Doing what the honeybee does.

The sweet cherries and pears are blooming nicely. It's chilly and rainy outside at the moment. I didn't stay outside very long. I have a bad cold.

This is a 5-variety pear tree. I played the honeybee, using a paintbrush, taking pollen from flower to flower. With compact trees, it's easy to pollenate several dozen flowers in 10 minutes. That's plenty. Pears require pollination from a different variety. With a multigraft tree such as this one, I can go from variety to variety without going from tree to tree. The pollen is a bit wet. I don't know if that's good or bad.

I found the label for the Asian pear combo tree. The varieties from bottom to top are Shinseiki, Yonashi, Hamese, and Mishirasu. One is missing, I think Yonashi. Stock is OHxF 97

Backyard Orchard: The payoff!

Studying diligently for my recertification, not spending time in the garden. Always some reason to neglect it! That's one of the great things about the backyard orchard - it doesn't need care at the time of harvest, and the harvest is great if the weather permits and prior preparation was good.

Late frost and chilly spring meant a lot of grapes didnt set. Even so, there are plenty odf sweet flavorful grapes to eat now and for the next month or so.

Tomatoes are doing great! The delay just made them all the sweeter in my mind!

Oh man, the pears! Luscious, sweet, a dessert in eveyr bite! Eating one every day.

Still some Asian pears remaining. I think they'll last a little longer on the tree while I eat the European pears. The first of the asian pears were wonderful!

I don't know if I posted on the Trilite peaches, now they are long gone. Very good! Now the genetic dwarf peach is almost ripe, a bit crunchy and slightly tart but very peachy!

Peppers are the best I've ever grown! Container gardening rocks for these warm season plants! THe eggplants are producing as well! Cool!

Fruit trees: Apple blossoms, tart cherry blooms, pears have set.

Technically, this counts as "Kitchen garden" but I'm keeping the "backyard orchard" in a somewhat separate category. Plus, apple blossoms are ornamental in their own right, even if the trees don't bear fruit. Same for the tree forms, which become increasingly beautiful and gnarled with age, starting fairly early.

Asian pears have set fruit. This is the 3-variety tree planted Spring 2009.

Second variety, different coloration. All 3 have set. Cool! They'll need thinning in a few weeks, I'll keep them to one fruit to a spur.

Golden Delicious. I think this was a semidwarf, not a minidwarf. It is too vigorous. This is the first year with significant blooming. Last year there was one cluster of flowers. This is the best blooming year ever! Cool!

May not look like much, but this was just planted last month. This is Karmijm. We'll see how it looks next year, and the year after. If it blooms, I really should remove any potential fruit, to allow for growth this year. Same for the new Honeycrisp, which as discussed before was little more than a stick with a root. That one will definitely not be allowed to set any fruit this year, if it blooms.

This little tree needs a stake placed before the roots get growing too much, so that I don't damage roots. All minidwarf apple trees need a stake for support.

Jonagold. This is becoming a handsome specimen, with beautiful flowers. Last year was quite fruitful. No every-other-year bearing in this backyard-orchard-culture 'orchard'. About 6 ft tall.

I need to move the stake so that the tree doesn't lean so much. Not a problem now, but she apples weigh it down, I'd like for it to be better balanced.

Liberty. Also increasingly beautiful, year after year. Still only about 5 ft tall.

Northpole. Beautiful specimen! Last summer, fall, winter, I pruned it right, finally! This year I intend to be more diligent about protecting the apples from insects (little socks for the apples), and trim to one apple per spur, and pick them when ripe!

"Surefire" tart cherry (pie cherry). I planted this tree late winter, 2009. It's blooming. How cool is that! Probably not enough this year for a pie, but assuming they set, there'll be enough for a good taste of cherries. Maybe we'll get a pie from in in 2011, at this rate!

Backyard orchard culture. Trees in Bloom

We're now in the "second wave" of blossoms in our backyard-orchard-culture "orchard". The apricots have finished blooming - I don't know, the frost may have killed branches and prevented fruit set, we'll see. If the trees die, that's it - no more attempts at apricots. They are not well suited for this climate.

The peaches have a few blossoms now, but are leafing out. Soon, I'll want to dig up the peach seedling and find a better location for it to grow into a tree. As a nongrafted, seedling, genetic dwarf, it's a complete gamble. If nothing else, they have beautiful flowers.

The plums are done as well. It's too soon to see if fruit set - with some of the cold nights in the past month, it's possible they didn't. This is only their second leaf, so any fruit would be a surprise.

Asian Pear, 3-way graft. Oh, it will be so great if a few fruits set. Not too many - it's only in its second leaf. The flowers are lovely.

The 5-way European pear. This year we'll thin more. It's developing a nice spur structure, repeat clusters of blossoms. Responding very well to the backyard culture method of summer pruning to hold to size, which means no standing on ladders is needed.

Awesome clusters of cherry blossoms. Some are in full bloom, others not quite there yet. Again, the sweet cherries are responding very well to the pruning philosophy. I really didn't know if it would work. It's working great for these trees. This tree was allowed to grow a bit too tall for backyard orchard culture, but before it got out of hand I pruned it back. It's a 3-way graft, so pollinates itself. I usually play the bee and travel among blossoms with a paintbrush, but it's too rainy for that. I hope the real bees do the job.

More sweet cherries.


Another experiment, this one in its infancy. These are seedlings, from wild cherries collected last fall. The wild cherries grow very tall, too tall to be practical in a yard. Why not see if they can be kept compact by severe pruning? I don't know if it's possible, but if it is, we would have wild cherries within reach, and fruiting at a time when other cherries are done. These are just beginning life - who knows how many years this will take.

Harbingers of Spring. Two New Fruit Trees. Phenology.

The small narcissus are always first. I think that some were lost last year - I remember more. Still, great to see them blooming.

The Aprium is one of the first trees to bloom in my yard - right there with the peaches. I think this stage is called "First Pink"

And here are the early peach buds. The bags at least didnt kill the tree. Now to see what happens with our nemesis, leaf curl.

The first of the 2 newest additions, "Surefire" sour cherry. Arrived Tuesday, kept in a cool place overnight, and planted when I came home from work Wednesday (last night). This might have been the only rain-free window of time for a week, so it worked out perfectly.

The other of the 2 newest additions, the multigraft asian pair. I STILL don't know which of the 4 potential varieties are represented on the 3 grafts. The label states "Varieties from bottom to top: Shinseiki, Yonashi, Hamese, Mishirasu". I studied the grafts and decided that one bud did not take, second from bottom, which would be Yonashi. That would leave the 2 smaller, yellow, sweet varieties, one for early aug and one for late Aug, and the large russeted Mishirasu, a September bearing variety. Any combination would be fine. Probably 3 years to know for sure.

More Fruit Tree Orders

Uh Oh....

Last weekend I looked online at Raintree Nursery again. Decided to order two additional trees to grow, using the backyard orchard culture method:

Surefire Cherry. I was thinking about my parent's cherry tree, and realized that I haven't had a pie made from sour cherries for about 30 years. Being into "slow food" - you can't get much slower than starting out with the a small, bare-root tree. OK, you could plant a seed to grow the tree, but I'll be dead before I get cherries from a seed-grown tree. Tree should be here in 1-2 weeks. The 'ideal location' in the backyard was occupied by a rose (Carl Brunner), so yesterday I dug it up and moved it a few feet to the former location of "Angel face", which did not survive the winter and has now joined other Angels in heaven. Well, actually, in compost, but it sounded nice. The location is ready, I added some chicken compost, and will add some eggshells when planting the tree. Some thought actually went into this selection: It blooms later than other cherries. Late frost has been a fruit-tree nemesis, so the later flowering is a bonus. Most sour cherries, including this one, are also self-fertile, so no pollinator variety is needed. They stay fairly compact, especially compared to sweet cherries, so the pruning might be easier as well. IT's on Gisela5 rootstock.

I DID say two trees. I've been developing a taste for asian pears - they are crispy like apples, but have more flavor, like pears. Not enough room for more than one, and most asian pears need a pollinator, so I ordered a multigraft Asian Pear. I won't know the 3 varieties until it arrives. It will be all but one of:

Shinseiki (medium to large, sweet, yellow fruit, late August).
Yoinashi (medium to large, russeted, butterscotch flavor).
Hamese (mid sized, sweet, yellow fruit, mid August).
Mishirasu (large, russetted fruit, late September).

They can't say which if the 4 is missing. If I could pick, I would go for the two sweet yellows and either of the russetted, but any combination is OK with me. Planning for this to go into a front-yard border, possibly in the location of the opuntia (winter did a job on that one too) or eucalyptus (also a winter victim - there is a trend here). I'll have to look at the site from multiple angles to scope out the optimal location.

We already have a multigraft European pear and a multigraft sweet cherry. Some authors are not crazy about multigraft trees, since some varieties may be more vigorous than others, but my feeling is that for trees that need pollinizers, it's a way to achieve that need in one tree. Plus, judicious pruning can keep the most vigorous in check and allow the other varieties some space as well. I've added a couple of unknown variety grafts to the dwarf apple trees, last year. If we are very lucky, they'll bear this year.