I would say our native dogwoods (cornus florida) around SW VA bloom later than most other trees. In fact, native dogwoods are just starting to bloom now here. And imported Kousa dogwoods bloom later yet. I wonder if your early blooming dogwoods than what we have.
Our basic yellow daffodils bloomed a month ago.
I have a kousa dogwood in front of my house … I hate it. The berries it gets are a mess and then it smells like vinegar when they rot… HOA won’t let me get rid of it unless it dies 
. It literally dumps all its berries right onto the sidewalk going into my house.
Thankfully, I planted 3 kousas last year in grassy area.
A lot of fruit getting mashed afoot or awheel is sure messy. I remember visiting some neighbohoods with KV (purple leaf plum) trees and the fruit was everywhere you don’t want it to be.
It’s looking good so far where I am… maybe I’ll get apricots this year. We haven’t had anything serious in terms of freezes and the long-range forecast also looks OK now. It’s been rainy but hopefully enough breaks for the bees to get to work. One thing good about the rain is I planted some new trees and I have found rainy weather is the best thing for just-planted trees.
Rain will be good for the 100 strawberries I planted as well.
Fingers crossed on no more freezes. There appears to be a good set of various interspecific plum cultivars for including few dozen flavor supreme. At what temp would the cold kill the plum sets? 29F killed the apricot sets.
29F won’t get near killing apricots. I am sure you had much lower temps by your tree, maybe there is a frost pocket. Look at the MSU bud hardiness charts, they are pretty accurate.
Congrats on the Flavor Supremes, I think about five on a 18’ tree is about the most I ever got to set.
Assuming we escape any cold nights, it looks like I have a ridiculous amount of fruit set on my Ilona/Tomot twin trunk apricot. Is there a rule of thumb for thinning apricots?
Also, I’m pretty busy this weekend and was thinking I may not get surround on this tree until the middle of next week or so. Am I inviting a PC disaster? I always think of them showing up when my carmine jewel cherries have set, which they haven’t yet since they’re just flowering now, but maybe they arrive earlier if there is something else to attack?
Thanks for the info.
Few weeks ago, my apricots green fruit looked nice like Zendog’s last pictures. Then it got windy, rainy, and cold, and the fruit became shriveled and brown. Perhaps it was confluence of those weather factors that made the fruit die. It could have been lower than 29, maybe ~28F. Trees are on a slope so the air drainage is good and they are not in frost pocket.
This drop happened on multiple apricot trees so I assume it was due to weather, rather than the tree.
I thin something like a fist apart on my cots… well I aim to but don’t always get there.
Re: Surround, in my orchard I would have hit that last week. The PC are all over my early cots, I lost too many last year. You may have less pressure than I do. My trees are less far along and I will be starting up Surround this weekend.
Re: killing temps, I had assumed your apricots were more like mine and not Zendogs. I am just over petal fall. Still 28F is only 10% kill on the chart after shuck split and so my guess is you were more like 26F. Temperatures vary greatly so unless you had a thermometer in the tree there is a fairly big window of possibility.
28F came from neighbors weather station; it is the best data I have. I just checked in higher resolution. It was 3 hours of mostly 28F with it touching 27F for 30mins.
There was a 4mph wind also which may drop the “apparent” temperature by another few degrees.
Thanks. I’ll thin aggressively and see if I can get a first coat of surround on them in the next couple of days.
Until I started gardening I had no idea how true this is. I had to scrape ice off my car windshield this morning even though the one external thermometer I have here never showed below 38. Winds were low. Friday night/Saturday morning is supposed to be colder (forecast 36 here), but there should be more breeze so hopefully that helps. I’ve set multiple thermometers in the yard at different times and think I see about 5 degrees variation between high and low during a cold, calm morning… and that is over just a single 9000 sqft lot.
I think I had particularly good pollination on the cots this year since we had some nice sunny warm days when they were in full bloom. My pears are blooming now and it will be interesting to see how good pollination is on those with all these cold rainy days.
I have as much as 10 degrees difference from the top of my 2 acre to the bottom. Wouldn’t have believed it until I put a weather station down in the trees. Now I always factor in at least 5 degrees colder than predicted and usually more.
Just had a little hail storm come through Arlington, VA. Wonder if any of the little fruitlets are damaged. Now I wish I had waited to thin my apricots …
Hope they are okay. The two apricots I have left are about quarter sized.
Hi,
I recognize scottfsmith from my old Gardenweb days. :-). I have 2 spots: home is north Carroll Cty, my better growing property is in north Adams Cty, PA in orchard country. My home in town is a slope with wretched thin immature stony soil and deer pressure. My PA property is flat, with decent country soil. I mostly planted there and am now trying to do some things at home after 20 years of not.
I’m looking forward to some rain this weekend. I hasn’t rained substantially for me since April 11th.
I got rain last night. Did you all get that 70 to 90 over like 2 days that is up in MD got earlier in the week?
I think it was the early high of 85F here on Monday. It hasn’t busted over 90F yet here in mountains (~1600ft elevation).
I thinned my apricots about a month ago, but now realize that I left more than I should have. Before I think more, I was wondering when do I start checking my apricots for ripening? I have Tomcot and Ilona both holding a nice crop this year. They’ve sort of been sitting at around the same size for a week, so hoping they aren’t stunted. I’ll thin them more, but if they are ripening soon, maybe I should just leave what is there since it won’t make much difference?
