The biggest issue I face is the cedar rust. They grow wild at my property and I already cut down like 100 over the years. I still have to keep pulling seedlings.
This affect all my apple and hawthorn trees. I pretty much give up on them. Cedar rust also heavily affect the Asian pear trees I showed above. I was surprised many pears still survived the cedar rust. I may still need to thin some of the deformed pears.
Every year I got some tip damages. I thought it was squirrels. But it turned out to be cicadas. I’ll take a look at F.B. to see my trees were ever impacted.
My wife picked the peaches that were hanging low, she told me the deer were eating them. It was 100 degrees out, I looked out there and thought “do I really need peaches?”. Fortunately she likes the heat, so went and rescued them.
At lunch today it was only 95 degrees out. I picked almost all the remaining Nadia cherry plums, plus the ripe Violette de Bordeaux. I left the ones the wasps were eating. They seem to prefer the ones that are already breached. I figure if I remove those, they’ll just open others.
The Nadia set a very manageable load this year, didn’t require any thinning. Probably could have handled 50% to 100% more easily, but these sized up well. The one I measured the other day was 18 brix:
This is all stuff that dropped off the trees a little early. Most taste good, and the green gages have been great, all 25 brix. Hopefully soon the ones left hanging will be properly ripe and even better.
Castleton and Rosy Gage. Both aren’t ready yet but have been dropping a few that are close. We had a thunderstorm almost every day last week, lots of wind. They soften up after a few days and aren’t bad.
Yeah, I tried drying the green gage and toka and didn’t like them that much. If I don’t pick up the green gage drops right away, they develop some off flavors near the skin. I just cut them in half and eat the inside and they’re perfect. When I dried them, however, the skins tasted pretty bad. Toka was just pretty sour when dried. Peaches seem to work well. Just did some more of them today. Last year Rosy Gage dried pretty well, but not as sweet as store bought prunes. Asian pears were my favorite dried last year. Only have a dozen or two this year, though.
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. Ayers, Moonglow, Harken, Burbank and Flavor King.
