Garden Report: Fruit in the Trees

So a couple of weeks ago I prepared a neat little post about the various pieces of fruit coming ripe in the garden, and of course forgot to post it.

We've got a really nice year of fruit coming in. In the Asian pears, we have so much fruit on the trees that I will have to be very aggressive about thinning. Last year, one of the trees lost a major limb because it got so overloaded with fruit, so this is something I'm being vigilant about this year. As you can see, the number of fruits on this branch is ridiculous.

Also probably requiring thinning is the quince, although it does a good job of dropping excess fruit. The thing is, we can really only handle so much quince. Also, I think there might be a touch of fireblight in the upper branches that I have to climb up and prune out. That'll give me a chance to thin it out a bit while I'm there.

And here we have an apple. There are some apples on the older apple trees this year, like this one, but also a few on the new apple trees. I should really thin those off, but I'm excited about getting an apple we can eat this year so I won't. If this kills the tree or stunts its growth, you can all say you told me so.

The bad news in the garden is the nectarines and peaches. Not their fruit, which is as robustly overdone as usual, but their leaves, which have peach-leaf curl because I failed to spray them with copper in the winter. I know! I intended to, but never got around to it. And now they will be unwell this year. The infection makes the leaves curl up, so it's kind of like a respiratory illness for a human. My nectarines have asthma, basically. Untreated, it really hurts the tree (mostly by leaving it open to other infections), but for one season it will be OK, though I'll be kicking myself from now until the tree goes dormant.

And finally, the star of May, the cherry. In another week or so the cherries will be in full force in the farmer's markets (we've got an early year this year), and I better get those stupid nets on these trees if I want to see a single piece of fruit in harvest this year. This one is a yellow cherry. If I ever get more than five or six in a harvest, I think I might make a batch of maraschino cherries in a more interesting flavour than the store-bought ones.

Technorati Tags: apples, asian pears, fruit, quince, urban farming

posted by ayse on 05/05/08