A little earlier than in previous years, this week our 2025 fruit season officially started. We’re having really difficulties this year navigating wasps, birds, squirrels and the heat when it comes to our fruit trees. We had a fabulous start with huge amounts of blossom and fruit, only to watch as bit by bit it disappears before it’s ripe or we get time to pick it. A few of our trees are also showing signs of trauma from the build last year, with weaker branches or parts of the tree that have concentrated on regrowing instead of fruiting.
Still – we’ve managed to harvest our largest ever greengage crop this year, and the birds left us a tray’s worth of mulberries which was nice of them! And our plums and damsons are ripening nicely – so much so that we made our first batch of damson jam with this season’s fruit. Most of it went promptly off to Daisy’s Dairy – a lovely milk vending machine shed on the outskirts of the village that stocks our jam alongside other local goodies such as butter, local sausages and bacon, ice-creams and of course milkshakes with all sorts of different flavours.
And at least we’re slowly getting the plum and codling moth under control – when we picked our first harvest we had so many plums and apples with larvae in (or worse – earwigs in the apples that would run around the chopping board when you cut the apple open until you tipped it out of the window). Now we’re definitely finding fewer fruit affected.
We’ve also been harvesting some of our vegetables – later than some people and certainly not as plentiful or well shaped (cucumbers in particular!). Our onion crop has been a success, and our potato bed seems to be doing well so far. Our squashes and pumpkins less so – powdery mildew has done for most of our plants, so we cut back what we could this weekend and have sprayed it in an attempt to prevent it getting worse. Our entire sweetcorn crop was stolen by squirrels this year again – it’s such a shame as our homegrown sweetcorn has tasted quite nice in the past!
We welcomed our fourth summer guests this week – another lovely family and possibly our oldest guest to date with a fabulous 95 year old lady who we took on a short tour of the orchard. Our third summer guests who left on Friday surprised us by leaving us a beautiful bunch of sunflowers and a toy for Evie, which we were so overwhelmed by! We do our best to make everyone’s holiday here perfect so for someone to recognise that is so thoughtful.
Ley Farm Cottages 