Mediterranean Fruit – the Orchard 2025

I covered the ground around the tree with horse manure and green waste in October. In April the tree looked very good and bloomed profusely. In May it suffered from a heavy attack of Dysaphis pyri (Pear-bedstraw Aphid) on one side which caused many leaves to curl up and turn sticky-black. I sprayed a little bit and then just waited for them to disappear in summer. We ended up with a very much smaller, but still very nice crop of luscious sweet pears. After all how many pears can two people eat? I hung up pheromone traps in April and July and about 80-90% of the fruit were free of Codling moth holes.

In November we did another round of trimming, taking out long, bare truncs and shortening branches. The fig trees reacted well, they grew into a lovely little copse producing very welcome shade and quite a few very tasty and juicy figs in August.

The plum tree looked good in the spring with lots of flowers but by early summer it had developed some long twiggy branches with twisted leaves and it let drop most of its fruit sets over the summer. We only harvested about ten plums in September. The problem may have been the early drought and heat wave in June and/or too much shade from the fig and laurel trees.

Planted in 2023, this tree works wonderfully in this Mediterranean climate. It grows well and produced a lot of very aromatic dark red mulberries from May to June. Mulberries show themselves to be the best alternative to “regular” berry shrubs.

Planted in the fall of 2024, the Arbutus unedo grew in well, sprouted new leaves during the worst of the summer’s heat, and even survived being transplanted again this fall. So far it hasn’t produced any flowers or fruit but that’s only a matter of time. Arbutus are very drought and heat tolerant and well-suited to this climate.

This Cornelian cherry tree “Schönbrunner Gourmet Dirndl” made a few flowers early in spring but didn’t do so well in summer, despite of the half-shade provided by the fig trees. In the fall its leaves looked quite chewed up by something. We will wait another season before deciding on replacing it with something else.

The dwarf Morello cherry “Carmine Jewel” again produced a handful of bright red and tart cherries. It doesn’t seem to mind heat or drought but it doesn’t grow very much either.

Despite a half-shaded location, good soil and a good feeding with horse manure in the fall, heavy mulching as well as regular watering throughout the summer, the berry shrubs made it quite clear again that this is not their favorite climate. Of all of them the thornless blackberry “Loch Ness” grew the largest (although still much smaller and less vigorous than in Switzerland) and produced quite a bit of – albeit very small – fruit. We had about 25 raspberries on one spindly shrub that never grew much beyond knee height, about 5 very tart tayberries on a one-stem shrub and zero loganberries on another. In the fall I gave all but the blackberry shrub away. Maybe they’ll fare better somewhere else.

The six or seven strawberries planted under the berry shrubs were a bit overwhelmed by wildflowers in the spring and produced only about 10 actual berries over the entire season. I also put some plants in a shady corner of a raised vegetable bed and in a half-shaded pot with Jasmine on the terrace – they produced some very nice fruit up to the end of November.

The grapevine “Venus” did well this year and produced several nice bunches of small grapes in mid-July. There were quite a few dried up grapes in the bunches due to the July heatwave (the vine is also planted along a light-colored wall).