There are lots of not great looking flowers on my Zestar apple tree.I think a good portion of the spur flowers on the Zestar tree were killed by cold at some point this spring. I’m hopeful that the 1-year old shoot flowers will look better. My Liberty is at about 50% bloom right now, and Kidd’s Orange Red is at balloon stage.
Hopefully we don’t get clear/cold/calm this weekend.
Also wondering if I’m being too zealous in using sulfur sprays, and it is causing some of this blossom damage. The constant re-applying needed for sulfur is also getting old and I might move to Immunox/Captan next year.
Yes, I did the same thing earlier in the year. the current foliage dried on it, it looked dead, now out of the nodes pushing the brown/dead foliage away is green growth. Don’t ever give up on cuttings early, give them time.
I think decades of growing sub tropical trees in containers has taught me a lot on how to grow these plants. They are much easier than some of the others I have tried. I certainly have killed a lot of plants too, the more you kill, the better gardener you become! The figs look to be continuing on their excellent path this year too. 4 successful grafts too. Which I needed as I seem to really suck at grafting! I was ready to give up. I didn’t and once again grafted all kinds of stuff on my stone fruits, hoping for more takes. I’ll take 2-3 and be ecstatic I had one take last year, and none the year before. It has been a slow painful learning process for me!
Ironic as most say to wait for warmer weather, problem is here it’s not warm till July! So I took the advice of a local and grafted when flowering, hope it works? Others have confirmed in colder climates, you have to graft earlier than in say the Northeast.Where it is a lot warmer than here now. It worked for the figs at least!
LOL! Oh well! I must say when I lose a plant, I like to know why. Frustrating when their is no obvious or apparent reason. When I lose a plant from under watering, The next one I lose is from over watering, you just can’t win!
OK, “tree nerds”, here are some more pics of some recent plantings. I am done with all our fruit trees/plants for the year. Now it’s time to concentrate on veggie matters.
Back orchard after mowing yesterday, looks very clean now. Little peach trees show a good bit of leaves
I purchased 6 peach trees from Vaughn Nursery. Two Intrepids, two Contenders, and two Carolina Golds. Of the 6, all but the 2 Carolina Golds are showing life. Are the Carolina Golds that far behind in dormancy than the other two variety? Just seems a bit strange both the CG peaches are not even doing anything.
I got a bunch of small peach trees this spring from Cumberland Valley Nursery, which is virtually next door to Vaughn’s. They are all acting slow to leaf out here, but all of them are showing modest signs of life, except a Contender (reputed to be one of the toughest of all varieties; ironic). The Contender looks sad. It took me a week or two to get these in the ground and the roots may have dried a bit. I’m still confident they’ll all pull through (if we’d ever get another good round of rain again). Peaches are rugged and vigorous. If given a chance, they thrive.
I have a seedling peach tree that has 2 flowers blooming…it also has a branch of Saturn full of blooms (budded on summer 2015). I’m guessing the seedling fruit will be nectarines. It stinks because they are at the top of a very tall branch i want to cut off…but now with fruit up there i’ll leave it.
Nice thing about seedlings…they don’t work…graft them over or cut them down…no loss.
I have a Contender from Henry Fields that is just sitting there. Little thing…not sure what the deal is…maybe it was very dormant.
Or grow them for rootstock, even if not budding, it will work. A good splice graft on a thin rootstock will work well I bet. It would be a way to get whole trees cheap. I tried to germinate about 9 seeds, only 3 came up, and this was the best grower. Since Indian Free is not self fertile, this is a cross, and not a throwback to one parent or the other. So chances are fairly good peach will be good to awesome. If it’s super good, I’ll plant another to use as a utility tree.
With regular grafts, I could do a bud graft of anything I happen to have. Now if I was only better at grafting!
The other two seedlings will be grown in pots. I may use as rootstock, or grow out. I would rather use something else as rootstock, like my nectaplum might make a good rootstock having plum and nectarine in it’s genes. I may be able to use it for plums. I think you could anyway.
I put one in to but used Archer, I ended up with 50 of them, only ordered 25. I donated the other 25 to a new small community garden, if any of the growers want them. I did trade a few for Rutger’s Scarlet too! I also added one AC Wendy and one Mesabi. I’m going to put these on either side of a new blueberry bed. I got a Spartan Blueberry from Brady, and if I can keep it alive it will go in the bed. I transferred it twice now, and it’s not happy with me. I swear I have killed a number of blueberries. Well 3 so far. I do have 9 now, and will probably add 2 more. Only 4 are in ground.
I have done this blueberry/strawberry thing to all my beds. After I killed my Toro, I bought another as this is a super sweet berry. Not firm though, kinda soft, but it is super sweet, heck even green berries are sweet on this one. here is the Toro I put in last year, holy moly it grew like crazy!
One of three garlic beds behind it, On the right in pots is two dwarf everbearing mulberries I rooted from cuttings, and one Silk Hope that is holding on, but most likely will fail. I also put a few onions in the bed as I grow from seed and had hundreds of onion seedlings!
I’m also adding two Reine des Vallees red Alpine strawberry plants. These form no runners, are very productive, (probably the most productive alpine right ahead of Alexandria) forming large clumps you can split up. They will be grown in containers. Alpines are so good, and with enough of these plants you can get a decent amount.
Today for the first time ever, I noticed these brown globules all over my cedar tree which is just about 100 feet from my young orchard. It took me a few minutes before it hit me: Cedar Apple Rust!!! (right or not?). As I understand it, something (pollen?) from the apple trees floats over the the cedar tree. Then the cedar tree produces these brown things, which in turn release something that floats BACK to the apple tree and causes problems and ugly apples. I know that is a 3rd grade level of understanding, but is that generally how it works?
Can someone confirm if, in fact, that is what these things are? My ceder is a giant one and is covered in these things for the first time, so I’m very curious about CAR all of a sudden!
