For me it has been a mix bag. My improved list is Goldrush, Williams Pride, Muscadines, Harrow Sweet, and Korean Giant. My original goal was to produce enough for my house and immediate family. Beyond that I’m not sure. Today I finished picking the Harrow Sweet and they have a fantastic taste. They are amazingly good when they approach the correct ripening time of the year. My refrigerator is overflowing with HS. Korean Giant my grands favorite is about all gone freeing up some space. I picked several GR earlier and there is about 30 remaining on the tree. Hoping they can tree ripen into the wonderful gold treat they can become. I have several varieties that I’m working to improve my results but I won’t dwell much on the down side. Learning to grow fruit can be very rewarding in more ways than the buckets of fruit. In some ways I enjoy the process more than the results. I’m interested in seeing how @thecityman does with his fruit stand. I live within the city limits so I don’t know if fruit stands are allowed.
Not our best year at all, but still have some nice apples, lots of good prune plums, but only a few pears. Nothing ripe yet, but Libs are close.
Late freezes did most fruit in here. No apples at all for me this season.
heavy freeze on our Red Haven peach trees but still go 200 peaches, yum
enough to give many away
Disastrous year. Another one like this, I get the chain saw out.
Late freeze took out most stone fruit, most pears. The squirrel/wasp consortium took out most anything that survived to look ripe.
I got some blue plums by picking them too early. I got Gala apples, don’t know how they missed them.
Not my best year either. The only fruit that gave me 2 giant boxes this year is the Asian Pears. The rest is a disaster! Well,I’m glad this is over with…on to 2021!
It was a terrible year for most tree fruit. My saving grace were my figs that I’ve been eating for nearly 2 months with more ripening daily. My berries produced a lot like usual. Everything else got frosted.
This year makes me feel like giving up on thinning fruit. So many hours wasted just for animals to steal everything. On the bright side, they somehow left my President plum and my Suncrisp apple alone.
Overall I had a good fruit year. Well, its hard to sum it up though. I lost most of my plums, apricots, pluots, grapes, and persimmons to a very late freeze. Figs were killed to ground in winter so it was a regrowth year for figs with not much fruit. So you’d think I would say it was an awful year. But somehow my peaches mostly survived that late frost and they produced a large, wonderful crop. Apples did even better. Almost all my apple trees produced large, beautiful, sweet apples. Blueberries did well too.
I’m also really starting to get a feel for which fruits/trees I like and want to keep, and which ones are not worth the work and spray anymore. Its going to be a deadly winter for several trees! ha
@Auburn sales have been a little slow so far, but i’ll update my fruit stand thread to let people know how its going.
We mostly froze out here too. Some parker pears which must be a little freeze tolerant. A few protected peaches. On top of that, a drought. But with the drought, the good thing is that my mower which was on it’s last leg will carry that leg into new year now 
Mother’s day late frost took care of most of my pears and stone fruits. Honey Jar Jujube trees were late bloomer so no damage and very productive. Potted figs and Tam Kam non astringent Kaki are loaded. American persimmons and paw paw have light crops this year.
Yes it has been a good year. Yield wise I have not set the world on fire, but this year I got to taste a few or more of many different varieties. I tasted several plums, a couple apples, and two sour cherries for the first time. For a relatively young orchard that is success. I still have Kerr and honeycrisp apples to harvest. My large crop of Mount royal plums are starting to soften, but they don’t have the fabulously rich taste they have had in the past. I am worried something is off. Still waiting for Grenville plum as well.
Terrible year.
Blueberries were the saving grace. They did quite well. Apples were a disaster. Peaches, Nectarines, and Plums - ZILCH. The newly planted muscadines are promising . . . but won’t really know till next year.
Gee . . . I’d like to sound all cheerful and chirpy . . . but honesty wins out. My pomegranates were a complete disaster. If we get even ONE decent piece of fruit, I’ll be surprised.
If they survive (which I’m quite sure they will) we plan to drench them, and the ground around them, with fungicide - before the spring. What have we got to lose? This fungal thing has really ruined my pomegranate ‘hopes’. We had no problem for the first 3 or 4 years that our trees had fruit. Then the fungus descended with a vengeance.
I do have one idea that may work - like @cousinfloyd - I thought to bring a couple of my poms inside. Maybe order new ones that have not been exposed to the fungus. We found some HUGE pots that someone put out on the street . . . and this may be a good use for them.
Someone said that there are other perks to growing fruit, besides the fruit. And I agree. It’s just plain fun. But after all that work and time and optimism . . . it’s definitely not fun when you have nothing to put in your basket.
I’m with @Courtney . . . ‘On to 2021!’
Abysmal, here.
Courtesy of freezes, no apples, pears, plums, mulberries; few serviceberries, few persimmons, no pecans. Few acorns, almost no hickory nuts.
Blueberries were the only bright spot…
Yes and no. I got some cherries for the first time, but they all cracked badly. The apricot and the pluot were frozen out completely.
The early figs all split from a week of rain, and I’ve been having insect problems with them.
I still don’t have the knack for how much to water/fertilize my potted plants, but I got a few purple raspberries that were quite good. It’s possible it is simply too hot here for most of them.
Similarly I got a few apples, but between the wildlife, insects, and disease neither the quantity nor quality were all that great.
The jujubes are still too young.
My most successful fruit is, bizarrely, plums. I think they’re Japanese since they ripened before the cherries. I don’t think there is a plum orchard within 200 miles of Richmond.
Crop failure in the southern Rockies foothills. April 21 21 degrees did the trick.
The new Harvest Queen pear looked like it wanted to set fruit but I didn’t let it except for one pear I overlooked. A deer came by a week ago and ate it.
Because of freezes in April we got no peaches, pears, cherries, plums, pluots and just a handful of apples. I actually had a small Suncrisp this evening, it was pretty good, but gnarly looking.
I protected our strawberry patch from the freezes, but I bet we didn’t get more than a quart from about 100 plants. I weeded the patch in March, but the plants just didn’t produce a lot. Prob because I didn’t renovate, fertilize and weed the patch last year. Plus, something got in the patch and finished off what we had.
Raspberries had their best year, we made a few pints of jam with them, we’re getting a small amount of primocane berries now. We had a long hot and dry spell, plus a jap beetle infestation, so that prob didn’t help. Prelude is by the most prolific, but Caroline the best flavor.
Of our 3 gooseberries, only our big Oregon Champion produced some fruit. They were pretty good, but not a lot properly ripened before the birds finished them off.
Blackberries were by far our best performers. We have a run of 5 Triple Crown crowns with multiple canes, and they gave us about 3 gallons. We (or me) ate a lot off the vines, but we did make a few pints of jam, I think, and a few cobblers. We had maybe another gallon left ripening on the canes, but birds discovered them and they were gone in a couple days.
Our UArk blackberries were kind of a disappointment again this year, because of winter kill of multiple canes. Ouachita had just a few canes make it, but no fruit that I can remember. Osage had more canes make it, but there weren’t many berries.
Traveler and Freedom had more canes survive, and produced a decent amount of berries. They both had good flavor, Freedom had some giant berries. Both of these are now flowering and producing a few primocane fruit, but they don’t seem to taste very good. Plus, I haven’t weeded them in months, so unless I want another chigger infestation, I haven’t been browsing too much.
Triple Crown have the hardiest canes, decent sized fruit, and the best flavor of all our blackberries. They are also very prolific. I have several canes that have tip-rooted, so I plan on starting another run of TC elsewhere on the farm.
We lost three apple trees (Winecrisp, Winesap, and Grimes Golden) this year, two to likely root diseases, and a third got snapped off at the ground in high winds in April. It had been almost girdled by insects or rodents, but had flowered heavily in March, but I didn’t have it staked, and the 40-50mph winds took it out.
I have 10 apples that I grafted in pots that will be planted maybe next month somewhere on the farm.
Oh, and we have grown a bumper crop of seed ticks and chiggers, they have just about eat me and my wife up the last couple weeks. Now I wear jeans tucked into my Muck boots whenever I go outside, and check my boots for any new ones before I come inside. It’s been maddening. My neighbors have said they’ve had them bad too, so it’s not just us.
Great pots too!
I feel better now after reading how many of us had rough years.
I would’ve had a few pawpaws with their first fruits if not for the late freezes.
My one pawpaw fruit that did survive was a dud.
Birds ate all but about a dozen of my muscadines. One of my vines (Darlene) actually died, probably due to the freezes.
Maypops had a normal, albeit late, year, and the quality was good after an off year last year (for unknown reasons).
I’ve gotten some surprise Celeste figs, less than a dozen, which have been good.
So i guess not as bad as i thought, when i put it in writing, but definitely frustrated with my muscadine situation and the much-anticipated pawpaw fruit that was terrible
Update - also on the positive side of the ledger, I had a good grafting year following an abysmal 2019. I think it was something like 80-90% success rate.
Here is the sum total of my Euro pears after the squirrels ate the 150-200 they decided was their share. Bagging didn’t slow them down, but they couldn’t figure out how to get at these two.
Last year they ate all my Asian pears but left the Euro pears alone. This year they ate the Euro’s but I actually got to eat a couple of Asian pears that for some reason they left. They also left me 3 peaches, maybe because they heard me say I was going to remove the tree since I never got any fruit. I keep feeling it is like playing the slots in Vegas - they let you win a little now and again so you’ll keep playing.
The deer were merciless on my fruit trees and any veggies I planted in my yard (except kale, which they left for the whiteflies and harlequin bugs), but I got some nice cabbages, tomatoes, and other stuff from my community garden plot, despite a lot of theft there as well. I had expected it due to the economic hardships, so mostly just sighed and kept weeding.
My potted figs were mostly ruined by splitting from the rain, birds and squirrels and lots of bugs. This is the first time I’ve had so many yellow jackets attack my fruit, which I hope is just a one year change and not a new normal.
But I connected with some very nice local gardeners and folks online, including here of course, harvested a fair amount of veggies (some weeks enough to donate the excess to the food bank), a few delicious pieces of fruit, and watched some things grow and flourish, including a bunch of new persimmons I grafted with the help of many generous members who send me scion wood. Who could complain?