Stick-in-the-Mud

After a difficult few years of very cold springs and late frosts, the orchard is finally coming to fruition this year. I admittedly have lost a plum, but it was not too painful because I have four others, including an impressively fecund drooper, plus three damsons, a greengage, and a couple of feral suckers I got from a sucker's garden in Bradford-on-Avon. Some of my cherries are still intact, but I suspect they'll prove popular with the birds and won't last much longer. An avalanche of apples is also on the cards, but my two pear wouldn't make much of a hand at poker, but I call that a success at this stage.

Some of my experimental fruits are not quite so promising. This my mulberry, a hybrid Canadian variety perhaps suited to the northerly climate.

Maybe so, but not coming into leaf till June leaves itself a lot to do in a short season, and it gets no sympathy from the looting bullfinches and alpinista slugs that have taken a shine to the buds and leaves over everything else in the garden. Three chewed up leaves on a two-metre long stick is not much to show for three years' effort. Now the problem has been diagnosed, we may get the green shoots of recovery...

Here's your drought update. To talk in agrohydrometeorological jargon, we've made a slight dent in the anglo-scottish soil moisture deficit.

2014	Snab	Brize
January	34.5	155.2
February	42.5	105.7
March	21.0	56.6
April	23.4	62.7
May	58.1	80.5
June	76.6	47
Half-year total	256.1	507.7