thorny branches.
04:47 And this isn't very personal but it comes every year and it
04:52 always get a lot of fruit from it. So in another few weeks these should be
05:00 ready for picking. And you know when they're ready because they will be soft and they'll lose their
05:06 kind of hairy exterior. And just coming in through that these are wild blackberries coming in through
05:14 the fence here. I try to cut them back but I'll just show you over the fence. It's just a mass of
05:24 blackberry bushes. You can pick them as well. And up here is a pear tree which has never grown
05:31 particularly well because the ground's too bad for it I think. But this year for some reason
05:36 despite the really bad weather and the really wet winter there's loads of tiny pears coming on it.
05:42 You can just see there. And there's more here. Now whether they survive
05:52 I don't know. I've had one fall off before but I just have the one pear tree and it always seems
05:58 to produce at least one pear. But this year I've never seen so many. There's some more there and
06:04 some more on up.
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