Has it been a good fruit year?

General Fruit Growing
#16

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.

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#17

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.

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#18

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.

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#19

Great pots too!

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#20

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 :slight_smile:

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.

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#21

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.

Pears_in_bottles
Pears_in_bottles719×1280 948 KB

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?

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Effects of physically constraining fruit size?
#22

Was a bad year here, combination of a few late spring rains and one hard, late frost doomed most of the fruit. The small plum trees I inherited with the house did all right, as did the poorly trained-Newton Pippin that hugs the house. But my apricots and the inherited ones all bore very poorly (probably 10-50% of expected yield). Of my new trees, only one perry pear tree made one fruit. On top of all that I didn’t get any mulberries this year :frowning:

Next year!

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#23

Great thread…got me reviewing my notes. But I do feel bad that most of you had a lousy year.

Bumper crop of pokeweed!

Cherries: overwhelming amount

Tomatoes: rather poor year, they were really sick, which is unusual in my area

Zucchini: overwhelming amount, almost no powdery mildew

Raspberries: Caroline and Heritage very productive and tasty

Peach/Nectarine: mostly overwhelming amount, and excellent quality. Had two varieties that made no fruit, and others that needed multiple rounds of thinning, and others that had trouble fully ripening. The early and late varieties did best.

Plums: overwhelming amount on some varieties, requiring a lot of thinning, but had bad aphid curl on most; again some had trouble ripening up properly. As always, Burgundy and Santa Rosa were insanely productive and wonderful.

Persimmons: variable. Some bore little due to alternate bearing, others doing great; my Chocolate bore nothing.

Goji berries: insane amounts, and not too bitter this year. Neighbor swears they cured her arthritis in her finger.

Figs: mostly great. Earlier they were ripening nicely, but then they had trouble, now barely ripening. Squirrels running off with whole fruit.

Citrus: great year, lots of fruit and growth.

Melons: watermelon did well despite being in a shadier location; muskmelons did great and I finally found a variety that will actually sweeten up for me.

Eggplant: bumper crops! Best ever.

Pineapple guava: pollination problems again. Just planted some seedlings to pollinate in future years.

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#24

I knew fruit growing was hard, but holy cow is this thread an eye opener! Here we have some of the most devoted, knowledgeable fruit growers that there are, and yet almost every single entry talks about having one kind of failure or another with at least part of their fruits. That really says a lot about how difficult this hobby is. Its also kind of neat how we just accept these hardships and move on. As @Courtney put it so well - “On to 2021”! I don’t know about the rest of you, but I also love how seasonal fruit growing is. Just about the time I get burned out and completely sick of spraying, our trees go to sleep and give us several months off. (there is work in winter but its different and not as hard). By the time spring rolls around I have my passion back and can’t wait to get started. So for me, this is the perfect hobby in spite of all the difficulties listed above.

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#25

Despite the all but total bust on fruits, the garden - first we’ve really planted in nearly 30 years - was pretty productive; timely rains all summer long probably helped.
Beans, field peas(blackeye & brown crowder) were productive, summer squashes kept us and all the neighbors supplied despite squash bug/wilt, and the butternut/buttercup squash were quite productive, despite the wife and daughter picking 25 large immature butternuts while I was out of town, thinking they were oversized zucchini. Have never had as much success with growing watermelons as I did this year, but the honeydew melons were a huge disappointment… just not very tasty. Okra just now really hitting its stride…
Peppers and tomatoes have been good, but I’ll have to pick a more productive bell pepper variety next year… CA Wonder just didn’t pack 'em on like others I’ve grown in the past… 2 or 3 peppers and quit.

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#26

Puget Sound lowlands had a very cold spring.
Summer got off to a late start. Lasted until about September 15. Now, the cloudy weather has arrived.
So
Although we had good fruit set
The quality is not good.

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#27

Is it true that G5 cell towers will repel squirrels?

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#28

So true, @thecityman - it is a great way to get in touch with the cyclical nature of life. I too look forward to the winter break and honestly need it to get re-energized :slight_smile:

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#29

My vegetable garden did well except for a lot of seeds that never germinated. I have wonderful watermelons for only the second time in my life, including a thirty pounder. Not much for berries of most kinds this year and once again a disappointing total crop failure of Carmine jewel cherries due to worms and rot, but the apples and pears did fairly well, a taste here and there of plums, which is fairly normal. Other miscellaneous stuff I am experimenting with continues to languish, but maybe some year it will pan out. Kiwi blossoms froze this spring. Had a crop of nice Nelson blackberries for the first time. My grafts didn’t pan out well this spring. I’ll probably still keep playing around with more next year, though, as it can be habit-forming. I sure do love having fresh pears, though.

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#30

First of all, I feel bad for those who have a bad year. I can empathize asI have been in that situation more than once.

This year has been a very good year for me after a shaky start of late freeze in May. That killed off most apricots and several cold-sensitive plums and peaches.

Cherries - Affected by late freeze. Set far fewer fruit than normal. Utah Giant stood out among 4-5 varieties I grafted,

J plums/hybrids - Shiro, Beauty set well. The rest were bud kills esp. Satsuma and Nadia. Not sure I like J plums that much anymore. May remove the trees.

E plums - very productive. Unaffected by the May freeze. They taste sweeter, more flavorful than J plums. A few are outstanding.

Peaches - Autumn Star and PF 24 C produced heavily. The rest sparingly. We have given some, sold some and canned so many jars of jam.

Nectarines - finally found a nectarines worth eating. A very nice Freckle Face. Everyone’s favorite.

Apples - last year was a skip apple year. This year, trees produced heavily. Many grafts from 3-4 years ago flowered and set fruit, too. I realize I don’t need 20 + varieties after all. Will only keep a few going forward.

Figs (potted). All set well and taste good to me.

Persimmon - my Nikita’s Gift finally is able to hold on to about 8 fruit (out of 100+). Grafted Prok on NG’s tree has 3 fruit. Quite exciting. Hope they will ripen in time.

Watermelons - late putting them in ground. They are not as productive as last year but we are much better at picking them at the right time.

Cantaloupe - got free seeds of Sivan F1 charentai melon. The best cantaloupe type melon I (and everyone I gave it to) have ever had. Very sweet and fragrant.

Freckle Face nectarine and Sivan F1 are the new and wonderful discovery this year.

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#31

I had a terrible fruit year.

  1. Late frost got all of my stonefruit.
  2. Early hot and humid weather brought the plum curculio before I could spray. Worst year ever for PC. Lots of scab this year too.
    Next year will be better.
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#32

Fabulous start! Looks great!

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#33

I read all the previous post and there are several common problems but the one I’m surprised about the most is how many share the same issue with late cold weather reducing or eliminating their fruit for the year. For the last four years my five plum/pluot trees have bloomed well but late cold weather has reduced the number of fruit to small quantities. My original pear varieties were a little better but even they were reduced most years. The addition of later blooming pears has improved my odds.

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#34

Very good:

  • Figs, lots of figs - I only had 5 small trees grown in bush form but got more fruit than we could keep up with. Towards late summer we started getting hit by birds and SWD but it just meant we weren’t picking every day as we should have been.

Good:

  • Peaches - surprisingly. Really focused on consistent spraying this year as well as trapping squirrels and it paid off. Got a decent size harvest off the peach tree. Lost a lot due to drops from not spraying early enough I think.
  • Spring raspberry crop - I need to focus more on pruning / variety selection of this versus the Fall crop production.

Bad:

  • Late summer / fall raspberry crop - got destroyed by SWD, I think my spraying schedule is off
  • All pears - got wiped out by late frost, grafted more varieties to counteract this
  • Currants, gooseberries, and blueberries - got decimated by birds
  • Strawberry - crowns planted this year got completely eaten by bunnies
  • Melons - I think were planted too early, struggled to grow, got powdery mildew, cracked when it rained
  • Trees in pots got under-watered and grew poorly
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#35

Some of us that are fairly new to this hobby, might feel we have learned a lot. As I have seen here many times, “once you figure out pests, then you have to learn about fungus/critters”

What I learned in 2020;

Even a few peach trees with 90% buds lost to the late freeze, will provide all the peaches you can eat, can, freeze and give away.

If you are all over spray schedules you can beat the OFM! (last year, not one fruit was left. This year not even one branch flagged, let alone hit the fruit. Major victory

I should have planted 3 different types of peaches instead of 3 Red Havens. having 3 trees to harvest at once would be overwhelming.

Next year, if I keep up my spraying and we don’t have the late freeze, I will have some local food pantries on speed dial

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