Yeah, that’s about when they were ready here at the orchard we visit. I remember how huge they were, and thinking they couldn’t taste that good, but they were very tasty for their size and being an early apple. One of them would make a meal.
I thought they tasted better than Gala, but I’m not a big fan of that variety. To me there’s a lot of better tasting varieties. I prefer my apples to have tart and sweet together, like Goldrush, probably my favorite.
I checked them out again today, as I’ve been very occupied with non fruit issues lately, and saw even more leaves missing. I’ll take your word for it, but it’s very aggravating seeing them there basically leafless now. Hope we get some berries off them despite this setback.
Guess I’d better get my patch prepared for the new plants. Need to till and fertilize it a bit.
I cover mine with netting when they fruit - maybe you need to cover the leaves
I’m thinning my pear fruit as my apples start to bloom. I will start bagging my pears as they get about dime size. Hope to be finished bagging the pears before the apples get into full bloom. This is my first year to get a heavy bloom on the asian pears. Wow they set fruit as thick as dog hair making it hard to determing the king fruit (Korean Giant).
To me, pears do not really have a king fruit in a cluster like apples. I just choose the one that looks best and its stem is in the right position (in addirtion to being damage free).
If you think KG set fruit thickly, wait until you see 20th Century fruit cluster. A KG’s cluster carries 5-7 fruitlets. 20th carries almost 10 per cluster.
Sometimes, I take whole clusters out when there are a lot on a branch.
Pears do not have a king fruit like apples, so I do the same thing you do Mam, I pluck off all of the weak looking pollinated tiny pears!
Thanks I feel better. Now I will thin and not be so concerned with my choice.
I’ve learned to check their stems, too. Sometimes, after I thinned a cluster down to one or two best looking fruitlets, I found out that the stems were half munched off by some leaf rollers!!!
As you can tell that I had too much time in my hand or more accurately a touch of OCD 
I’ve bagged pears only to find them dropping because their stems were chewed
Lol. I havent had much reason to thin but when I do i select the fruit that has been hit with PC or CM.
At bagging/thinning time, the only pests I find on my pears are the worms
Today we repaired sinkhole in our yard. I took off a portion of topsoil around the hole and explored what is bellow. Below were couple of big rocks with an opening in between. Bar probe showed it is deep. The idea was to get some sand, and using water hose sink it down the hole and fill the opening. So I decided to use water hose to see, how big of a space we are talking about. I opened the water and left it open full for about 10 minutes. Water never accumulated in the hole. Water also didn’t come out anywhere we could see…So sand idea became unrealistic. Instead, I decided to treat this problem like all of my terraces made. We pushed few rocks in the opening to make sure they wider than the opening on one side, so it created kind of “cork”, then added some gravel, landscape fabric, and finally 1 cubic yard of topsoil we bought. Now I have horizontal “terrace”… Oh, well… I hope this will hold.
We have a similar spot in our yard, evidently an old septic unit from before the sewer. You cannot fill it! Luckily for me, I was able to use it for the outflow of our ground source heat pump, which can run up to 9 gallons a minute around the clock in very cold weather. In over ten years we’ve never had any indication of a problem (knock on wood!).
I grafted all my Blues Jam scion today and it was awful 
The wood was so hard, and I’m just bad at that. I’ll be lucky if even one takes. Crossing my fingers. I want a damson!
I’ll be set if I can get softer buds later in the year, so I only really need one take.
Mark,
Is your source of heat,geothermal?bb
Got my three newly budding apple grafts potted up today finally. I might put them under some lights to help them a bit before they go outside. The three from last year will get planted in the ground soon.
Sat evening I managed to weed the three gooseberries, as well as the Juliet and Romeo cherry bushes. Also gave them a dose of Hollytone fert and then gave them some straw mulch. Finished right as the leading line of heavy rain started. It just now stopped, after about 3 hours, bet we got almost an inch. Hopefully it didn’t wash away all the fertilizer. But at least there’s no more rain due until later next week.
Today I was doing some minor chores in the backyard and noticed a snail on the passion fruit vine. They never really seemed to bother the big vine on the trellis, although they’ve decimated some smaller rooted samples. However this time I saw dozens of the stupid things all over the vine. There were 2-3 per leaf in some places… Slime everywhere. Definitely the definition of yuck! I spend a few minutes and plucked about 2 dozen off, then took a rock to the ones on the ground. Not fun!
Brady, yes. It’s a Climatemaster Tranquility 27 open loop system, so whenever it’s running we’re pumping and dumping. It has worked pretty well for going on 15 winters. We’ve yet to use the backup electrical, in fact, never even enabled it.
