Second year in a row that late freezes have dealt a serious blow here. This year it was 10F on March 19th. Wasn’t quite as bad as the 23F event on April 22nd of 2021 though. In 2021 I got 1 apple, zero peaches, perhaps 50 blueberries… This year it will be about a dozen apples and ~10 peaches and a very small handful of blueberries probably. The blues in particular, had bloom buds starting and that 10F event made almost all of them turn black and fall off.
Good on later things like raspberries, blackberries, hazelnuts, etc though.
Japanese Beetles have been considerably worse this year than most.
1 apple tree, a plumcot, and a sweet cherry died.
Tried to kick it up a notch with pollination, will continue providing homes for orchard/mason bees.
Here it’s been great. Spring was warm. Summer has been dry.
Berries have been superb, aided by dry weather. Almost no mold.
Peaches started to ripen within the past couple days, roughly a week earlier than last year.
Figs started setting fruit in late May, again earlier than in past years. I expect to begin picking at least a week ahead of usual.
Lately there has been very little rain, but I have a well and the aquifer is healthy. So long as the drought doesn’t get a lot worse, it should be a great season all around.
@ elivings1, put down some stuff that laughts at late frosts like most haskaps, specially if they have enough Russian on them. I have seen my flowered haskaps covered in snow, not a worry. Sour cherries are just smart enough to flower later.
we are about the same Don. last i counted i had 65 different types of fruit + multiple cultivars. ive added another 7 this summer. my oldest cherries are 5. they set a huge amount of blooms but about half set fruit. still much more than last year. yours ripen yet? mine are about a week out. read that by year 6 they start to get a good crop. my monty cherry and adirondack gold apricot were damaged some by the -40 of last winter. growth is sparse but they survived and are putting on new growth. the sunny 80’s that we have been getting in the last week has really kicked the plants in high gear here. occasional thundershowers put down just enough rain to keep everything lush.
Figs? Big, big crop expected! Now high nineties/ hundred’s, burn leaves, exposed fruit got sunburn. Harvest, maybe 20%.
Citrus? High temps in April, lost a lot of bloom, maybe 30%. I did sawed of the larger potted trees and grafted different varieties to them, these are doing fine.
They should bloom again next Spring providing no surprise’s
It’s been a good year, I finally got some apples from Fuji and Pink Lady, this after 8 years of planting. I almost thought I got the wrong variety. But overall much improvement over 2021.
Only problem was zucchini plants, I keep having mildew in this location, not in my previous 2 gardens.
Red haven peaches
cool wet spring during bloom. The peaches had many blooms just dry up and fall. Very unbalanced load. Thinning was difficult, one side of a tree completely empty, to much in bad spots. Like all together or in crotches. I estimate 800 peaches from the 3 trees. About 25% are huge, well over a half lb. Approx. 25% small where I left them a bit close.
Pests
Squirrels never used to bother the peaches, but this year they were very active. After losing a 5 gal bucket of golf ball sized peaches, I took action. I shot 10-12 of them, set 6 rat traps, stopped filling the bird feeder and added 2 foot chicken at the bottom of my Electric-fence. Re-spaced the hot-ground wires to 2 inches apart above the chicken wire.
Sweet cherries, birds got every cherry. We will take them out, to big to net. Tart cherry produced well but has some trunk issue, might not make it.
Nectarine, though right next to the peaches, gets bug damage even with 8 sprays this year. Peaches have had no bug issues.
All friends, neighbors got bags of peaches and a large box of peaches to a local food pantry.
I put in haskaps this year. I put in a Giant Heart and Blue banana. They did well until the heat and look almost dead now. I think we have too hot of summers for them.
I forgot to say that my favorite apple, prairie magic, skipped last year. This year it decided to behave like a crabapple tree and put out an ungodly amount of apples.
I probably did not cull enough and it will end up skipping next year
keep them watered. they will leaf back out when it starts to cool off. we had 2 severe droughts the last couple summers and mine did the same. started to leaf back out in late august.
late, wet, cold. good for peas, greens, lettuce and garlic- no tomatoes, peppers, squash or fruit yet. just a few sad black raspberries, a single yellow patty pan.
edit to add, now it’s hot and dry and sweltering. happened overnight so everything was moldy and now it’s dried out and dying. a bad year for most stuff, and very late for the rest.
last year was terrible. I hope we never see another heat wave like that.
pests this year: aphids completely covered my plum tree THREE TIMES even with spraying. have trapped 30 squirrels, who ate half my baby plants and dug up a bunch of others. had some kind of disease on all my broccoli, wilt or mold, killed it off. again a bad year
I was in a similar situation and decided to try lots of scare tape on my cherries before taking them out. I am getting maybe half the cherries with the scare tape, the trees are pretty big so it is not too bad a deal overall.
Absolutely the worst year EVER in the 12 years I’ve been growing fruit. Late frost took out the vast majority of peaches and plums. Then we have had the worst drought since 1952 so the few stone fruit that did make it have been small and dry, and for whatever reason the June Bugs have been horrendous this year. Any peaches or plums that survived the frost and managed to make it through the drought have been consumed by giant balls of June Bugs that eat an entire peach in just a few hours. Apples are small and spotty, paw paws didn’t set much fruit at all, and pears have been dropping for no reason- likely from the drought. Even my sour cherries, which have always been one of my easest fruits to grow, all turned yellow and fell off before ripening - that was before the drought kicked in so I don’t have a clue what caused that. Even my blueberries are 1/2 normal size and on many bushes they are wrinkled and look like dried fruit even though they are still hanging onto the bushes. I think by now you are getting the idea…its been one heck of a terrible year for fruit here in my little orchard. The crazy thing is that towns less then 10 miles from me have gotten several good rains that missed me. This was also my first year of growing feed corn on my new land. I have 30 acres of corn and the farmer who is growing it for me says its going to be 75% below average!!! (it will weigh 25% of what it would most years)
Hate to sound like I’m whining. In the big scheme of things none of this is going to have a real effect on my life and I’ve got good health, a good roof over my head, a job I life, so like will go on just fine. Some of my neighbors have their whole lives in their farm and very well could loose their land, house, and all their money to the bank from a year like this.
I’ve got a dozen honeyberries in the ground here in STL and we’ve been 90F+ for several weeks even pushing 100F+ a few days. My honeyberries are green and thriving so I’m not sure the heat is your issue.
My varieties for reference: Czech 17, Boreal Beast, Boreal Beauty, Boreal Blizzard, Blue Hokkaido, Blue Moon, Blue Sea, Blue Pagoda, Yezberry Solo, Indigo Gem.
Oh, and one more thing to note is my Czech 17 died back to the ground due to some kind of winter damage but shot up new growth and has bounced back quite nicely. I just had to protect it from the rabbits and deer until it got big enough to survive some munching.
Modern haskaps are improved varieties. The general rule is that the more Russian, the more cold hardy and early flowering. The less Russian, the more heat hardiness.
Yeah, the only way I can get success out of using scare tape is to go absolutely nuts with it. Or, if I have only a few cherries, I’ll completely wrap each cherry with it.
its a combo of dry and hot conditions. if you get decent rain during the heat they do ok. the more Japanese they have in them the more heat tolerant also. i have mostly Russian genetics and they hate the heat.
Excellent here. Blueberries & peaches had biggest fruit set ever. Tons of Honeycrisp on the trees. We had a great strawberry harvest in our raised beds. Maine continues to be an underrated place to grow fruit but why would anyone want to move here? The snow & cold….no one else in the USA has winters!…lol. And it stinks to have hundreds of miles of ocean, dozens of freshwater lakes and mountains to hike and ski on…and did I mention that we still have undeveloped land? Oh well…
alot of s. new england has moved up here in the last 2 years to get away from the crime and take advantage of our cheap land. i bet the 3 -40- temps last winter made many of them think twice about staying here. reason why there arent many people in Aroostook county.
