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We are now into the fruit season; the bush soft fruits are in full swing. Gooseberries are still on a few bushes; last month, most varieties were at their ripest, a few later ones are hanging on. It's the blackcurrants, reds and the raspberries that are now the main ones, plus the less popular loganberries, tayberries, and an assortment of hybrid cane fruits. The blacks are the most widely grown of all, large acreages of these are for the soft drink industry. In the garden we are lucky if a bush yields well after ten years, due to the various pests and diseases, and through insufficient feed. This fruit, and the cane sorts, do need heavy doses of nitrogen each spring. Do remember to prune the blacks straight after picking, cut out old fruiting wood, leaving the best new shoots to crop next year - it's on the one year old wood that this fruit crops.
Still on fruit, now is the time to prepare that new strawberry bed. Select runners from the old plants that have cropped the best, and do not plant too deeply; the crowns, where the new shoots appear, should be at ground level. A new one I am planting this year is called Florence, sounds all right, a good old-fashioned name.
Clematis are very popular now, the trade are pushing this group of climbers in their publications. One firm has launched four varieties to celebrate 200 years of the Royal Horticultural Society, rather strange as this society was called the Horticulture Society at first. Anyway, these clematis are called: Wisley, Hyde Hall, Rosemoor and Harlow Carr, after the four gardens now run by the RHS - which reminds me, don't forget that we have the Kilham Gardening Club on our door step; a club that started in September 1994. They meet on the 4th Wednesday every month in the village hall at Kilham, and have speakers on a wide range of gardening subjects, so one need not attend the meetings in London, when we have this local club. The famous gardens at Wisley were given to the RHS in 1903, just over a hundred years ago, and are still, in my opinion, the very best all round gardens in the UK - well worth a visit when in Surrey.
A gardener called to see me recently with an orchid, it was a moth orchid, the phalaenopsis genus that I've see in the shops in large numbers. This is an orchid that in its natural habit lives in cracks and clefts of trees, these are known as Epiphytes and gain their foods from debris and drips
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