My pears were a disaster. First ones. Leathery skin . . . don’t know what that was about? I was all excited . . . Harrow Delights! And one Bartlet or ‘something’ - not sure. Maybe next year. I have a Magness branch or two - and a Moonglow. Lots of other grafted varieties. I’m not real ‘big’ on pears . . . but have only have grocery ones. I’m looking forward to a REAL pear!
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Some decades ago I met the pomologist who works for the Resnicks and had selected Wonderful. The selection was made on flavor after processing since the business plan was pomegranate juice. The commercial processing technology had been developed with support from the Resnicks by the UC Davis school of engineering. After the selection of Wonderful was made, one million TC’s of Wonderful were produced and planted in acreage near the western end of Lerdo Hwy in California’s central valley. At the time, we both remarked on how the “ripe off the tree” flavor of Wonderful was only average in comparison to other cultivars we were sampling in the specimens growing at Wolfskill.
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My Keepsake hasn’t done anything? Perhaps “replant disease”? As I have it planted 6 feet from a Granny Smith I plan to cut down soon as Keepsake grows. B-118 root.
But, I expect Keepsake to be a rather ugly home grown apple, not shiny and red.
Hopefully a keeper though.
Great shots of your fruits.
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I imagine the one on the right came from the ziplock.
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Stayman, Mutsu, and Jonathan.
My 2022 apple harvest primarily consists of these 3 varieties. There was also a single Wolf River but something knocked it off early.
A late freeze for the 2nd year in a row really hurt things, some other varieties bloomed but didn’t set.
2 Mutsu, 4 Jonathan, 14 Stayman is the grand total… A bit slim for 6 and 7 year old trees on M111. But, just wait till next year!
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Leathery pears. My Flemish Beauty pears were cracked and leathery their first year, inedible. After that, they have been fine.
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thank you for that tip.
. . . here’s to next year! 
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My first summer banana apple! Nice size at 3- 1/2 oz. Greenish yellow with prominent lenticels. Russet at the stem.
I don’t smell any hint of banana, but I really like the taste. Sweet/tart with a hint of caramel. Fine grained and fairly juicy.
It’s definitely not a keeper. I see it browning before my eyes.
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How’s it differ from “winter banana”?
I wish I knew. I have a one year graft of winter banana but no experience yet.
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Any live sand dollars? I’ve found a few…but it a long time ago.
Brought home live conch shells from Jekyll Island, GA in 1976.
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My daughter’s haul today, she’s staying at our house while we’re away. She texted one of the melon was cracked open. Let’s hope these melons are not too ripe.
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Winter Banana for comparison. This is the first year i have tried these and i really like them so far. Flavor wise it reminds me of fuji. Inside was more of a yellow color and browns very fast.
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I love collecting seashells. Many many years ago, one of my sons wandered down the beach when he was little. He was collecting shells and never looked up for a long time. I had to contact the lifeguard to find him. That was a harrowing moment for sure.
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Victoria peaches. These have been pretty easy to grow. I haven’t sprayed them since my last big spray. Little bug damage. Nice to have peaches again!
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@BlueBerry … never found a live sanddollar… pretty rare where we go to find a whole one and i found two this time and one with just a small chip out of it.
I found one conch shell with a live hermit crab in it… did not realize it was in there until it ran off our table.
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Yesterday I walked around and looked at how my trees and grafts were handling the scab that seems to have set in after copius amounts of rain.
I rated each tree and graft with a clear, light, medium, or heavy case of disfigured leaves. I guess my findings were not surprising, but I didn’t expect there to be such a difference depending on what tree the graft was on.
I’ll give you a few examples. Bite me, Stephens apple graft was completely clear on Jonathan but really bad on Virginia Beauty. Granny Smith grafts were clear on wolf River but covered with scab on McIntosh.
The worst looking leaves were grafts of chenango strawberry, tollman sweet, and Newtown Pippin. Some of the clearest–red fleshed apples like pekka, redfield, odysso, pink delight. Liberty, freedom, and Enterprise did well too, as expected. The limbertwigs mostly fell in the light scab spots, as did Ambrosia, wealthy, winter banana, among others.
Moderate scab was McIntosh, Arkansas black, honeycrisp, winecrisp, summer banana, jonagold, ashmeads kernel, and quite a few others.
My takeaway was that although certain varieties are more or less resistant, it depends a lot on the immediate disease pressure of that tree or nearby trees on how it’s going to perform. Some granny Smith grafts were clear and others looked pretty bad. The trees they were grafted to did have different amounts of scab but not enough to account for the significant differences, in my opinion.
Why do this ridiculous amount of review? I guess I just like to look at the trees in a variety of ways to see if it makes sense to me. I’m trying to figure out what trees perform best in my area, but it’s often not that simple.
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You mean CAR or actual apple scab? I did the same thing with my apple trees to look at the fruit and also the leaves on the trees. I normally do not see CAR on my trees. This year with the multiple days of rain then heat, then rain every other day for a month. I could not spray like I normally could. I think that was probably was a bad combination. I am taking notes so I compare this year to next year. See if the CAR is the same next year. It seemed to be a mess this year.
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