Growing any fruit?

My trees are starting to get old enough to produce. I picked the rest of my apricots today and am picking my peaches today -- but I am not finished. There are about a bucket full of peaches for us -- not counting the ones the birds ate. This is a first for me. My orcas pear has about 16 lovely little pears and my seckel pear about 18 very small pears. I got a couple of hand fulls of cherries this year much earlier.
With bad soil, deer and late freezes, I thought this day would never come. I hope to get them all mulched before the first bad event that begins with f this year.
My peaches were very small but absolutely delicious. The apricots were as big as, if not bigger than my peaches.
Yum, I am in heaven. Will send pictures eventually.

Nanking cherries which I leave for the birds in winter. Let's not even THINK about me making a pie. Actually I'm sure it would be a very, very funny tale ^_^

What about eating Nanking cherries? Are they good? I have read about them here and there.

Yup about half as sweet as bings but a large pit to fruit ratio IMHO. They do make a lovely shrub though (nice foliage, drought tolerent and bug free) and the chickadees get drunk on the fermenting fruit in the fall which is way too much fun. "Excuse me my luv, please don't step on the staggering chickadees" LOL

Ah, I might need to plant a few Nanking cherries for the birds -- and deer to distract them from my other yummies. Kind of like the bedding ( not pavement) roses which I will plant around the edge of my vacant lot. Perhaps they will distract the deer from the stuff I want to harvest. Don't know, but worth a try.

Oh I'm so excited to hear that you are having success wtih fruit trees, paja! So cool!! My DH and i planted a variety of semi-dwarf fruit trees 3 years ago, but so far, no fruit. patience, patience. A mystery plum that we planted 5 yrs ago gave us a bumper crop 2 yrs ago, and we're going to get some this year. My DH started "collecting" multi-var fruit trees, where 3 or 4 different vars are grafted onto one base. We love the trees, regardless of whether they produce.

I just recently read about Nanking cherry shrubs, and I'm so glad to hear that they survive in low zone conditions. I'll have to try a few next year. It would be fun to have some drunk chickadees weaving around the yard. :)

I am putting in a dwarfing apple tree when we rip out the driveway. I only have room in this spot for one tree and this one will make babies with the neighbours crabapple tree. I am getting mine from here. They were very helpful with my questions and all their trees are grown outside so we know they will be hardy. I am also getting an apricot tree from them now that I saw that other RMers have them. http://www.dnagardens.com/ This farm has a great reputation and they have yummy homemade saskatoon pie too. http://www.saskatoonfarm.com/

Fruit trees are wonderful in the Rockies. There are marvelous orchards all through the Rocky Mountain region. I have always dreamed of having a yard full of fruit trees and at last I have it.
I have tried many fruit tree varieties and not all have worked. I am now on my third and fourth varieties of apple, but I am convinced I have now found the ones that will do well here in our mountain environment.
DN, you are very smart to use local nurseries for fruit trees. Yesterday I had a call from a friend who is trying to learn to garden that everything she had planted had died except the plants from the local tree grower I had recommended. His nursery, called Tooley's Trees, handles trees suited for our area. And they grow like mad. If only all our growers studied their local areas so carefully.
Home grown fruit is so wonderful because it can be tree ripened. Fruit picked early so it can be shipped just doesn't have much flavor. The apricot, plum or apple picked from one's own tree is fabulous because it hasn't been on the road for weeks!
Semi-dwarf is definitely the most intelligent size tree to plant in a normal yard and is far more convenient for picking. On the other hand, if one wants a tree to double as a shade tree and a fruit tree -- you can't beat a standard. They take longer to bear but can be both shade and fruit trees. Most of mine are semi-dwarf. But I do have one standard. -- my apricot.
Not only do I love the fruit, but I love the flowers in the spring. Fruit trees bloom not long after the daffodils when I am most in need of flowers. And they provide masses of color!
I may have to try some Nanking cherries as well. Maybe if I put them around the outer rim of the yard, the deer won't feel they have to come into the yard to eat **my** cherry trees?
I have to say that of all the plants I grow, the deer most prefer the leaves of fruit trees and lettuce. They rather fancy the tops of carrots, too. I think they are creatures of taste, unfortunately.
See my first decent-sized peach crop. They are quite small but have the most wonderful flavor. I may have to make peach preserves!

BTW, Snowline Rose,
I have a multi-variety pear tree. It is growing and has now flowered for two years, but is much smaller than my two single variety pear trees. I don't know if this is because of the grafting of different varieties or because of the very poor soil where I planted it. I have been mulching it like crazy and it grows better each year. I wonder if the multiple grafts slow them down.
I have a green gage plum tree. It has not yet flowered, much less born fruit, but this is only its third year. The books claim green gage is naturally semi-dwarf. I do hope that it will have plums in 2009. It is growing nicely.
I also have 2 crabapple trees -- the kind that are for eating as opposed to the can for flowers -- I have 2 of those as well. One crabapple has never produced anything and the other has produced 2 crabapples per year for the last 2 years. I am really looking forward to crabapple jelly some day. I hope my DH likes it. I doubt if he has ever tasted it since they don't sell it in stores or even at my local farmers' market.

Wow cool paj. Nice peach harvest.

Wow - what a haul, paja! Those peaches look fabulous! So, how old are these peach trees that are producing so well? Do you keep bees to pollenate your fruit trees? We constructed a raised bed in our little orchard for a "bee garden", but I haven't gotten around to planting it. I'm not sure what to plant that would flower before the fruit trees - they blossom so early.
Our multi-vars are babies (just planted this year), but they are kind of funny-looking. It seems like one var on each tree has gotten the jump on the others and has created a larger branch starting from a bulbous graft point.
My neighbor has a Dolgo crabapple and she is planning to make jelly. I'm looking forward to having a little taste.
On a side note, another neighbor who does massive remodels (apartment complexes, office bldgs, etc)dropped off a trailer full of old sliding glass doors that he is giving us to build our greenhouse. 50 3'x6' double-walled panes - for free!! Maybe we'll be able to plant some orange trees next year. :)

I looked it up. The peach is a Reliance and I planted it in Sept. or Oct. 2002. So it is now 6 years old -- almost. It probably was a 2 or 3 year old tree when I bought it from a local nursery. It has had crops for the past 2 or 3 years but not enough that the birds were willing to share with me. The bucket is my share this year!
On the multiple kinds fruit trees, one kind tends to dominate the others and the challenge is to keep the dominant one from taking over the whole tree. I gather you have to prune it more than the others.
Peaches and cherries are the first trees to start bearing but even they take a while to produce good sized crops.
Apples are slow and pears are worse. I have a Trancendent Crab Apple ( a siberian) and a Wickson -- an antique American variety from the famous apple breeder Albert Etter. Can you tell I love fruit trees and fruit?
Here is a picture of my Orcas Pear -- planted in 2004. If you look carefully you will see a little pink spot which is a pear. It has 18 of these pears now. I am so excited. Next question -- when do I pick.

I posted a picture of this tree before it flowered or even leafed out in the spring this year. Now if you look carefully you can see some pears. Not millions, but I will soon be passing out cigars!
Here is a closeup of the pink one.

and pears too!!!! Let's all go to paj's for fruit salad mmmmmmmmmm ^_^

Y'all come. In about September when they will be ready.

Hey DN, I've had a nanking in my backyard, but nothing to cross polinate. I've heard that you need another kind of cherry to cross with it(from local nurseries, me thinks to sell cherry trees). Do you do this, or do you have multiple nankings? I love it in the spring, and my cat loves it in the summer. 8' x 8', it's huge.
A bountiful crop of peaches this year. My 2 neighbors have already gotten ripe ones, but mine are bigger. The tree was huge and overgrown last year, so over the winter, I butchered it by about 2/3. Needs some more trimming.

Peaches need to be trimmed annually in order to keep bearing. Congratulations on your success. Don't know a thing about Nanking cherries -- probably someone else on this forum does.

vadcap I only have the one. It was a mess and I whacked it right back to the ground when we moved in. 2 years later loaded with cherries and being it now for 6 years. I haven't seen any fruit bushs/trees in our neighbourhood other than crab apples but there is a bee colony that lives under the deck beside it so maybe they are bringing pollen from far a field to pollinate it? or maybe it cross pollinates with the currant in my yard?

I don't think it would be the currant. I guess the bees are bringing in from somewhere. I was wanting to put a sand cherry in a corner of new bed, so I guess I will see how that works. Certainly no room for another nanking!
Paj, our spring frost timed it perfectly this year. The trees were pollinated just before the frost hit. I thought the tree was a goner, because it was infested with borers of some kind(can't remember the name). It had about 4 major trunks, but is now down to one, as it was relativly new and not infested. I counted 13 and 16 rings on the chopped down ones.

Wow! Those nanking cherries are tough little critters. You could probably make jam or jelly from the berries -- if you have enough energy to take out all the seeds.
Someone recently told me that pollinators can be 1/4 mile away and still work fine. I was surprised. It might be the bees or just the wind. I wonder what pollinates a nanking cherry?

Just looked it up, vadap. Nanking cherries are self-fertile -- this according to Raintree nursery. No pollinator required. But a pollinator could be fun to have!

Well there you go. Thanks paj.

Here are some thoughts on cherries and birds from my buddy who is east of Calgary and grows his fruit trees on rainwater/rain barrels alone. Note: his first language is french so ignore the typos in english s'il vous plait. merci.

"I have carmin cherry and what i like about it it is its size. It stays small tree. Mine is about 5 years old and is about 3'x3'. the cherry are a tad bigger than nanking and in good soil it probably would grow every thing a bit bigger. I have 2 evans cherry , one in poor soil and one in better soil. They are about 3 years old. The one in good soil was about 2' tall when I purchused it and it is about 10'x10' now and the cherries are big and delicious. the other evan was about 6' tall when I planted it and it has not grown an inch but bears lots of smaller fruits (about 1/2 size the other evan)

Robins are a real problem they take a peck at every cherry to see if ready to eat and leave them to rot half eaten.I've put a net on two of the cherry as well as my rasberry but it did not work very well. The birds were so adamant to get their beak on those cherry that they either landed on the net picking at the cherries or would repeatedly take a run and ram the net until they would manage somehow to get in. To say the least maybe 10 got intangle in the net and died. I think a raccon visited my yard every night because the dead birds would be gone by morning. Considering Robins are a pest im my yard (100s of them) i don't feel bad about it. They also pecked at my apples ruining them, never seen that before, maybe they were very thirsty considering the fact we had not had rain in two month. They also strip all the saskatoon berries. We grow fruits because we like to harvest them not to feed the birds . So next year I will, God willing, build portable chicken wire cages for the fruit trees. Than maybe these birds will move somewhere else."


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So how many apricots did you get, paja? I grew up in a place that had 2 acres of ancient apricot trees. Every year, our relatives would come over and we'd make apricot pies, jam, fruit leathers - it was fabulous. My DH and I planted two apricots in our little orchard here in Bend. They came through two winters and a deer attack looking pretty good. Unfortunately, the leader on one of them just up and died a couple of weeks ago - gasp! It may be destined for the Hill of Shame, next to the flat-topped hawthorne and the cat-pee boxwoods. :( Anyway, I love fruit, and i'm excited to hear that there is hope for a harvest at high altitude.
P.S. The best cherries I ever ate were hand-picked on a little ranch in Ronan, MT. We had dinner at a friend-of-a-friend's house where everything on the table was home-grown - even the steaks.

OK, the nanking deal has been driving me crazy for some time, so after much exploring of the net, this is my conclusion, but could be very wrong, depending on who you listen to. Nankings are self-fruitful, but not self pollinating, unless they are a hybrid. ie, they will polinate in their own species, but not themselves, unless science got a hold of them. I think. They are also good pollinators of plums.

Well, vadap, I don't know what to make of all that. Self-fruitful but not self pollinating? How can that be? I agree this stuff is all really confusing.

This year I didn't get so many apricots because we had a late freeze, but I got enough that I could eat some every day for a couple of weeks and that is with the birds getting about half of them. Two years ago I had a bigger crop. I always get some because the tree is between the wall and the house and is protected. I shouldn't have gotten any this year. Apricots grow very well here in Los Alamos, but we do miss crops every so often due to late freezes. If the leader of your tree dies, why not amputate it and leave the rest to grow -- that is if it didn't die down to the ground.
I am envious of the years you spent with ancient apricot trees. To me the apricot is the best fruit we can grow anywhere around here. Peaches and cherries are tied for second. But I would love to live where I could have a mango tree! Not here, by a long shot!