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Unusual & Old Fashioned Fruit Trees |
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About The Author At about the age of 12, I moved with my parents to a large old house with an acre of garden in Staffordshire. The unkempt field like garden had a couple of old smallish greenhouses at the bottom of it near to a large brick built "shed" as we called it, although it had been many things including a TV repair shop. My mother had been a keen gardener for many years having completed an R.H.S. course when I was younger, so she started growing tomato plants and selling the tomatoes to local villagers. Quickly she expanded her ideas, started growing many plants to sell and the family erected more greenhouses, but these were of a commercial size. A few years later my father lost his job due to detached retinas and he and my mother decided to make a proper business out of the growing nursery, so they put his redundancy money into yet more greenhouses and the business continued to expand rapidly with little opposition locally.
I used ordinary domestic paraffin greenhouse heaters instead of proper commercial heaters to heat the long greenhouse, 4 or five of them I think. After they had been lit for the night they had to be checked to make sure they were burning properly. One very cold night I had forgotten to check them and they burnt with a thick black smoke all night. The next morning the greenhouse/plants had a surreal appearance with everything inside covered in what looked like black snow, ie, a thick layer of soot. The loss of plants was too great, so I gave up my fledgling business and spent a few months as a lifeguard before later getting a well paid job as a sales representative for a greenhouse equipment company that manufactured electric greenhouse heaters, propagators and watering equipment which were sold to garden centres and the horticultural trade in general. At the age of 26 I had nervous breakdown and lost my job. As, by then, my parents garden centre had developed even further and was employing several staff, my father asked me if I wanted to work there. By then I had developed an interest in fish keeping, so I built and ran a new aquatics department on the garden centre, but during the quieter weekdays helped out on the nursery with a little potting and general nursery maintenance.
More recently I have been writing books, become a bit of a computer nerd, (Hence this web-site.) and during the last couple of years my mother and myself have been planting fruit trees and bushes in our garden instead of having flower beds as she is getting too old to enjoy gardening much now. We decided there was not much point growing vegetables, because farmers can grow them cheaply and in bulk, whereas fruit is often more cost/space effective. We also love most fruit and will try anything to eat, so we started looking for as many unusual trees and fruit as possible, ones that can’t usually be bought in our shops.
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After some years,
but before my parents decided to
retire, the family tried to start another wholesale plant nursery on a
15 acre site near Derby on the outskirts of a village called Hilton. We
developed the site for about 3 years erecting 2 large 60 foot polythene
growing tunnels to protect the young plants. A water supply and irrigation
system were also installed and we supplied some plants to the main
garden centre. The project was beset by difficulties before recurrent
health problems for myself and my aging father