What are one or two things that make you smile/feel good when you think back through this year in your orchard?
Mine are having the first apple grafts to set fruit. And having the new section young trees finally be large enough that they show above the brambles and vegetation and I can see and enjoy the overall pattern.
Happy New Year from the northwoods! Sue
Mine are the first pawpaw fruits and the first red flesh apples baya marisa⌠
First-time harvests of a few great apples: Coxâs Orange Pippin, Calville Blanc, Kiddâs Orange Red.
I ate my first few fruit from the orchard in 2019. My Contender that was planted same year gave me couple of fruits. After so many years of growing peaches without fruit, this was a real treat.
I also got couple of Chicago Hardy figs for the first time.
I grafted over my American persimmon to couple of different varieties of hybrid and Asian and 5 out of 5 grafts took and grew. Some branches grew more than 4-5 feet!
Iâm in the process which is always ongoing of adjusting my garden to fit my wants and needs. And I saw a lot of progress this year. Not only the garden but processing the fruit and veggies to use as long as possible. It has been working great, now fined tuned. The school of hard knocks is tough but graduation day is sweet.
All the new fruit varieties that I tasted for the first time from my orchard (listed below) I have to say it was a great year from that perspective! I also have to add that their quality was sublime, high to very high brix and flavor as expectedâŚ
I had some successes at my first attempts at grafting. Also the amount of knowledge Iâve gained about growing fruit instead of just planting it and hoping for the best.
My big orchard success is finally having a piece of land to put an orchard on. More shade than ideal and too many squirrels, but nice sandy soil, enough sunny spots, and itâs mine! Big things happening in the coming years.
Sue, my highlight is the 5 seeds in the 'fridgeâŚfrom my first hand-pollinated intentional cross.
Weâll see if they hang in without sprouting until springâmaybe Iâll get at least one or two I can grow out from those seeds.
The little Black Oxford tree is alive, by the way, but isnât growing much.
Have yourself a lovely 2020. I bet you get plenty of snow.
My apple (Liberty) and one of my pear trees(Tennousi) produced fruit for the first time. Blackberries blew me away. 5 Prime Ark Freedom plants absolutely produced plenty for me to use throughout the year. The rest are just overkill. I just wish blackberries didnât have seeds.
Okay, how about a third thing involving my little vineyard and really the best thing about 2019?
What made me incredibly happy was trying a fruit I had never tried before: Muscadines. I only had a couple since my vines are young(1 and 2 years old), but WOW were they good. Such a unique flavor and each vineâs flavor was different, but great. Absolutely looking forward to a few more in 2020! What a relief, too! I have 9 varieties growing. Would have been a shame pulling those suckers up had I not liked them lol
This was my first year to get enough Korean Giant pears for my family and a few to share with others. Great tasting pear. Planted my first seedless muscadine (OH MY) which is supposed to be the first seedless to be full size and sweet etc.
Chad, how did you like your Libs?
I liked them and so did my son. We took a few of them along with those pears to Yellowstone. Great snack during a long hike. Very juicy. We picked them WAY too early though or at least I think we did since they seemed quite tart. So still good picked early! Iâll let them ripen fully this coming year to taste the difference. Hereâs a picture of part of the lot we took up there.
Seems to me that the ones that are picked early store best; the fully ripe ones lose their texture pretty soon (a month maybe?) in storage. The âjust rightâ ones have nicely developed flavor, arenât as tart.
Youâve got some nice looking fruit there. Iâm really tempted to start a muscadine vine here if it can handle the winters.
I was very pleased with the continued success of having productive peach trees here. We also made a concerted effort to do heavier thinning which paid off with larger fruits.
Also I was pleased with our Honeycrisp apple cropâŚa real surprise considering that our McIntosh and Cortland were wiped out by scab because of our lack of spraying.
This was our first year of getting pears, and our first time getting a few more apples than the one from last year.
The two pears came from a smaller tree, but they werenât all that tasty. Good sized fruit, but too gritty and not really sweet. Still havenât figured out which variety they were, it is supposed to be a Orient pear, but their shape belies that.
We got apples for the first time off of four different varieties- Suncrisp, Zestar, Grimes Golden and Liberty. We just got one SC, but it was huge, and had good flavor, glad we we got the tree. The GG had a surprisingly good flavor, a bit grainy texture, and small fruit, but glad we have the trees. We got a couple Zâs, picked past its prime, but still had that crisp, sweet/tart flavor itâs known for. The Libâs were way past their prime as well, we had five fruit, but either squirrels or deer got three of them the others were too mealy. Our Alkmene tree fruited for the second year, but we only got a few fruit to try, but it has a unique flavor, more âaromaticâ than the others.
Iâm sure the apples will get better as the trees mature and get bigger. Hope to see my other trees fruit for the first time next year.
Got one peach this year, off our scrwany Redhaven tree, the others didnât even bloom. The others trees have good size, so next year might be our first good crop. Our three pluots have put on good size too.
Berry wise, we had a good strawberry crop, not like last year, I put in another row this year (Flavorfest), so next year ought to be great crop.
Blackberries were prob our best producers, all of them fruiting for the first time. Triple Crown had the best flavor, Freedom the biggest berry. Osage had the second best flavor, followed by Ouachita and Traveler.
Raspberries did OK, but not that many fruit. Prelude and Anne were the best producers. Canes didnât do as well as the blackberries, but there seems to be quite a few for next year.
Our wild plum tree I transplanted a couple years ago was quite loaded with fruit. I sprayed it with Surround to keep the PC at bay, and it did a pretty good job. But, we didnât get any ripe fruit, I guess squirrels got after them, too.
Look forward to more tree fruit, and blackberries next year.
This was the first year that I got more than just a few plums. I had very good crops from Castleton, Green Gage, Early Laxton, Toka, Damson, Rosy Gage and Kahinta. It was my first time trying an actual ripe Green Gage and they were delicious, and I had quite a bit of them. Had a decent amount of peaches and asian pears as well. I found out that dried asian pears are super tasty, and dried peaches and plums are very good as well. I also made some damson plum jelly that was awesome.
Congrats on all the plums. How did your honeyberries, currants and gooseberries do?
I got a handful of cherries from my Juliet bush that I liked very much.
Planted 2 year old pawpaw seedlings that were from fruit I had hand pollinated with a watercolor paintbrush. They were crosses of Shenandoah x Susquehanna, Shenandoah x NC-1, and Allegheny x Susquehanna that were planted where some other pawpaw trees had winter killed.
Got some fencing up and traps to help keep the critters out of my blueberries over this coming winter. Last winter the bunnies ate most of the blueberries down to the nubbins or snow line.
Learned and applied more cultural practices for maintaining the new apple, peach, pear, and Romance cherries planted in 2018.
Setting plan in place to raise a few seedless table grapes
