Garden Reflections - Berries and Tree Fruit
Over the next several weeks I'll be writing a series of posts entitled Garden Reflections where I will break down the successes and failures in the garden this year. Each week I will focus on a specific group of produce that I grew and harvested and how I plan to be successful next season
Berries
I harvested only a little over two pounds of berries this year due to drought and my own laziness in not keeping the weeds down and providing supplemental water. I had no raspberries as they are planted in a poor location. I'll be moving them to a place where they will get better light. My blueberries also underperformed this year.
Strawberries
This year I grew three varieties of strawberries. Pineberry, Rainbow Treasure and Yellow Alpine.
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| Pineberry |
Pineberries are the opposite color of standard strawberries. They have white flesh and red seeds. They are said to have a pineapple flavor though I didn't think so. I found them to be more acidic than red strawberries which added an interesting nuance to their flavor  |
| Rainbow Treasure |
Rainbow Treasure is a pink flowering cultivar. It produces richly flavored, medium size, red berries of high quality.
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| Yellow Alpine |
Yellow Alpine is an everbearing variety that produces small pale yellow berries with yellow seeds from June to first frost. The berries are ignored by birds due to their lack of red coloring. They are highly aromatic and intensely flavored when fully ripe
Dewberries
Dewberries grow wild in the wooded areas of my property
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Blueberries
I have six blueberry bushes in four varieties. Bluecrop, Chandler, Reka and Sunshine Blue
They give me a staggered harvest starting in late July through October. They are planted in 25 gallon barrels, at the farthest end of the garden. This made watering difficult during this years drought so I've decided to transplant them to the upper edge of the orchard where there is a natural spring. They will have plenty of water there and room to grow
Apples
I have two apple trees, Silken and Almata. The Silken produces medium yellow apples with a pale pink blush. The skin is thin and nearly transparent. Desert quality flesh is excellent for fresh eating and it also makes excellent sauce .
Almata produces small red fleshed fruit and is classified as a crabapple, though fruit is larger than a typical crabapple. It is primarily used as a pollinizer as fruit has an underwhelming flavor and texture. I also use it to add a pretty pink hue to applesauce
My Silken apple produced 12 1/2 pounds of fruit this year, enough for 12 1/2 pints of sauce. This is the first significant amount of fruit that it has produced since being damaged in a windstorm two years ago
Cherries
I have two cherry trees. An old sweet cherry of an unknown variety, but similar to Bing and a Montmorency pie cherry. A third of the sweet cherry died this spring so I plan on removing the tree this fall and replacing it with another sweet variety
The pie cherry produced over 19 pounds of fruit this year, most of which was frozen for pastries over the winter. I also made a batch of cherry liqueur to sip in front of the fire on cold days
Peaches
I have one Frost peach tree
Due to our damp maritime climate we have a problem with peach leaf curl. Frost is the only variety that is naturally resistant to curl and will produce reliably in Western Washington. It produces very fuzzy medium sized free-stone fruit of high quality. When fully ripe, the skins slip from the flesh, requiring no blanching. My tree produced nearly 47 pounds of fruit this year. Enough for fresh eating, pastries and 15 quarts of canned fruit
Plums
I have two plum trees. A newly planted Italian prune and a Shiro plum
The Shiro produces a medium sized, yellow cling-stone fruit that is extremely juicy and of high quality. It does not keep well. It produces on a three year cycle bearing low, medium and high amounts of fruit in turn. This season was it's high bearing year with over 160 pounds of fruit produced, more than we could possibly use. We ate our fill of fresh fruit, I gave away as much as I could, made 8+ quarts of plum juice concentrate and fed over 50 pounds to the chickens
My berries and fruit trees produced over of 241 pounds of fruit this year
We planted a few 4 way trees and have not had any success with them. Our peach tree did ok, our apple tree did not and finally our pear tree had the sweetest pears and they were big and juicy! We finally started to get grapes, not enough to make wine though! I will have a lot of questions for you. When do you prune the fruit trees? When do you fertilize them? And what kind do you use? Your fruit looks fabulous. I wish I had your cherry tree, we only got 2 cherries on ours:( Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading Pattie. If needed, I prune my trees in the fall after all the leaves have dropped. Most of them are well established so they only need pruning every 2-3 years. If there has been issues with fungal disease I spray my peach and apples with copper fungicide the spring before bud break. I only fertilize if the trees need it and that is done before bud break in the spring. To know if they need fertilizer I check the previous years growth. This link: https://www.groworganic.com/organic-gardening/images/uploads/Fertilizing_Trees.Still003.jpg
ReplyDeletewill take you to a site that has a chart that shows the expected growth rate of different fruit trees. Only fertilize if growth is below the minimum or at the lower end of the scale. I use composted chicken manure from my birds, but any organic high nitrogen fertilizer will work. I hope this info helps.
Thank you for getting back to me. I just told my husband about the link you send me. We live in ZONE 5B is it too late to prune the trees now. We started to get snow flurries already most of the leaves have dropped on the fruit trees. We have copper fungicide that we use on our tomato plants and it helps. What saved more plants this year I used the Aspirin / water spray when my plants were small. It was a test to see which tomatoes would stay healthier and the Aspirin treated one stayed without disease. I do not have chicken manure but maybe my neighbor can give me some. We use cow manure we buy in bags. Last year we put some 10-10-10 in the soil and it helped our pears but not our apples or peaches. The year before we used worm castings and that worked well on our peach tree. What zone are you from? Thanks so much for your expert advice!
DeleteYou can still prune with no issues just as long as it's done before spring. I put a good bit of manure on my established trees, usually a 5 gallon bucket each. You can mix a little blood meal in with the cow manure to boost the nitrogen.
DeleteI'm in Western Washington, near Seattle, zone 8b. We don't usually get a hard freeze until late November and snow is rare. Disease and pests are also few and far between, thankfully.
Wow that is a lot of manure. I am not sure if the stores are sold out of it yet. I have a bag of bone meal but not blood meal. I will see what's left in the stores. The shelves are loaded with Christmas items, I prefer gardening items. This winter I am going to concentrate on marketing my garden markers. I am a graphic designer and came up with an idea for garden markers. I had them manufactured and tested in CA, FL and PA. They held up beautifully! I have 36 vegetable varieties. This gives me something to do during the winter blahs of not raking and hoeing the dirt!
DeleteDo you know anything about grape vines? We visited a few wineries and they told us to cut off all the clusters from the vines the first year. We did not do that until the 3rd year and this year we got grapes. Not many but enough to snack on. They did not tell us what to fertilize with but we noticed a lot of mulch around the base of their vines. We had 5 trees removed this year because they were almost dead. We had the tree service leave the mulch here in a pile. It is already starting to break down as soil since the June removal. Yesterday I wrapped burlap around our 2 fig trees and composted them as well, I put a lot of mulch around the base hoping they will not freeze. This summer they sprouted from the base but no figs. It is a learning process and you are full of information! Thanks for reaching out to others! I appreciate your information so much. My husband will prune the fruit trees a bit before it snows! The apples were tiny and the skins had black spots on them. Not like a mold just a discoloring.
Pattie Caprio
www.logosanddesign.com
Unfortunately I don't know much about grapes. The spots on your apples may be apple scab, a preventable fungal disease, but I couldn't be sure without seeing an image
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