The Fruit or the fruits?

I told my friend Euan about my blog and he raised a valid point. Is Paul in Galatians refering to one single fruit when he talks of the fruit of the Spirit or is he using fruit in the plural, such as 'Would you like some fruit?' (You wouldn't say fruits now would you?) I could favour both interpretations. For as I said in my first blog the Spirit living within us naturally produces these characterisitcs as long as we ensure we are living by him, in other words following his leading and by the Spirit giving every part of our day up to God for if the acts of the sinful nature come from living for ourselves then logically the acts of righteousness must come from living life under the constant guidance of a perfect being.

You could see the appearance of these characteristics as the growing of one whole fruit with nine pieces or you could see them as 9 fruit growing on a tree the point is that they all come from the same source and they are all available to us once we have accepted the Spirit into our lives. The first fruit is under construction and there maybe quite large gaps between each blog coming out this is only because I really want to get to grips with a Biblical understanding of these fruit/this fruit.