Fruit Victims Asparagus is a good crop this year ;
but it will have to be a very good one indeed to atone for the losses on fruit. I walked about one beautiful plum orchard near Evesham and failed to discover one single set fruit. The frost has made a clean sweep of the crop. Except here and there in peculiarly favoured spots of the Vale there are, literally and in fact, no plums. It is not a question of a decimated but of an annihilated crop. The successive frosts left no survivors. Such destruction is, happily, very rare. Personally I do not remember any frost that has been so destructive, not of vegetable, but of animal life. To my own knowledge rooks, blackbirds and robins have been killed and a number of other species found dead. The cause was probably frost following semi-starvation due to drought and the hardness of the ground, that defied even the stoutest beak.
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