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Just done a little tidying up of the main site, corrected a few typos, added some text and put up a link to the National Fruit Collection at Brogdale, a major omission corrected. We have booked more farmers markets for 2008 than last year, details will go up soon.  I have nearly finished pruning the trees, there is a tremendous amount of fruit bud and the trees grew well in 2007, so we should have the biggest crop ever.  The weight and quality were down last year due to the awful weather, but given an average year for 2008, we could easily get 12 tons. Even last year, in addition to the fruit spoiled by waterlogging and fungal disease, we lost about 2 tons of fruit, mainly Lord Lambourne, Kidd's Orange Red and Winter King, that could have been sold, because we just couldn't find time to get to enough markets. This was mainly to do with the fact that we are part time farmers with other responsibilities which we can't always control. We are planning harder for the coming year, learning the lessons where we can.

Julia and I will divide our forces and I'll take the family esate car while she takes the van when there are 2 markets on the same day, e.g. Alton and Southsea or whatever. I'm also hoping to start taking our apples to the Saturday market at Sunnyfields, not been yet. We'll go to Winchester markets together as it's so hectic there.

We are arranging a couple of Saturday work parties in February for friends of the orchard to clear the prunings. We are also, sadly but necessarily, going to remove 24 large but unprofitable Bramleys. They have grown out of control and fruit poorly, they are just too vigorous to manage. The soil in our orchard is very patchy, but these extremely vigorous trees by chance just seem to be in a very good bit, and all they do is grow , grow and not fruit much. Its a shame to cut down a growing tree but as my brother in law Bob, who works with a firm of receivers says, 'if you lost £8 down a drain would  throwing £5 down after it make things better?'

We keep getting asked for pears, and it just so happens that a few espalier pears we grow for ourselves a few yards away are now doing pretty well. The excellent soil these Bramleys are unproductively using should grow pears excellently. We will probably go for 36 dwarf bush pears in all, half Conference for reliability, plus a few Beth, Concorde and Comice. We have a few rare varieties for ourselves, these ones will be purely for sale so we won't get involved in the rare old variety thing with pears as we have with apples, there is a limit!

You have less time to choose, buy and plant new fruit trees before the spring than you had when I mentioned it last, and a trip to a few nursery web sites today (see links inside the main site) are sold out of some varieties already, so do hurry or you'll have to wait another year.

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