I had to pick some unripe because they get too soggy and hard to make into jam. They are also a pain to keep picking every day for such low quality fruit.
I guess that Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, no pun intended…
Ive been selling it at the farmers markets around Seattle for 30 years and its a #1 crowd pleaser.
My beautiful bride and I were out harvesting our first peach variety of the season, Harbelle. This is one of my longest surviving trees at 26 years.
Most are perfect with some just a touch under ripe. 80 lbs of #1s and less than a tray of blems. I have never gotten this good of quality off of this tree before. Unsprayed except PLC.
Crossing my fingers for the varieties to come.
Are you doing anything to prevent the wormy moths? I was plagued by them a month ago and they seem back
Dont seem to have any problems with worms/moths.
beauty to me is only good within a short window, when it’s hot it seems like the window is only a single day. it’s cool that it’s super productive and early but I like the later season stuff so much more. also on multi graft trees it takes over without huge amounts of pruning
most of my beauty got dried or made into syrup this year
satsuma started for me yesterday, it’s still my favorite or 2nd favorite maybe after flavor grenade
Ram, your observations are what I’ve been saying for years. Beauty is a great producer, too much in fact, and a great cooker because the red tart skin adds a ton of flavor and gorgeous color. Sugar is all that is lacking.
Last year I tasted a couple fruit from a farm share or something that changed my opinion. They were higher brix and they were quite good, hinting that it could be great if that balance could go further towards sugar.
This year I did a much better job of thinning my Beauty. Although I didn’t fully commit, I did ensure that no two fruit touched each other and culled anything with any sortof blemish.
I was rewarded with fruit that are palatable for fresh eating. In fact, I like them. I’ve been eating 2 or 3 good sized ones each evening out in the orchard and prefer it to Nadia.
Next year hopefully I’ll have the fortitude to thin mercilessly. Like 6" appart to see if I can get them to another level.
I prefer to eat the ones that are firm ripe, not fully colored. They still are on the edge of too juicy.
Beauty are the red ones. AU Producer the small ones, and Nadia the big dark ones. Nadia set relatively thinly this year after a huge production last year, so the fruit are big.
BTW, unless its for juice, I’d remove the pits before cooking. Otherwise the pits break down and its super difficult to get all of the hard bits out ![]()
edit: Here they are cut
Great pic for reference! We tend to pick our Beauty at about that range too. Having to survive a bumpy 80 mile trip to market demands some durability.
We will have a point where Beauty, Methley and Early Laxton are all on the table at once for us and different people have their own preferences.
You are right on about thinning. Our large trees of Beauty would just break the branches without thinning and of course the flavor would be almost nothing.
I know this pic may seem like they are close together but in this case (at harvest) this tree had been thinned twice and had started out with multiple fruit per node.
This year I thought I was going to have the best year ever for Asian pears because of the massive fruit set. I probably got rid of 1/2 to 2/3 of the setting fruit: only kept the king blossoms from the cluster of 2 or 3. Also I’ve been giving it more water because of the dry spring.
And, I do have a lot of fruit - but they are the size of golf balls. Some are already ripening so I know that they aren’t going to get much bigger. The odd thing is, the fruit size has been steadily decreasing with age. The tree is about 8 years old now since brought home from the nursery (it was a 4 way graft w/Chojuro, Nijisseiki, Shinseiki and Shinko but I got rid of the Shinko because it had excessive rust). Once upon a time when it was young it gave me apple sized fruit that were quite good but the fruit is consistently getting smaller and less tasty every year.
Trying to figure out if this is because I’m doing something wrong (very possible) or root-stock related. It is on OHxF 333 which I have heard can dwarf the fruit. I use 16x16x16 in the spring, and occasionally use a boron foliage spray and put down epsom salts for magnesium.
I did a rootstock trial on Ohxf stock, 333 snd 69 mostly as i was interested in how the Asian Pears would perform on a 7’ trellis. This was a replacated trial with at least 6 trees each on the two stocks and then repeated on Shinseiki, Kosui, Hamesi, Mishirasu, Ichiban Nashi and Olympic. I didnt do a control with what would have been the recommended stock for Asians at the time, Betuliafolia, because i already had experience with it and knew i didnt want that!
Anyway, after 25 years, i can say that the two Ohxf stocks work very well. They do tend to over produce for their size as compared to Bet and Ohxf 97 but thats to be expected for the dwarfing effect of any fruit tree stock.
When thinned i have never had any problem with size from Shinseiki although maybe its being out competed by the other varieties??
@jcf this is great info, thank you. So I must be doing something wrong… I thought I thinned a huge amount, but maybe I didn’t thin enough. Or, maybe the soil is loosing nutrients or something. At any rate I have had terrible luck with it… I see larger trees that are completely neglected in other neighborhoods that have much larger fruit so I thought maybe it’s the rootstock, I’ve heard OHxF 333 can make smaller fruit but probably I just needed to thin even more than I did.
Yes, the smaller fruit thing is just bs passed on by talking heads who have no real experience in the subject.
Trees on dwarfing rootstocks always require more attention to detail.
Both thinning and fertility management is more important with these, especially if in pots.
My trees in this trial are so old and large now that i am planning to remove every other one. These are on 10 x 10 spacing.
Can you give me pointers on fertility management? Also, I thought I thinned aggressively but apparently not enough → I waited until after bloom when I saw which ones had taken, and when they were the size of a marble is when I took the king blossom from each bunch… how much should I be removing?
The king blossom is the one that usually produces the largest fruit. I leave the king blossom in each cluster, remove all the rest,cand make sure there are at least 6 inches between developing fruitlets.
Sorry that’s what I meant, I kept the king blossom and got rid of the others
Restoring Eden is having a 25% off sale ya’ll ![]()
I moved to a 1.5 acre spot in Granite Falls, zone 8a/8b, and bought a dozen fruit trees, targeting what I like to eat and making sure to get buddy pollinators where necessary. It should in theory ripen June-Nov.
All planted in February of this year. The apples and nectaplum produced fruit this year (picked off young so the trees could establish, minus a test cosmic crisp).
Royal Rainier Cherry
Montmorency Cherry
Fay elberta peach
Spice Zee nectaplum
Olympian Fig
Wonderful pom (2x)
Cosmic crisp apple
Granny Smith Apple
Kaiteri pineapple guava
Arbequina olive
(And a himrod grape I killed in container because I didn’t install a trellis quick enough)
The pomegranates and elberta peach came from Home Depot, the Granny Smith apple from online orchards, and the rest from Restoring Eden.
Hello! Nice list, would love to see how that Arbquina works out for you
I realize I’m three years late to this fruit tree party, but I have to ask, are you planning to go to Apple and ssPear day in Mt Vernon again this year?
If so, I would one hundred percent buy a dozen varieties of pear/apple and rootstock for them.
Might be a bit of a challenge but Luck is definitely on your side if you still have a live tree from Online Orchards.






