Well,it’s January and a new year.Being Winter also for a lot of us here in the Northern hemisphere,we can also look forward towards Spring.
Remember that?But we have to be patient and wait.Here’s something I recently read.
“Is the Spring coming? What is it like?”
“It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine…”
We’re only a couple weeks away from ramps and daffodils around here, so I’ll have some vernal premonition making appearances soon enough that I’m satisfied. I’ve got a lot of grafting experiments lined up and dozens of new-to-my-efforts seeds en route, so my hands will have plenty of time in gloves and/or dirt before it’s time to play in the yard itself.
Citrus galore! Most of it from @fruitfruit after a successful CRFG exchange. One lonely sweet lime (not sure of exact variety) from the exchange. My first time tasting a sweet lime. I was expecting it to be insipid but it did have good sugar/acid balance.
The event itself was very well organized and attended even with all the Covid constraints. Huge collection of apples but decent representation for figs, pears and stone fruits as well.
There was a small stick of Valentine pomelo left over from a CCPP group buy last year, that I grafted on my Oro Blanco. It did nothing last year but remained green. It has bursted out this year with sooo many buds (which I’ll obviously pinch off).
My Amorphophallus Konjac corms are pushing up flower spikes. I’m hoping it is warm enough to have them flower outside since I don’t think my family will appreciate their special bouquet. Ziggy is a bit nervous as well.
25 M.111 root stocks from Cummins arrived Thurs, and my “garage fridge” croaked. Arghhhhh…
A lovely warm day hitting 72 degrees after the low of 18 Sunday morning. Time to put the seedlings out to sunbathe. I love my grow lights, but nothing is as good as el sol.
I’m getting close to ready to start seeds inside here. Some things I should likely have already done, but May frosts the last two years have left me a little nervous. As has a rather pervasive trend of burrowing rodents showing preference for the things that have been surrounded with repellant strategies. It’s likely not a smany as it feels like, given their visible burrowing trends, but the assorted hawks across the way do not seem to be patroling enough to help out. I think the crows are helping to protect the smaller birds around my feeders a little too efficiently.
And lastly, my scionwood orders seem to be arriving well ahead of my rootstock orders, except of course, for the things that have been here for a while, in which case, the scion is dragging its feet. I think this means I am ready for spring. I even grafted some leftover walnut scion over the weekend onto rootstock that will most likely be removed. I’m not expecting anything from either, but the practice can’t hurt. If I happen to get lucky, I’ll have two more types that didn’t take the first time.
Spring is in the air here, although it does look like we’ll be getting another frost this weekend or Monday. I believe these are our native 7-spot ladybugs.
ill be right there!
Oh sure…… now that we are going to the high 70’s today!!!
But I will say that cold spell kept my trees in tight bud until now!!!
I am SOOOOOOO excited! After having apricot trees for 12 years and loosing them to frost every single year for 11 of those 12 years and only getting a handful of fruit on the one year they didn’t all get killed by frost (most blooms were killed that year too, just not all), this year for the first time it looks like my tree is going to be absolutely LOADED. (hope I’m not jinxing myself here. ha). Petals are dropping now and I can see healthy looking fruitlets EVERYWHERE…TONS OF THEM!!!
Who on earth is dumb enough to keep trees that only give fruit one time in 12 years? 
THIS GUY!!! haha. Yea, here in the land of late frosts, apricots - at least the ones I have - are just impractical. But you can’t kill the dream…and once ever 12 years seems like a perfectly good reason to keep a tree around to a nutty, irrational fruit grower like me! haha (keep in mind I’m lucky enough to have plenty of space so its not any worse than my maple trees or whatever except I get the POSSIBILITY each year of having fruit and so far, it looks like this may be that year.
Want to hear the strangest part of all this? I actually lost most of my early blooming plums this year to frost, yet this cot somehow kept its fruit. It blooms a few days later than some early blooming plums/pluots that I lost (spring Satin, etc). So this year, this tree just barely squeezed through the proverbial “frost window” it appears.
Any other mid-south growers with apricot trees have similar problems getting fruit? Strangely I’ve seen others not too far from me show cot trees with fruit, so either I just have bad varieties or a bad micro climate or something. I’m sorry i can’t tell you with any confidence what varieties I’ve tried or even what variety the one fruiting now is, because these were all bought in my early days from Lowes so what was on the tags literally is more often wrong than it is right. Think about that…I’ve had more trees turn out to be mislabeled than the number that were right. So yea…no telling what kind of cots i had/have!
UPDATE: As I type this I’m hearing the morning weatherman say its going to be 28 degrees Saturday night so this whole post may be for naught! Grrr.
The weather has been wet and cold and not fun to be out in lately. But the spring veggies seem to be enjoying it.
Two explorations this afternoon.
First, the pawpaw in my bathroom had pollen a couple days ago, which I harvested and put in the fridge. Today I used some of it to pollinate a flower on one of the trees in my yard. I’m not 100% it was quite ready, but I had some stick and I can add to it tomorrow. A few other flowers are not far behind. Neither is known to be a named cultivar.
Next, I received a Juube of a variety I hadn’t wanted this year. I ordered it after I’d substituted Jujube scion for something that was out without thinking about not having anything to graft onto. Anyway, it had one decent looking stem about the same thickness as one varietal and a decent sized stem that included the original graft zone. The first graft was standard whip (too thin and hard for a toungue) and the second graft I did as a side graft on top of the original graft.
If it takes, I’ll have three varieties on one plant, including a graft zone with three cultivars overlapping. If it doesn’t, well, I haven’t lost anything I probably hadn’t already lost otherwise. I have no idea what the rootstock is.
I applied dormant oil yesterday. My apple trees may like me, but my back is killing me. Max temp was 51°F. Bud break is underway. Anyway, I am posting this to inform you that, since I’m done, it’s officially too late to do this now.
