Oh no, did I say horizontally? I meant vertically. If you don’t have the extra room they require, that is. Which is why I discussed the advantage of nylon stockings.
I’m dyslexic so I knew you meant vertical. I didn’t even see the error! Now that’s weird!
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i tried melons in my greenhouse. the powdery mildew killed them just as they fruited.
Melons are really worth searching out mildew-resistant varieties
I grew a bunch of different ones, but can’t remember crap about them. You’re close to me, any suggestions?
I’m currently growing Escorial, a charentais hybrid, and Diplomat, a galia.
They’re both early, all the better to beat the PM
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thinking of axing my seaberries. i like the taste of thier berries but they are a lot of work to harvest. think ill add another mulberry there.
We are giving up on Apples and admitting defeat. I love apples and the history of apples, but my wife was right about the difficulty of growing and selling apples for a profit in our area. Just 2 hours north or 2 hours west in my climate zone even at same elevation they grow much better. We scaled into growing apples over several years and we plan to scale out over several years. We have already removed many the least successful varieties and have targeted more removals for next year. We like several of the varieties to be removed but the trees are too small. Each row contains about 20-25 trees. More fungicide would improve our yield and appearance but we decline to spray a fungicide “cocktail” on a 3-5 day recommended schedule.
Rows removed so far:
Lodi/Summer Rambo
Bevens
Redfree
Rox Russet
Ginger Gold
Pristine
Stark Grand Gala
To be removed next year:
Va Winesap
Grimes
Crimson Crisp
Summer Banana/Va Gold
Daybreak Fuji
Cameo
Pristine
That would leave Stayman, Granny, Old Fashioned Winesap, Fuji ,Goldrush, Pink Lady on about 1/2 acre and compress my picking season into about 6 Saturdays.
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i let thhe peaches die. they are water hogs n i have a limited well.
my grape is doing well n my figs should give me more than i can eat.
wrapping them is very hard, but once they hit 4 years inground they start bearing well.
my dominick gave me 300 figs last year n this year i should get 500 from this tree.
zone 7a is too cold for figs but if you can get them thru the winters they like it here, in the gravel n sand i call soil.
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I am curious, the ones you are leaving why did you pick those varieties to leave? Taste, disease resistance, yield, something else?
I really love this thread, Dave, and it couldn’t be more timely. As I recall it, me and you started down the fruit tree road just about the same time. I think I had put a few trees out 1-2 years before you but I got serious about it about the same time you did. I have long had the opinion that since I’m blessed with quite a bit of space and don’t mind the work, I’ve always told myself (and this web site) that I am perfectly ok with planting trees such as apricots which very likely will only fruit once in 5 years, and I’m willing to try things like sweet cherries because I’ve had a little bit of success with one so I tried others. Anyway, just like you, this is the first year I’ve started to change my philosophy and is going to be my very first year to actually cut down some good, healthy looking trees simply because they don’t bare often enough or good enough fruit or I don’t like the taste or whatever. Even though I sill have space and could simply add more trees, its just starting to seem dumb to me to keep pruning and spraying and mulching and fertilizing trees that just don’t do anything (or much) for me. So right now, I’m thinking many of the same things you are:
I’m certainly going to stop dragging any potted figs in and out of my garage. I’m planting them all out this spring and time will tell if any of them can survive winter. I am going to keep my in ground figs, but I’m no longer wrapping any of them. It rarely helped anyway for me. So based on last 6 years some will make it through winter mostly in tact, while others will freeze AT LEAST back to the ground and therefore not produce much some years. I can live with that, and some winters I get no die back so I can justify keeping mine more than you probably could.
Appricots…just like you, mine just bloom way way too early and I’ve had fruit literally ONE TIME in the 6 years I’ve had them. I’m going to leave one and cut 4.
Also like you, I love my pluots so much that I’m keeping them, even though at least one of mine is such an early bloomer that I’ll not get much fruit most years. But when i do it is so great that I can convince myself to keep them.
Another thing I’m probably going to do may surprise you, because you and I (and me and many others here) have often talked about how much success I’ve had with my Black Tartarian Sweet Cherry. But I don’t think I’ve fairly explained that success. Yes, it is one of the biggest, healthies trees in my orchard- much to my shock and in spite of what most resources say about growing sweet cherries in the south. HOWEVER, what I haven’t been clear about is the difficulty I have had in keeping a good polinator. In other words, I’ve only been successful with ONE kind of sweet cherry. For the first couple years I had what I think was a bing, and it did pollinate my BT and I got quite a lot of fruit from the BT for a couple years. But my Bing died. Since then I’ve planted 8 different varieties of other sweet cherries, and they have all performed poorly. They barely grow at all, so they stay so small that they don’t have enough blooms to properly polinate my big, nice BT, so the last 2 years I’ve only gotten maybe 20 cherries from it. And many of my newer sweet cherries have died. I tell you all this because for a long time I’ve talked about my success with Black Tartarian Sweet Cherry, and that was 100% true for first 2 years and in more recent years I’ve still bragged on my BT because it grows so well and looks so good and I thought (and still do) that all I needed was a larger pollinator. I’ve now learned that every sweet cherry tree EXCEPT BT is just as hard to grow here in the south as everyone said they all would be. I’ll probably leave my big healthy BT and one polinator, but the rest will probably go this year.
I am also probably going to cut 2-3 Euro pears that are healthy trees, big producers, good in every way but one- i just don’t like the taste. That includes moonglow, keiffer, and perhaps one or two more. They aren’t awful, but they are so similar to each other and so mediocre that its probably time to thin the herd! ha.
I’m also considering taking out some apples which might surprise folks. Both my gala AND my honeycrisp are 5 years old and while they have produced a bit the last 2 years, its been a small amount and worse yet, they were just small, knotty, spotted and ugly as could be. Both have been failures for me, even though I sprayed the same things at the same times as my other apple trees which produced great tasting, beautiful apples. I probably will keep trying on these 2 varieties this year because I like them so much when I buy the varieties at the store, but if I can’t improve the output and quality, they too will come down in the future.
I could go on, but you get the point…we agree that there are certainly some justifications for taking out some trees this year!
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I’ve lost the last 3 apples to fire blight in the tree trunk. a lodi , hardy fuji and a cortland. funny thing is i never seen it in the branches. i sprayed them all for it too. would make a sunken spot on the bark and would girdle the tree. put in a garfield king y. transparent last year. original tree is 20 mi. from here so should be fairly resistant to our diseases around here. also planted it in a raised bed. our rocky clay soil isn’t good for apples. if this one fails , I’m done with apples. theres plenty of them growing wild around here to collect for apple sauce.
all of those. Evaluated in terms of revenue per row. I need close to $500 per 100 foot of row to make the time and effort worth while. We hoped for $1000/row when we started (34K revenue/acre), but its clear we will never produce even close to that yield. Profit would be a better evaluation method, but I don’t have the ability to keep up with it on each row.
I forgot to mention Gala which I am keeping except for the Stark Gala. If you assume that Gala generates the same revenue per row as a later variety like Pink Lady it will produce more profit because it requires less sprays since it ripens so early. Unfortunately, most folks are not interested in Apples when Gala gets ripe in August.
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I can remember wayback when people rushed to buy the early yellow transparents because there were finally apples again
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Kevin,
On the cherries did you have White Gold? Just wondered because it supposed to be a universal pollinator. You could try and transform some of the BT scaffolds to grafts like Bing and just keep the one tree. I’m lucky as cherries grow well here. Fairly easy to grow.
With figs many are just OK, and some are great. I like them so much I’m willing to do the fig shuffle. One though has to decide their priorities. And we all keep some hard to grow items because they are so good. For me that is figs. Although I don’t think they are hard to grow, just a lot of work to grow. I guess we all hoped more were like that. It does make no sense to grow a hard to grow plant when you barely like the fruit anyway.
I also think putting everything in is about the only way to figure out what is good and works and what does not. Or you could listen to those who have been there done that, but that would be too easy! 
I have mixed feelings on the subject as when I first came I was told I put the wrong trees in my area. Well i wanted to try them and even though I have not grown fruit trees before I have grown plants my whole life. My dad too, and he had fruit trees so I knew how much work they were already. So I still have all those trees I was told not to plant, they are my favorites. Arctic Glo, the nectaplum, and other west coast trees. The pluots worked fine. All fruit, some not as well as others, but many of them work and work well here. At the time I joined I was told not to grow any pluots. At that time we did not know which worked and did not work, but the only way to find out is to try, When I say joined I meant Garden Web as I started before this site existed.
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I’m really going to try stop growing so much waterhemp, foxtail, purslane, ragweed, morning glory, stick tights, chickweed, creeping charlie, quackgrass, horseweeds. While these varieties do so well year after year, they have just lost their charm for me.
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Kevin,
I feel your pain. Beautiful fruit trees with little to no production is heart breakers.
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Here people still make applesauce from them, though I don’t know what appeals to people about making and canning applesauce in sweltering July when the same product could be made from apples in September or October.
That’s always been my own view on the subject
I used to make applesauce from an anonymous tree that was growing here when I bought the place, but borers got it several years ago
I’m planting a new orchard in spring 2019 and here is what I had that I’m not adding again:
Alderman hybrid plum - I had only had fruit one year and it was totally meh, which appears to be the going opinion here. Replacement: Black Ice hybrid plum
Kidd’s Orange Red - This was an OK apple for me. It didn’t live up to its hype and doesn’t keep tremendously long. Replacement: Crimson Crisp - same season and has consistently good flavor (almost lemon-citrus flavor) in our climate, long keeper.
Harry Master’s Jersey - Did not fruit for me. It seems to bloom so much later than all other apples here that I don’t see it being pollinated ever. I read descriptions of it more closely and it is supposed to give a “barnyard flavor” to cider. Nope!
Enterprise - Shy bearer. Lackluster flavor from what I can tell. Thick skin. I still have a tree, in a pot, ready to be planted. I think I will be converting to a multi-graft tree in 2020.
Redhaven - I don’t have a plan to add this peach back in to my orchard. I will have to see whether my NCSU peaches survive the winter. If not, I will probably roll the dice and buy a Redhaven at a big box store.
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