First Activity in the New Year? 2026 Edition!

Ripening date and Bloom date are the most important for consumers after Hardiness Zone. The bloom only matters if all pollinating partners don’t overlap.

When I made a list, I organized European Pears by compatible bloom category (1,2,3), but I organized (many types of) plums by harvest date. For each I noted the other key component: e.g. type of plum (Japanese, European, American, Cherry) so I knew what could cross-pollinate, or pear harvest date.

Here’s an example read out of Toka Plum from Cummins Nursery. Note that it tells you “Bloom Group” and “Ripening Date”:

As others and I figured out long ago and the book “Grow a Little Fruit Tree” describes, the home gardener wants a long harvest window because they might be out of town for someone’s wedding one week. The farmer, in contrast, wants to know when to schedule the work crew to show up to harvest everything-at-once.

Where we could make a difference is by providing the bloom and harvest dates for all the non-mainstream fruit and nuts: Currants, Persimmons, Seaberry, Goumi, Chestnuts, Serviceberry, Quince, Shipova. The Seaberry harvest dates on nursery websites totally contradict each other. One nursery was selling Nikita’s Gift persimmon to Zone 5 (Des Moines) and it would never ripen edible fruit there.

Oregon State University is breeding Hazelnuts, and they will tell you with respect to a common variety, which are -7 days ahead, +7 days behind. The University of Saskatchewan has nice Gantt style charts of bloom and harvest for their own Haskaps.

The GrowingFruit community provided a Pear ripening chart here:

For common fruit there is topic for ripening charts here:

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