Yes. I picked up my first three pear trees at an end of season sale at Lowes for $12.98 each. I don’t know the rootstock but probably dwarfing as is common at Lowes and Home Depot in my area. The second year two of them had a few pears. Year 3 still a couple of pears put I did grafting and pruning so that slowed down production.
Most disappointing: Goji and Seaberry. Discarded the Goji after 4 years since production and taste was poor. Seaberry only produced a few berries and this year 0 flowers.
Figs. All of them. They have all deeply disappointed me. I see no reason to keep growing this fruit.
I started growing fig trees (in pots) because pictures of the fruit always made me salivate. They looked so luscious and wonderful that I decided they were my favourite fruit. I bought a dozen varieties three summers ago. Several have produced good-looking figs, but I hated them all. The texture is repulsive to me and the taste is barely passable. It kinda tastes like grapes and… dirt to me.
I expected to adore figs, but I have to admit the truth to myself: I’m decidedly not a fig person. Too bad.
I used to feel that way. And that was in CA, fig heaven. But the ones I got there were over watered. I think you’d like good figs properly grown and fully ripe.
Vandalay sweet cherry. When it rained, the fruit cracked, all cracked. Rot moved in. Had the tree for a few years. I might had eaten one or two cherries from the tree. Can’t recall the taste. The tree was removed. No regret.
OOOPS I might have to revise my negativity of Chester Blackberry. I blame my zone for my mistake, we don’t get blackberries here and so I have been eating them just off the bush. Although many others might like them I found them so so for flavour. I picked the last ones today and cooked a few up with sugar sorta like a small batch of jam, and it was very good.
I’m glad to hear some other people have not been super happy with figs, I thought it was just me. They taste great but I get very few fruits. I know if I grew them in pots they would do better but I don’t have the time to haul them around. In their favor I basically do nothing to them so unless I need their spots I will keep them.
The pomegranates have been a bigger disappointment than the figs, just when they are about to produce a lot they die back. They are more likely to be removed than the figs as it takes them more years to come back from a dieback. Probably the next dieback and they are gone. As long as they don’t die back I’ll keep giving them a chance.
Goji and che I was also disappointed in for the same reasons as above: low productivity and nothing special in flavor.
Currants and gooseberries I have also not been super happy with, in my climate they suffer in the heat. They were fun for awhile but the fun is wearing off since I’m not getting a lot of harvest. If there is not much I don’t bother to protect and the birds clean up. In a cooler climate I’d be all over 'em, they taste great and are awesome in various recipes. Cranberries were even more of a waste, they fried in my heat.
Raspberries and blackberries I never devoted enough room to so I don’t get a whole lot of fruit. You need a nice sunny 25’+ stand to make it worthwhile IMHO.
This has been a bit surprising thread to me! By no means whatsoever do I have any great skills at growing any fruit really, so what I’m about to say is NOT due to me doing anything special. But I have so many different experiences from many of you. Figs for one: a few haven’t been productive, but my Chicago Hardy, celeste, and Brown Turkey have been extremely productive and extremely good. I do get more figs (by the pound) than I do tomatoes. Then there are the people saying pears take a long time. Mine are on semi-dwarf root stocks, so maybe that is the difference since Tippy mentioned full sized ones, but I’ve planted 8 pear trees and they all produced within 3-4 years. Now, I will conceed that many of them are not that great to eat but they are large and plentiful.
On the other hand, what I’m going to list as most disappointing is one most of you will be surprised by and disagree: blueberries. THe ones I get are delicious, don’t get me wrong. But it has been a long, hard battle for me to get blueberries. I know it is a constant fight against my non-acidic soil, but I’ve constantly added acidifies, put vinegar in water, and so on. Yet I’ve had lots of plants die, others are perpetually unhealthy, and the few that have done ok get swamped by birds like nothing else I grow!
oh well…interesting to see how different things do so differently at various locations
When you grow figs in pots or in short season areas, they frequently don’t taste great for a number of reasons. Figs grown in pots often fail to develop full flavor in part because they are often over watered, in part because they lack adequate nutrition and probably for other reasons as well. Additionally many of the short season varieties are not great figs to start with. Good quality cultivars grown in the ground in a long hot season are usually excellent.
I forgot about pomegranates. The problems with poms start with the fact that they are not great for fresh eating. They’re a pain to deal with and basically all you get is juice, so eventually we just juiced ours. But that’s also a pain, and you can only drink so much juice, in part because it has very high levels of sugar. And even if you’re serious about them every cultivar ripens a little differently so you have to pay attention to the ripening dates. But that’s almost impossible so you’re constantly picking poms when they’re not at their peak. It was years before I understood that the Wonderful pom actually is wonderful. It’s just really hard to pick it at its peak.
I have 2 that were failures. I grafted some scionwood of what was supposed to be Kidds Orange apple. It has never flowered. The tree is now 7 years old. Other varieties I grafted the same day have been bearing apples the last 3-4 years. Time to cut the Kidds down or maybe cleft graft something else to it.
The second failure is Summercrisp pear. Some years they are very sweet and delicious and other years they are tasteless. Not my favorite and definitely not something to can up (too small of fruit). I keep it to pollinate my Bartlett but I should graft some other varieties to it that would be better in size and flavor.
After ten years, I have yet to harvest an Evans or Meteor cherry. Lingonberries have spread into a large patch, but don’t produce, either. I think the soil is too dry and sandy, which was why we bought another piece of rural land, where things grow much better, but there is danger of herbicide drift from surrounding farm fields. One of the older honeyberries, either Blue Belle or Berry Blue, not sure which, is very astringent, too. So far plums have been pretty sparse, too. I have plenty of room, so just leave the losers hoping for better years.
OK, so I have a honecrisp apple growing on my property, but it’s not producing yet. That said, I went to the local orchard/youpick operation yesterday. Zestar was ripe and absolutely delicious. Honeycrisp they said was just coming into ripening, but was completely bland. And small! Other years we’ve gotten them from fruit stands in the area and they were huge. Is this just a thinning issue? We tried multiple fruit from multiple trees and all honeycrisp were low sugar, uninspiring. Now I’m wondering if I made a mistake planting the tree.
I don’t think you made a mistake. Honey Crisp like colder zones. Your zone would be good for it. Not thinning enough would result in such things like smaller size fruit and poorer quality.
I’ve HC for 10 years. It took a while before it started bearing. Also, it has a tendency to go biennial if not thinning well. I think you will like HC right off your own tree.
Honeycrisp is such a variable apple. I’d say 1 out of every 4 years here in east-central IA are they up to par with the hype. If they were small, then the orchard probably didn’t thin enough. Small size can cause blandness. Weather also has a big effect on HC. This year we had some cool night and sunny days down here before the deluge set in two weeks ago, and Honeycrisp coming from the orchard I buy from are very sweet and juicy. I think they were picked before we had our biggest rains.
Zestar! has yet to disappoint me. Down here they are a mid-late August apple.
