Abundance

It is interesting how fruit trees seem to have a good year and then a not so good year. The olive harvest may be excellent one year and mediocre the next; other fruit can range from none to one or many! This season has been a bumper season for me. That doesn't mean that I have tons of fruit but certainly a nice supply to eat and share with family.
The birds also have their fair share. It's a pity they eat the unripe fruit! Anyway, I cover parts of the trees with netting and don't really worry too much about the birds because I appreciate the diverse bird life in my garden.
So this year I've had prunes, apples, figs and lemons galore. There were a couple of bunches of grapes, but they disappeared before they were ripe I also harvested a couple of kilograms of luscious youngberries.

The Olive trees are looking promising after years of not bearing any olives. They are Manzanilla and probably not the best variety to have. I also have one mission olive which usually produces a reasonable crop of olives.

My lemon tree has been groaning under the weight of lemons. I keep banging my head against them! 52 lemons on a smallish tree. Some of them are as big as grapefruit. This lemon tree didn't have a single lemon for many years but now it's making up for that! In a storm a few months ago, it blew over (partly due to the weight of the lemons) and my garden helper and I pulled it upright and staked it firmly. It hardly noticed that it had been uprooted.

I have another lemon tree in the bee garden that started out as a kumquat tree. Then it had fruits that didn't know whether they were lemons or oranges. Now it has settled down to plain lemons.

Soon it will be guava season.....

The apples have their fair share of blemishes and coddling moth damage. They will be used for juicing and making cider vinegar. Maybe also an apple pie. Like the lemon tree that started out as a kumquat, the apple tree started out as a crab apple tree. Obviously the original stem somehow took over and now it is a huge and beautiful apple tree producing a good number of granny smith type apples.

So all round there has been abundance and I haven't even talked about the honey. I'm wondering if the lovely fruit this year has anything to do with the many extra bees in the garden these days.