Got out in the apple orchard today and pruned 7 Honey Crisp trees on Antonovka rootstock. Beautiful day for pruning…40 degrees and almost bare ground.
Here are some pictures of the first tree that I pruned. These trees are going into their 10th growing season (yikes…seems like it was just yesterday that we planted them!).
Found a persimmon at the grocery store! Never eaten one before. So, how do I know when it is ready to eat?
It’s a Fuyu, so no need to worry about it being ready. It’s nonastringent. Go for it. Should be crunchy.
If you wait until it starts to soften, it will be sweeter. It ripens by storage at room temperature with something that produces ethylene, e.g. an apple or a banana.
We have a large Valencia orange tree in the backyard planted by previous home owners. We usually leave the fruits on the tree until Fall/Winter and start juicing then. I saw someone’s post here (I think @Matt_in_Maryland) saying they mixed orange and lemon juices, which I tried this year and it was great. Made me wonder what else I should mix. Our new winner so far is Valencia + passion fruit - Rich tropical flavor with nice sugar/acid balance. We call the juice cocktail “Flavor Bomb”, following DWN’s pluot naming scheme 
On the surface, it sounds great. However, diseases and pests must be taken into consideration. I have seen pest infested apple tree in my neighborhood that drop fruit on side walk and make a mess every year.
Fruit trees on public lands need to be grown with little care. I have seen some streets and parking lots in and around Nuremberg/Rothenburg in Germany lined with pear trees. They need little care and definitely attract people to harvest them.
Good concept but needs more thoughts and planning into it.
We use a lot of citrus as street trees, but usually they are of bitter orange… why not sweet ones, tangerines and clementines?
I couldn’t agree more Tippy. Here in Spokane, the climate is near perfect for apples. There are feral apple trees all over Eastern Washington. Without care and a good spraying program, all they really contribute to the area is perfect harmful insect breeding grounds. It just makes it that much harder for those who are really trying to grow them. Feral cherries aren’t that far behind as a problem.
I totally agree. Many of my neighbors have pomegranate trees and don’t care about harvesting the fruit. Leaf footed bugs overwinter in the split fruit, breed there in spring and summer, and then fly to my pomegranates, wave after wave, all summer and fall. Takes me a lot of time to clean my pomegranate trees of these nasty pests. I have to do this every few days from late July to late October, since a new wave of these bugs arrives just after I exterminated the previous one.
A beautiful morning today with the temp around 70 degrees for the next 2 weeks or more and it is a perfect time to graft everything. I am having a cup of green tea now and feeding the pet miniature 10 yrs old 5 inch turtle and the fish before heading outside to graft.
Tony
You can down load the Google’s lens app on your phone and one shoot it will name any species of plant or fruit known to man.
Not to be the picky one in the group . . . .
but WHY are we still posting under the title - What’s Happening Today “2019 Edition” ??? 
There is a thread for 2020. I guess that gives you more choices… 
Because that’s how human brains work, they read a few letters of a word and recognize the whole word without keeping attention to the remainder of the letters. Similarly, I think some people (including me, who only realized this is the 2019 post when you pointed that out) read the first few words and recognize that this where to post “what’s happening today” without reading the rest of the title referring to 2019.
@Ahmad That is a good explanation! I just thought it was kind of funny that we were all just going along with the ‘2019’ thread ! LOL
Here is the 2020 one –
I am going to close this one to help keep us in 2020 
