This could be the most unfruitful year for us (yup, I just said that). Our mature apple trees took a major beating in the Halloween storm of 2011 and are not producing much of anything this year. Our mature pear tree had pears, put they’ve all disappeared…I’m looking at your squirrels! This leaves us with just our newly planted trees, which are in their third year. Of all of them (there are 17 total), we have 1 apple. That’s right, 1 apple!
Behold, in all it’s glory:
It’s funny you say this, because due to Lee Reich (fruit gardening writer dude) always writing about how hard it is to get a good apple/pear/peach harvest I opted out of planting any of those, even though I really wanted one. And he just had up another blog article about that the other day so I’ve been mulling over if I’ll ever try and go that route… still, 1 apple is 1 more than I have. And damn your grapes are looking awesome; my plants are huge and unruly, but no sign of fruit. How many years have you had yours in the ground?
In any case, here’s that Lee Reich article: http://leereich.blogspot.com/2012/06/every-time-i-go-near-my-apple-and-plum.html Enjoy!
@Sarah
We put the grapes in the ground last year. At the beginning of this year they were tiny, they’ve grown about 7-8 feet so far with grapes on 3 of the 4. I’m not sure how old the vines were that the sprigs came from…I’m guessing pretty mature.
Our mature pear tree seems to be fruiting heavily every other year. Last year we had way more than we could deal with…like 500-600 pears with almost no predators. I made 15 gallons of hard cider! We used to get a ton of apples, but those would pretty much be overrun with insects…maybe 1 in 10 was salvageable.
We had peaches on our newer trees last year, but this year they’ve been so dry and we just started watering them
Fruitless years suck. I’m with you there, friend. And having just read your About page, I know your grandmothers are, too. When they read over your post, they’ll say, shaking their heads, “Goddamn. How many years was it, Grandpa, that we went fruitless…?”