Me Revolutionary? Apparently I am

According to my neighbours I am the rather revolutionary one in our terrace. I live in a terrace of ten houses where the ages are equally split between half of us not owning a bus pass whilst the other half have their bus passes.  All the back gardens are fairly open with only waist high fences or hedges separating us. Not the most private of spaces but it does have a communal spirit when were all out in the gardens chatting over the fences.

So when I bucked the trend of back gardens full of flowers with the odd tomato or herb plant and went with digging up most of my garden to plant vegetables it caused a few raised eyebrows.

With the severe lack of privacy settings it does mean that the communal path that runs along the back is the ideal place for the neighbours to note and comment on my success rate. No pressure then. Imagine then the comments when I started to grow a plant in a container that none of them had seen before. There was finger pointing and muttering till someone asked what it was. A melon pear.  For those who are the gardening type its proper name is Pepino or Solanum muricatum.

Never heard of it? Nor had I till a few months ago.  A melon pear is …according to the blurb … an ideal plant for containers on your patio. It will delight you blue flowers before producing fruits the size of pears but taste like melons. I decided to give it a go as my two children love melon but growing melons in a back garden isn’t really yield productive as they need a lot of space. This seemed an ideal compromise.

Mine is still thinking about delighting me with blue flowers but it is teasing me with small flower buds. The pressure is on for it to fruit. If I am not successful with the fruit I think I will be downgraded from revolutionary, by the neighbours, and merely called mad. If, though, I am successful I will be chuffed to say the least.

 

The picture isn’t my melon pear but what mine will hopefully look like soon. Thought it a bit more interesting than just a picture of a bush thinking about what to do next.