Posts

A BRIGHT FUTURE

/15 Comments/in , /by

As Good As It Gets

You might think that writing about good weather would tempt the fates. I’ll thumb my nose at the fates and go ahead and write that this spring is the best spring, gardenwise, ever in all the decades since I’ve been gardening. The flowers have been more vibrant with color and, it seems, also in greater profusion. The air has been particularly fragrant, especially now with the intoxicating aroma of black locust blooms following closely on the heels of autumn olive’s sweet scent.
Apple tree in bloom
My fruit trees are most thankful for this spring’s beneficence. In all the years of growing fruit here on the farmden, never has the landscape been so brightened by snowballs of white blooms of plum and pear trees, pinkish blossoms of apples, and peaches’ pure pink blossoms.
Apple blossoms
Peach blossoms
The now-fallen petals are no cause for wistfulness, because those clusters of flowers have now morphed into clusters of fruits

Why this Year?

What makes for such a glorious spring? The weather, of course, both this spring’s in addition to last winter’s and even last spring’s. Let’s first go back to last spring’s weather effects.

During spring 2020 the weather warmed going into April, coaxing flower buds on fruit trees to swell. Then, towards the end of that month and into May, a number of nights saw temperatures that nipped life from many flowers, then open, especially the 22° temperature on April 23rd and then subfreezing temperatures on May 9th, 13th, and 14th. (All this information handily recorded and passed onto my computer via Sensorpush sensors I have at two locations outdoors and one location in the greenhouse.) 
Peach fruitlets
Prelude to the present season began with a relatively mild winter, for which peach flower buds, which suffer damage at around minus 15°, were especially appreciative. And this spring has seen more or less gradually warming temperatures with — and this is most important — no late, damaging frosts. Buds for a current spring’s blossoms develop the summer of the previous year. Seeds in developing fruits produce a hormone that suppresses flower bud formation, so a heavy crop one year means a lighter crop the following year, and vice versa, all other things being equal. Last year’s late frosts knocked out much of the potential fruit crop so this year the trees did what they do, compensating for last year’s loss with more blooms.
Asian pear espalier
Fruit trees can afford to lose a certain number of flowers to cold each year. For instance, each flower bud of an apple tree unfolds to five flowers, and only 5 percent of those flowers need to set fruit for a full crop of apples. Furthermore, a temperature below 32° doesn’t always cause damage; just how much damage ensues depends on the the growth stage of flower buds and how cold it gets. Using apples, again, as an example, when their buds have expanded just enough to hint at the five flowers within (the “tight cluster” stage), 27° will kill 10 percent of them, 21° will kill 90 percent of them. More details for apples and other fruits can be found here.

Another variable is that temperatures can vary a little at various points within a tree, which can be important at these critical temperatures.

Not Yet Home Free

This auspicious spring is not a call for me to just sit back and wait for the delicious bounty to hang on the branches awaiting my picking. My work is cut out for me.

One job, to begin soon, will be thinning the fruit, that is, removing lots of them. In addition to upping the chances for a good return bloom and harvest next year (remember the seeds and the hormones), fruit thinning lets the trees channel more of their energy resources into fewer  fruits. The result: Fruits that remain are larger and more flavorful. Fruit thinning also lessens the chance of limbs breaking under the the load of too many fruits, and lessens pest problems. Two apples touching each other provide good cover for the larvae of codling moths to burrow into the fruits to become the classic “worm in the apple.”

Apple fruitletsCommercially, tree fruits are thinned with chemical sprays but I’ll be thinning by hand. The plan is to reduce the number of fruits to one per bud, leaving the largest and most pest-free, and allowing remaining fruits to sit no closer than about a half a foot apart along branches. Larger kinds of fruits are the ones that need thinning, which is nice because it would be very tedious to thin small fruits, such as cherries. Winter pruning removes some branches with fruit buds, so also contributes to reducing the load, as does trees’ natural shedding of some excess fruits.
Pear fruitlets
Another job, which began a few weeks ago, is keeping an eye out for and protecting fruits from insects and diseases — particularly problematic on a less than perfect site such as here on the farmden. All of the common tree fruits, except for pear, are very prone to these problems throughout much of eastern North America.

On a backyard scale, the problems are few but serious, in some cases serious enough to eliminate almost the whole crop or render it inedible. The major culprits are plum curculio, codling moth, apple maggot, oriental fruit moth, brown rot, apple scab, fire blight, and cedar apple rust. Not to mention deer and squirrels.

My tack is to take a multi-pronged approach, with some spraying (mostly organic), nurturing the soil (lots of mulch and compost) and the plants (pruning and fruit thinning), fostering beneficial insects with plantings that encourage their presence and with careful choice and limited amount of sprays, trapping pests (hanging fake apples, Red Delicious, with sticky Tanglefoot in trees), and possibly bagging individual fruits. See Grow Fruit Naturally for more about these approaches.

Even if there is “many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip,” every fruit grower has to be an optimist.

Plant Sale Reminder

This is the last week of my annual plant sale. For more information, go to https://leereich.com/2021/05/last-week-of-2021-plant-sale.html

And, A Free Webinar, “Weedless Gardening”

For more information, go to www.leereich.com/workshops.

Ugly, But Tasty, Old Fruit

/21 Comments/in /by
Today’s fruit du jour is medlar (Mespilus germanica), one of the most-disgusting-looking fruits you could imagine. Don’t stop reading! Medlar was a popular fruit in the Middle Ages, and with good reason. Charlemagne was so taken by this fruit that he decreed that it be planted in every town he conquered. Medlar needs some contemporary pr.
Let’s get those bad looks out of the way. Picture a small apple with a rough, russeted skin and the calyx end — the end opposite the stem — flared open. Not very pretty, eh? That homely appearance gave rise to

some not-so-complimentary nicknames. “Open-arse” fruit, for example, by Chaucer. Or, from Shakespeare, more discretely, “open-etcetera.”

Ugliness, for medlars, is not just skin deep. When harvested, which was a few weeks ago here, the fruits are white and rock hard within, and not ready for eating. The fruit must be bletted, or ripened, a couple of weeks or more. I blet my medlars by setting them on the cool, north windowsill facing my kitchen sink. With the woodstove at full tilt, the air at the windowsill might still be too dry for best bletting, so I also have a few fruits bletting beneath a small bell jar in another cool part of the kitchen. A wrinkling, dark skin tells me that bletting is complete. At this point the flesh has experienced a dramatic transformation —  to brown mush.
I put all that ugliness behind me and taste that brown mush. Delicious! Something like very rich applesauce with hints of wine. I’ve only eaten them straight

up. They allegedly also cook up into delicious tarts, jellies, “fools,” and the like. Here’s a simple recipe for a tart, dating back to 1660, from Robert May’s The Accomplisht Cook: “Take medlars that are rotten, strain them, and set them on a chaffing dish of coals, season them with sugar, cinamon and ginger, put some yolks of eggs to them, let it boil a little, and lay it in a cut tart; being baked scrape on sugar.”

(For a once popular fruit, medlar has had its share of pejoratives. “Rotten,” in the above recipe, means bletted. But many fruits, including European pears and avocados, need to be harvested unripe to ripen off the plant. Admittedly, few are brown mush when ready to eat.)
————————————————————–
So much for medlar’s bad looks and good flavor. Let’s take a good look at the plant itself.
Those ugly fruits ripen on a very attractive, small tree that never reaches more than about eight feet high or a spread of equal width. It’s a year ‘round beauty, even now, leafless, with its craggy branches and light brown bark. In spring, in contrast to many other fruit trees, the leaves unfold before the blossoms; each

blossom, opening singly and with white petals like a wild rose (a relative), is then framed by a whorled backdrop of forest-green leaves.

The tree is also self-pollinating, so does not need a companion to set fruit. Small size, beauty, and ability to perform solo make a medlar tree perfect for a small yard. One tree, then, doubles as your ornamental plant and your fruit tree.
————————————————————-
Pests can be a big bugaboo when growing tree fruits. The best way to deal with pests is to avoid them, and the best way to avoid them is to grow kinds or varieties of fruits naturally resistant to pests. That’s one reason I suggest against growing apples pretty much anywhere east of the Rocky Mountains. (Two of apples most significant pests, plum curculio and apple maggot, are absent from many areas of the West.) Nectarines, peaches, apricots, and plums similarly suffer from serious insect and disease problems, again, especially east of the Rocky Mountains.
You may wonder, then: What’s left to grow? Pears, for one. Also, a slew of other tree fruits that are not well-known, fruits such as medlar, pawpaw, persimmon, cornelian cherry, raisin tree, mulberry, and Asian

Bletting medlars

pear.  These uncommon fruits all have excellent flavor and few or no pest problems (and play the leading roles in my book Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden). They also demand little expertise or time in pruning as compared with some of the common tree fruits.

Not that biting into a fresh-picked, good variety of well-grown apple or peach isn’t a heavenly experience. And not that the occasional tree of such fruits some years bears a decent crop without trouble. But it pays to play the averages and proceed with eyes wide open. What are the chances for a good harvest and how much effort (and learning) will be devoted to upping the odds?