A month of apples

LAST MONTH'S harvest is now in full swing. There are still some soft fruit pickings to be made, but these will soon give way to top fruit: apples and other tree-grown fruit. The old country orrchards are now brimming with that old reliable dessert apple, Beauty of Bath, which will be ready for plucking shortly. In more recent planntations, this apple has been replaced by the variety George Cave, a seedling of Beauty of Bath and generally regarded as being superior. Some gardens are fortunate enough to boast an even earliier and, in many ways, finer apple, the Gladstone. This beats Beauty of Bath by about two weeks, is larger, and is redder in colour. Its advantages is that it tends to be short-lived, having a useful life of about 15 years, while 25 is the norm for most others. Perhaps this explains its absence from nursery lists today, a fact to be regretted. by Ted Walsh

Although first class fruit currently brings a high price at the market, it is not the grower who reaps the greatest reward. As that marvellous poet and philosopher, john Stewart Collis, wrote, " .. .if you want to get rich in moddern society you should not aim at securing the Means of Production, but rather the Means of Distribution."

Harvest or not, August will see many of us leave our plants for the exotica of foreign places. Unless there's a genuine heatwave (a very remote possibility), our plants can survive our holiidays unattended if we do some special work before going.

Mowing and weeding will be in order, and the compleetion of spraying is important. Roses are the chief target and benlate spray is the best to use. August is a mildew month, and the most severely hit roses are the ramblers. Annother twining plant unrelated to the rose but nonetheless an occasional, if not frequent, victim of mildew is the honeysuckle (Lonicera). It can hit both the deciduous and evergreen sorts and may do so in a devastating manner that gives the impression that the plant is beyond revival. Happily, this is not the case. But why suffer a defoliated, sickly-looking plant?

Indoor plants, or plants out-of-doors in pots are the real problem at this time. The most satisfactory solution is to have a neighbour look after them for you, but where this is not possible you must improvise. Water the plants well and then sink the pots in a tub of moist moss peat.

Do not forget that outtdoor plants are, in the eyes of the slug, juicy and tender, so avoid mild disaster by placing a few heaps of slug pellets around your little plantation.