Orchard People

[00:00:00] Introduction and Confession
Susan: Hey everybody, I have a bit of a confession to make. I have never grown medlar trees. I don't know much about them at all. I haven't seen the medlar fruit in my grocery store.
I've never seen it at a farmer's market. But once I started reading about these really unusual fruits, I was really intrigued. These old English fruits are full of history. They are full of character and apparently they taste great too. But the best way to get your hands on this fruit is to grow the medlar tree yourself.
And so today we're gonna find out a lot more about them.
[00:00:39] Meet Jane Steward: Medlar Expert
Susan: I'm going to be talking to Jane Steward. She is the author of a wonderful book called Medlars - Growing and Cooking. And Jane, in her own backyard on her own property, has a National Collection of medlar varieties. This is in North Norfolk in the United Kingdom.
So we are going to dive into what makes medlar so special, how to grow these trees, how to prune them, and why more of us should be planting them in our backyards and in our orchards. So we're gonna go into the interview in just a minute, but first, if you are watching us on YouTube, please click the like button, click the subscribe button, and put your questions and comments in the comments box, and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.
You can also follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Orchard People. And finally, for more information on today's topic, hang around until the end of the show and I'm going to share some resources with you so you can follow up with more information. But for now, Let's chat with Jane. Jane, welcome to the show today.
Jane: Hello Susan, and thank you so much for inviting me to be part of your lovely series of podcasts.
Susan: I understand that you are one of the most passionate people when it comes to medlars. So if I'm gonna ask anybody this question, it's you.
[00:02:00] What Are Medlars?
Susan: And that is, what are medlars? Why haven't I heard about them before?
Jane: Medlars are close cousins of apples, pears, which we all know, and quinces, which are increasingly fashionable again. and the medlar, as a fruit, shares some characteristics of these three other fruits.
They're are hints of apple sauce in a fully ripened, soft, fragrant, bletted is the term, medlar. There's a slight graininess to the flesh, which can be reminiscent of the pear. And for some people who are less keen on pears, that can actually deter them from falling in love with a medlar, which I quite understand because, texture is as important as taste when we are eating.
And in terms of similarity to the quince. they tend to get bundled together in people's imaginations. The number of times I've been asked if a quince is a medlar or vice versa would make me a very rich woman if I got a pound every time I was asked this question.
[00:03:03] Growing Medlar Trees
Jane: And I would say that the medlar is worth being aware of because it is dead easy to grow.
You've already very kindly suggested that the easiest way to lay your hands on medlars is to grow a tree. They are easy, straightforward, undemanding trees to grow. They do really well in temperate four through eight in the northern hemisphere and the equivalent in the southern hemisphere. And they are beautiful.
They are beautiful coming into leaf right now. Flowers coming in May, and the fruits move through several color phases from greenish through to golden brown, through to much darker brown when they're fully ripe. And they add because they're unusual. They add diversity to our guts.
And because they're unusual as a tree, they add diversity to our gardens or our plots, as you would say in North America.
Susan: They're funny looking. Can you describe that?
Jane: Yes I can. and the polite way of describing a medlar is, certainly from one end of the fruit, you have quite a distinctive calyx end.
That is the end where the flower would've been. And, in France, this, fruit is known as a cul de chien, which sounds a great deal, more attractive than dog's bottom, which is for how it translates in English. I think the other thing I need to get outta the way right now is that when the fruit is ready to eat and it's fully ripe, fragrance soft, bletted, the flesh is brown.
I can't think of another fruit. even figs aren't really brown, are they? They're purplish or maybe greenish on the inside. But the brownness of the medlar when it is ripe and ready to eat is visually offputting. And we have been programmed, I think certainly over recent decades to be very wary of anything that is brown because we have been persuaded by growers and retailers that there is such a thing as a perfect fruit.
I query that. But we've been persuaded of this and there are many people who would say that actually a brown fruit deserves to go on the compost heap. End of story.
Susan: So we've got this funny looking dog's bottom fruit that's brown inside. But it has some interesting flavors. I guess it's sweet.
Do you eat it raw or is it something you're gonna make jam out of it and put it on the shelf?
Jane: This is the great thing about medlars. They are versatile. They make very delicious as well as distinctive looking table fruit. There's one particular cultivar, which I know is very popular when people have had the chance to taste it. and the growers sell out of it. It's called the Iranian medlar, which is actually designed, grafted, to ripen fully on the tree, and you can actually eat it straight from the tree in late October through mid-November. Medlars also cook beautifully. You can make fantastically fragrant jellies. Delicious chutney.
You can make medlar fruit pastes, medlar butters. You can bake with them, you can make ice creams with them. I make a medlar syrup with the, fruit stock after boiling and then straining the fruit And the versatility of this fruit is something that I try to bring to life through the 32 recipes that are included in the book that I wrote a couple of years ago.
Quinces, on the other hand, just to touch briefly on them, you can't eat a quince as a table fruit. It does always need to be processed and it's quite a challenging fruit to work with because it is hard and I always think of it as being rather perilous 'cause you've got to take a knife to it, unless you have another means of bringing it to a state of softness to turn it into something else.
Susan: So a medlar really sounds like a nice addition to a collection of fruit trees, whether it's in your backyard or in your orchard. Can you get fruit if you have only one of them, or do you need to have a cross pollination partner for the tree?
Jane: We're straight onto the ease of growing medlars.
You need just one because they are self fertile.
So For me, the medlar is heaven sent, and the flowers are beautifully structured to appeal to passing pollinators. the medlar is a member of the rose family Rosaceae, which as anybody will tell you, is a vast array of species. And the five petal flowers open up pretty well, flat.
And there are these lovely little, they're creamy white and the lovely yellow stamens, and they're waving away to all the passing pollinators saying, stop by. There's good stuff to be had here. Perfect for honeybees is how I would describe them, although any pollinator will do.
Susan: In terms of medlar, what are the pest and disease problems that you are more likely to be fighting with?
[00:08:07] Medlar Tree Pests and Diseases
Jane: They're actually pretty pest and disease free. Okay. There are of course exceptions and I have become aware that air circulation. Around, and within orchards, particularly where you have a lot of trees, air circulation is really important for all fruit trees.
And I know that quince blight, if you've got a mixed orchard, you need to be watchful for quince blight. And if quince blight is present, it can, it doesn't always, but it can find its way across to the medlar. They are cousins after all, and as we know, transmission can occur. but I haven't experienced anything like that.
And I've got an orchard of 117 medlar trees in five different locations on our six acre plot of land. What I do feel very strongly, is that they're, they need to have, good air flow around them and good air flow within the tree. So they do love to grow in a quite a congested higgledy-piggeldy way. So I've just completed my Uncrossing of badly crossing situations, not to create something I could throw a hat through, which is always the guidance for an apple tree.
But just to open up the spaces a little bit. Do you know that expression "ma" in relation to space in Japanese? It's the space between that can really make things their most beautiful. So we're not going for that look, but I'm conscious that a little bit of space within the crown of the tree is helpful.
And I have made sure that all our deciduous hedges that surround some of our orchard rooms with the medlar trees in, have had a very vigorous regenerative cut this winter 'cause everything grows really well here and you put things into the ground and before you know it, they're standing eight feet tall.
And you're wondering why on a certain type of day, it feels as though there's no air moving around. So I'm very airflow conscious. pests, pigeons, when we first spoke last week, I was partway through my big, bird scare tape application phase. and this is a glinty, silvery colored tape that rattles and makes a huge noise even in a slight breeze.
We have lots of pigeons around here. We live in farmland, farming country. And there are loads of pigeons. I mean there just are loads of them and I've seen them lining up on the hedges, waiting for the leaves to appear on the medlar trees. But they don't like the bird scare tape.
So that is the biggest pest for me at this time of year because they like the lovely fleshy green of the new leaves and they're the first fruit trees to come into leaf. So every country will have its own native, pigeons might be a problem in some parts of the temperate zones elsewhere around the world, but there could easily be, I think it's cockatoos down in the Antipodes, for example, rather than pigeons, but other pests, squirrels, we have loads of squirrels here. They don't take any interest at all in the medlar trees. They're not interested in the fruit at any stage. Wasps are not interested in medlars. They ignore them. it's just fantastic. They are, from that point of view, if you've had a warm enough spring to get some pollination, you are very likely to end up with a handsome crop at the end of the summer.
There's very little that can interfere with that. Even in 2022, when we had 40 degree temperatures at the height of summer in July, the worst thing that happened to the fruit was that some of it got a little bit of sunburn on one side. Okay. But, it didn't result in fruit cascading to the ground or anything of that sort.
and there are no structure, what I call fungal diseases that come up through the roots. we've got fundamentally a very adaptable, quite resilient and tough, beautiful tree producing fruit that is unusual. Adding diversity both in the orchard and in the kitchen.
[00:12:39] Pruning Medlar Trees
Susan: So you've been talking a little bit about pruning and, you talk about opening the air circulation. Obviously with apple tree pruning, there are strategies to create the form with these trees. First of all, are they always trees? Can they be shrubs? And is it just a matter of going in and removing entire branches that are obstructing the air circulation?
Or are you ever shortening branches, heading them back?
Jane: So what do I do? I stand back and have a jolly good look at the tree and
my orchard is made up of half standards, on hawthorn rootstock. And these trees look rather like lollipops, when they reach their maturity and they will achieve a height of maybe somewhere between 10 and 12 feet. Okay? You can get a multi stem, tree grafted onto a rootstock, whether it's hawthorn or quince, and you can control the way that tree grows.
And I'm talking about Quince A rootstock here. If you have a very small plot or a backyard terrace, courtyard garden, for example. You could try and get hold of Quince C root stock and produce a really quite compact tree that might not stand much more than six feet in height and would produce a manageable quantity of fruit, maybe 50 or 60 fruits after about five years.
So for, a couple, a small family with an interest in medlar, but not with a desire to produce lots of preserves, that could be a really good choice in the wild. And I have seen an example of, a wild medlar, so not grafted. two things strike me. One is that they naturally want to grow as a bush.
Secondly, they're very thorny, which is what medlars are like in the wild. And thirdly, the fruits are tiny. They're like acorns. In fact, they have the same look of an acorn. So they're quite distinct and different. So really if you want to have a bush structure, go for a multi stem and you can do what you want with it.
Medlars are quite forgiving, I have to say. Now you asked a question about pruning. Pruning. You don't need to aim for a leader. There's a lot of convention around tree growing. Having a leader is regarded as being quite important when you have a half standard as I have. And they are very pretty.
They will naturally crown up from a point which you select by virtue of rubbing off the buds below that point. And the tree will naturally find its own way over successive. So let's say it'll be two years old. By the time you've got your hands on your lovely young tree, by the time it's three or four years old, the crown will have thickened out and it will, at the end of the summer, be showing signs of these long water or lammas shoots.
These are vegetative, medlar are tip fruiting. So the one thing that you do not do with a medlar is to start fiddling about with bits that are sticking out. Be patient. Trust that the medlar knows what it is doing. we are not experts. I think humans actually have a great deal still to learn about all sorts of things.
So I've learned through experience to just leave them be. The orthodoxy says that if you've got lots of these water shoots reaching for the sky, that you should reduce them. You should remove them because of the pigeon problem. Remember my talking about that a minute ago? I leave those, quite a lot of them, if not all of them, depending on the tree.
Leave those vegetative shoots there because, if a pigeon is just determined to stop by and have a munch, have a fly past, have a bite of one of those up there. But leave the main body of the tree, alone, please. Does that sort of sound like a clear enough answer and the crossing over, you have to trace back.
I can see a problem high up there and I have to trace it back and trace it back. And if I think that there is definitely a structural crossing that needs to be addressed, then I will take out the length of wood close to a growing point with secateurs or my Silky saw, depending on the thickness of the branch, it can feel like a big moment, but actually once I've got that out, I can say, "oh gosh, yes." You can almost feel the tree sighing with a bit of relief. So I regard this as being, appreciation, evaluation, and then a little bit of tweaking.
Susan: So you said so many interesting things here. First of all, this is a tip bearing tree. So if somebody was to say, Hey, this tree is sprawling a little bit too much, I wanna just take in and shorten all the branches and make a nice lollipop shape. You are probably pruning off all your opportunity to have fruit.
Correct. So you don't wanna do that. Okay. Uhhuh. So you don't want to do the heading back cuts, which I talk about. I've got a new book that just came out. Fruit Tree Pruning: The Science and Art of Cultivating Healthy Fruit Trees. And so I talk a lot about the two different pruning cuts and heading back is one of them not desirable with medlar.
So that's a good first lesson. The second lesson was you're talking about improving air circulation. You're not concerned if there's one central stem, like a Christmas tree. You can have as many stems as you want. But you just go in and look to see if there's two branches crossing with each other that's going to obstruct air circulation.
And you'll go in there with your hand saw or with your pruners and you will remove one of the offending branches. Healthy or not. It might be healthy now, but it's obstructing and then the tree says, ah, thank you. Thanks mom. So, that's great. The other interesting thing that you talk about is, since this is a grafted tree, the form will depend very much on the root stock you choose.
So it sounds to me like you have what we call here, semi dwarf trees. You call them half standards. Standard is a very big tree. Half standard means it's gonna be not super big, but it's not gonna be a little dwarf tree either.
Jane: Sure.
Susan: And that was interesting as well. And the other thing you talk about is rubbing off the little sprouts that are anywhere below where you want your tree to have branches. So that means that if you don't want branches that are like six inches above the ground and that are gonna drag onto the ground and you can't do anything underneath, you can just rub them off when you're young. Yeah. So with those strategies, you can allow the tree to, to create the shape, whatever shape it wants to be.
Yeah. You just decide where your first branches are and take it from there. Rub anything off below that. Boom. yeah. And you're done.
Jane: It's that easy. This is something of a revelation. I'd never thought until I got into this, how a crown formed on a tree. And I started with a series of maiden trees.
Many of them came from the same nursery. So essentially they were I identical. And yet they're rather like children, they start with the same genetic ingredients, but hey one's got curly hair and one's got straight hair and off we go. And it's the same with medlar trees. The crowns have formed in slightly different ways and it's only when, as I have done over the last three weeks, spend a lot of time really hanging out up close with them, I appreciate, again, their individual characteristics. They have taken their own form that what makes them so beautiful. Elbows sitting out here and a shoulder blade up there, and branches doing this, that and something else. And then there are some that seem to have got a rule book from somewhere that says, oh, actually we're going to grow in a very orthodox, neat and tidy way and Jane won't have to do anything to me, it does happen.
Susan: So we talked about the pruning. We talked a little bit about rootstock and how that determines the size of your medlar tree. Your medlar fruit tree.
[00:21:23] Medlar Tree Varieties and National Collection
Susan: The next thing I wanna discuss is the different cultivars and, while I discuss this, you have a National Collection in the UK. That's a big deal.
Plant Heritage is an organization in the UK and they have found you somehow, Jane. And they said Jane has a National Collection of medlar. What does that mean? Does that mean you have lots of varieties or just a whole bunch of trees or what?
Jane: Okay. It's a numbers game in the sense that you have to have at least two examples of each of the cultivars that you want to include in your collection.
, Plant Heritage, which is the charity, the umbrella for the National Collections across the UK, is about plant conservation. It's very easy for things to fall out of favor or, to the edge of awareness. And then suddenly bang, it's become . extinct, okay. And that is a complete disaster.
And medlar is already, at the edge of people awareness. I think in 2017 when a survey was done in the UK, only 7% of people who were consulted in this 2000 person survey, knew what a medlar was. So we're talking about something here that nearly 10 years ago was on the edges of awareness and was economically about as insignificant as a fruit could be.
So Plant Heritage were quite happy when I actually, I approached them to ask whether there would be interest, in my applying for National Collection status. And it was my job to define what the collection was going to be. I was already running my little business Eastgate Larder making preserves, which I was selling in person and through small food independent businesses.
[00:23:09] Ensuring the Survival of the Medlar
Jane: And, they were thrilled because they said one of the greatest ways of ensuring the survival of any species is to use the produce that it, in the case of a fruit tree, produces. So the fact that all my fruit goes into my business is a really big plus for the viability of the medlar, as they see it, at the charity level.
And I decided that I wanted to have not only, put in the garden, put in the kitchen.
[00:23:40] Choosing and Identifying Cultivars
Jane: So my collection is defined as a horticultural and culinary collection, and I decided which cultivars I wanted to include. That is, if anybody looks at the RHS, the Royal Horticultural Society plant list for the species, Mespilus germanica, which is the Latin binomial for the medlar that we're talking about, you'll see a list of about 20 to 25 cultivars. My hunch is that a lot of those are synonyms. They're not actually genetically distinct at all. This is a big piece of work that is still to be done, which I want to take on, maybe not immediately, but within a short period of time.
So I settled on identifying, the cultivars I wanted to have were things like the Common Dutch, which has been around for a long time. The Large Dutch, which as its name suggests, is quite a big and chunky fruit. The Large Russian, which has been very difficult to get hold of, but I have now got two Large Russians, and the third tree I gave to a local regenerative farm to add to their mixed orchard 'cause I want to see how, it's very close by, but how the trees will do in different contexts. Then I've got the Iranian, which is my number one favorite for table eating. So I don't cook with that, ever. They're never allowed in the pot. They're strictly dessert fruit.
Then we've got, the Flanders Giant, which is similar to the Large Dutch, but not identical, even larger leaves, but not quite such a large fruit. There's a really pretty little one, with hints of cinnamon and satsuma are called Breda named after a town in the Netherlands. There's the Westerveld, which is a slightly larger round medlar, which looks irritatingly like the Macrocarpa and the Royal, which was introduced into the UK in the 1850s.
Are these genetically distinct? I don't know. They look, the facial recognition problems are huge with medlar, particularly these medium sized, round, quite closed calyx examples. The ones I've already listed are actually quite difficult to distinguish among. The Iranian is very distinct. It looks like a sort of teardrop Large Dutch easy.
The Flanders Giant leaves help. Do you see what I'm saying? You've got some easy ones. The one that everybody knows globally is the Nottingham, and that's the one that I think looks like a UFO. What's a UFO doing in the orchard? I think it looks like a UFO 'cause it's got a really open and flat calyx and quite often there's a little chunk missing, so it's not perfectly round.
It tends to be slightly shallower. It's less obviously round. So this open calyx saying, Hey, look at me and look, I've got this bit missing. Hey, I'm a Nottingham. Nobody can tell me why it's called Nottingham. Even people in Nottingham can't tell me that, but hey, that's what it's called. so, those are some examples of the cultivars, if not exhaustive.
I think that might even be all of them. Somebody will be counting as I've been talking, so I might have got them all there. oh no, there's a Bredase Reus. See, I knew I'd missed one out. That's another round one. is it the same as the Westerveld? Is it the same? So this genetic work, this DNA work, is the thing that is actually quite important.
And when that's been all been bottomed out, I will then approach the RHS and ask them if they'd like to have this information and they can then review their cultivar
Susan: So let's say somebody is convinced and they're ready to buy and plant a medlar fruit tree. where would you get it from and what time of the year is the best time to plant? And what are the ideal conditions for this tree?
[00:27:47] Growing Conditions and Planting Tips
Jane: Let's start with the ideal conditions.
Ideal conditions are not maritime. So they like to be, they're land lovers. They will grow well nearby, water. So one of the natural homelands for the medlar is actually the area between the Caspian and the Black Seas in the Caucasus. So think Northwest Iran and Eastern Turkey. Okay. They like neutral to slightly acid soil.
So we're talking pH five and a half to eight, that sort of band area. So very much middle ground. Rather like humans, they like a sheltered sunny spot. they don't like a howling gale coming at them. and if they are growing in that kind of context, they will lean I think a little bit. not much likes to be growing in a howling gale.
They do very well growing up against, in a very sheltered spot up against a wall. So in summers, like last years, the trees that did really well in terms of fruiting were actually those that were growing on south or west facing walls. and I do know a few trees around in Norfolk that have got those kind of conditions.
They do need, and this isn't always consistent, the month of May is when the flowers are out. So we like ideally to have temperatures that are, around a minimum of 12 degrees centigrade. So what would that be about 50 something in. Fahrenheit, you've got to have pollinators able to fly and land and take off again.
So if you're in single digit centigrade, that's not good for the bees, certainly not for the honeybees. So that's growing conditions. They're very easy to plant. If you get hold of a nice one or 2-year-old maiden bare root, try to get hold of that at a time of year. I know that your geography is likely to be quite snowy for a large part of the winter, so you might still be hoping to get things into the ground around now.
in the UK we don't get deep ground frosts in the way historically that we did, thanks to climate change or because of climate change. so I planted my large Russians when they arrived in the second week of February. We get a little bit of night frost, but we weren't having rock hard ground during the day.
Normally bare root trees, and this is a very good way of getting them to take off like a rocket, they're ideal to plant between December and the end of March. You might be able to push it slightly depending on your geography and your microclimate into early April. And the thing that they love most is to have a nice square hole and you want to get your root stock grafting point to the tree pretty well level with the soil. And into the hole goes
a bucket of water, in goes some, a mixture of compost leaf mold. And I like a mix of partially rotted wood chip because that brings a load of fungal growth into the hole. Now you can buy commercial micorrhizae and dip your roots in that and then pop that in the ground. I found that planting the trees here that I have in the way that I've just described, using this homemade mix of compost, leaf mold and wood chip has brought enough into the planting hole that my trees, are really taking off quite nicely.
So I've got my eight year olds planted in 2017. They're now standing 10 to 11 feet high, and they've been resized once the thing that I've learned about this is that, if you have a bad summer, a bad season without a lot of fruit, and you feel disappointed and frustrated, the chances of having another summer like that are quite low.
And I discovered that the work that's been done under the ground by the roots in a summer like that has been absolutely phenomenal. And the next year is quite often followed by a huge spurt of growth and a lot of fruit. And in response to that, I have had to resize, starting at the top with those long shoots that I was talking about earlier, but never cutting off those fruiting tips.
Susan: So when you're planting your medlar tree, you say you put all this good stuff into the hole, now you're mixing it with the native soil, am I right? You're not just putting it so you've got a mix of the native soil plus the leaf mold, plus a little bit of wood chips, hopefully from a healthy tree.
You plant your tree, you're planting in the spring. Your spring is gonna be a different time than our spring here. With an apple tree, you start off with a whip cut. Especially obviously with a bare root tree. Would you do a whip cut on a medlar or whatever you get from the nursery? That bare root tree. Just leave it be you do a whip cut. Do you?
Jane: A whip, I'm talking about something that just looks like a twig with a root system. Yes.
Susan: So do you give it one cut when you plant after you plant it
Jane: Oh, it depends on how tall it is.
My large Russians arrived standing about four feet tall. I didn't touch them, but I've had some in the past that arrive eight feet tall. So yes, I cut them down to a point where I think I cut them down to about my height and I'm five foot six. so I could look them in the eye as it were. And then I had them crowning at just below that point from about five feet or four foot six.
Susan: That does make sense. And that's very interesting because that's a high crown. Like with an apple tree, you might want it a little bit lower waist height or whatever. But what you're basically saying is wherever you want your first branches to be, you can head it back or shorten it to that height.
Jane: Absolutely.
Susan: It sounds like these trees are tough and flexible and they work with you, not against you if you love them.
Jane: Yes. And the wood is slow growing. they're described as slow growing trees. In my experience, they seem to, if they get their roots down and they're happy, they seem to want to take off like a rocket and actually can be trying to push out flowers and fruit in year three and four easily. And again, you need to be mindful of the fact that you want there to be a good network of rootage. It's what happens below the soil line that matters most with a happy fruit tree.
[00:34:46] Medlar in Gourmet Cuisine
Susan: Now I understand that, medlar the fruit are becoming increasingly fashionable and that gourmet chefs are using it.
Have you actually met any gourmet chefs, like fancy people who are on television and stuff who wanted to know more about the medlar?
Jane: Through the wonders of Instagram I have become aware of, these are British based chefs. I'm afraid that I don't have knowledge, of Canada and the United States and Australian in terms of named chefs.
But in the UK there are food writers such as Nigel Slater, who does have a reputation. He has a medlar tree, and he's published recipes that he likes to make. There's a food writer and gardener called Mark Diacono, who had a small holding down in Devon for many years. One of his recipes, sticky medlar toffee pudding, is one of the all time great winter puddings in my view, and I make that quite often for the family.
It's very popular and you can convert it to being a cake, if you keep the caramel bit outta the baking dish. And then there is, he's not a Michelin star, but he's a wonderfully focused creative seasonal chef in London called Jeremy Lee. He's a Scotsman. Lovely chap. He is a huge fan of medlar and I've given him medlar fruit in the past and he makes medlar tarts.
One of his favorite forms of dessert is a sort of mountainous confection of meringue with delicious, fruity things to go with it and plenty of Creme Anglaise and cream. And he has had those on his menu this winter with medlar featuring as a fruity component in with other things. So yes, there are, and Michel star chefs at places like the Clove Club in Shoreditch.
I've supplied fruit to them via a forager, who I know from Norfolk foraging this sort of, there's the stuff that grows officially and then there's the really fun stuff that is growing along the roadside or in a forest, whether it's a mushroom or an alexander or wild garlic or whatever it might be.
There's real interest in these food groups that are on the edges of what you might find growing on a farm. And we all know, we're told all the time, we need to cut down on the ultraprocessed food. We need to crank up the plant foods and, safe to eat. Plant foods need to be as diverse as we can manage.
And medlar sits full square in that category. It's unusual. People don't have access to it easily, but if they do, they will do themselves a sort of, a digestive favor. They're really great. They can ease one or two digestive problems because of their characteristics. In fact, I, my hunch is that's why humans took an interest in them in the first place.
I don't think even 3000 years ago, humans would've been fundamentally bewitched by a brown fruit. There must have been something else about that fruit, and I think probably by accident has happened so much in life. I'm not saying this is gospel, but you can't rule it out as a possibility By accident, it was discovered that a very ripe medlar sweet, sorbitol rich would help unblock, a constipated tummy.
And the opposite, an un unripe unbletted medlar. Full of pectin would help dry up diarrhea, which still kills in many countries in the world. Not everyone has access to Dioralyte. So there are these features and characteristics that we don't think of primarily, but, food, we are what we eat, but also we can benefit from what we eat if we've got particular challenges.
And there's research being done in Eastern Central Europe, Poland, Romania and Turkey into the merits of medlar, in terms of blood sugar regulation and what is one of the biggest diseases in the modern world, in the first world, it's type two diabetes. The drug's expensive. So if it is possible that having a balanced diet with some elements, that haven't historically been present, then this could be another avenue that might shed more light on the medlar, and it could help make it into a more economically significant fruit than it is at the moment.
[00:39:37] The Bletting Process
Susan: Let's talk now about the bletting process, because that's one step that other fruits you don't have to do. Like with apples, you can either eat them fresh or you pop them in a pot and cook with them.
So medlars have an extra step. Tell me what is bletting?
Jane: Bletting is the naturally occurring process by which the hard, astringent, tannic, pectin rich fruit becomes fully ripe, soft, fragrant, and brown. The pectin disappears and you get sorbitol and sugars in place of the pectin. So from a culinary point of view, if you want to make jellies for example, which I do, you want the bletted fruit because it's got the flavor, but you get none of the pectin.
So I tend to work with a mixture of, unbletted and bletted fruit to get the benefit, to help with the setting process. The point about bletting is that it will eventually occur naturally. Because I'm working on a commercial basis with the fruit, I like to pick the medlars off the trees when they're still hard, but clearly want to start the bletting process.
And I know that because the growing point will have dried out and the fruit will fall very easily to the ground. So if I shake the tree, the fruit will cascade to the ground. And that's a really good sign that the bletting process will kick off very quickly. And I let that happen in a very natural environment.
I have a northeast facing shed on the side of the house, which is open to the elements 'cause I leave the door open and I have ventilated, stackable trays. I pick the fruit straight into those, make my little towers of medlars and bingo. Two weeks, three weeks later, they will be bletted and I can either cook with them or I can pop them into Ziploc freezer bags and stow them in the deep freezer.
So I'm currently making product to sell medlar jelly, medlar chutney, with fruit that was harvested in November last year and was fully bletted by the end of the month and then has been resting in the deep freeze since then..
Medlars will remain sweet and soft and bletted for quite a while. And actually when they are like that, they will keep in the fridge even for 10 days. They're very amenable.
Susan: Just to clarify, bletting means that you're just laying them out and let them sit. You don't have to do anything other than laying them flat so they're not crunching down on each other or weighing down on each other. They're on trays and you leave them be.
Jane: They can be stacked. I can put three kilos into a tray.
They don't need to be lined up. They don't need to be dipped in anything. They're very robust. They will blet away. Bletting, as I say, just describes the naturally occurring exchange process, but it is mysterious. But we are surrounded by things that blet quite naturally without us even thinking, like pears.
Susan: Let's talk about your book now. The book includes recipes. Tell us a little bit about the recipes and what else we'll learn from the book. Are there growing instructions? And what else? And remind us what your book is called.
[00:42:43] Exploring the History of Medlar

Jane: So Medlars - Growing and Cooking is published by Prospect Books, which is a niche publishing house, .
So the medlar was, I thought, a bit of a glaring hole on the bookshelf.
Piecing the history together has been an interesting process and there are some gaps, but from what we do know, it seems likely that it was Roman invaders who brought medlar to England, Britain in the early years of the first century. I dunno, around the middle of that, sometime between then and AD 400, when the Roman Empire collapsed.
We know that because two medlar seeds were found in an archeological dig in 1,903 on the Berkshire Hampshire borders. They're freakishly unlikely, but there were two medlar seeds that were found, and they've been reassessed and confirmed to be Mespilus germanica. So we know that the Romans ate them. We don't know that they cultivated them, but we know that they ate them.
They weren't a staple food. They were probably classed as a luxury food. So that's one thing, and then you've got huge gaps. We've pieced together bits and pieces about the Anglo-Saxons and medlars were on their radar, and they certainly use them as a medicinal food. And then you've got another big gap coming through to the 13th century, which is when we first get evidence of them being cultivated.
By the 16th century, they were being planted in formal gardens. Henry VII wanted them at Hampton Court
and then we get all the way through to the early part of the 20th century, around the time of World War I, when Epicureans were waxing lyrical about the wonders of the medlar as a fruit that goes with all kinds of wine. Just at the same time as the whole of society was going through a sort of spasm after the first world war.
Lives were changing for everyone and more women were beginning to work outside the home, as you've probably already pieced together, medlars are not a straightforward fruit to work with. You've got time and patience and people were already feeling pressed for time, Its chances of remaining a feature of the winter diet in the face of refrigerated fruit coming into the UK, sugar becoming cheaper.
So if you wanted a sweet treat in the winter months, hey you could go and buy a bar of chocolate. Do you see what I'm saying? There were various factors conspiring against it.
Susan: So you've got the history in your book, you've got some recipes.
Yes. So yeah. Where can people find your book?
The book is distributed in North America, so I know that there are copies that are available. So if people want to go into their local bookstore, they should be able to order the book. If it isn't in stock and get it delivered, it should be available through Amazon as well.
Susan: So for the listeners who are listening to
[00:45:40] Wrapping Up and Final Thoughts
Susan: this show, and for those of you who are watching the video, by the time this video is published and aired, we are gonna have an article on orchardpeople.com that talks about some of Jane's top tips that we are talking about in the show today.
In order to find that article, you'll go to orchardpeople.com/best-fruit-trees and you will find our medlar article. We'll have a link to Jane's book. We will highlight a lot of the tips that we're talking about today, and so I'm gonna wrap up the show now.
But Jane, thank you for spending all this time with us. I have learned so much. I don't feel as ignorant as I was in the beginning of the show about medlar, and I'm very intrigued and figuring out if there's a way to sneak one of those into our Orchard Park.

Susan: If you wanna learn more about Fruit Tree Care, here's three things to do. Subscribe to Orchard People on your YouTube channel, and I'll tell you about all the new video podcasts that come out.
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I'll see you then. Bye for now.