Future fruit
I
went out in the drizzle Friday afternoon to retie a few training lines
that had come loose around our fruit trees...and ended up spending half
an hour dreaming of the fruit to come.
My father is already
eating strawberries out of his South Carolina garden, but our
"June-bearers" aren't due until mid May. On the other hand, the alpine
strawberries (the
right hand photo above) might ripen sooner --- the tiny fruits are
pretty much full-size.
Our gooseberries are swelling so fast that I
could almost imagine popping one in my mouth. Meanwhile, there
are tiny flowers on the grapes, budding flowers on the rabbiteye
blueberries and everbearing
red raspberries, and
full blooms on the northern highbush blueberries.
Of
course, it's the tree fruits I'm really watching with an eagle
eye. I love this time of year when the tiny fruits start pushing
their way out of the faded flowers. The photo above is one of the
many, many fruits gracing our kitchen peach, the back peach seems to be
nearly as loaded, and there are even some baby fruits on the nectarine
this year.
The
pear --- as I suspected --- is just a tease. She's a little young
to be bearing fruit anyway.
The cherry, on the other
hand, is an old maid. She must have heard me mention that this
was her last year on earth if she didn't start producing, so she killed
back half of her branches to gather up enough energy to make half a
dozen fruits. I guess she'll get another year to prove herself
after all.
And look at this!
Our first real apple flowers! (We did have blooms on our Stayman
Winesap last year...in the fall, after it had lost all of its leaves to
cedar
apple rust and then
leafed back out.) Surprisingly, this isn't our biggest, oldest,
or happiest apple, but the Yellow Transparent is in second place and (I
seem to remember) tends to fruit at a young age for an apple.
Maybe next year the tree will be past the teasing stage and ready to
give me fruits.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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