The Evil Forest

 I've made a few pies with this year's berry harvests. I picked a bunch of my Romeo Sour cherries. They're underripe. I know. But the birds hadn't savaged them yet, and I can't net the entire tree. So I picked what I wasn't going to bag, mostly. The unbagged ones were gone 24 hours later along with a 1 of 3 of the bagged ones. So good call, I guess? 😞 Pitting them sucked. Get a hand pitter or robot machine. Or use your own homemade child slaves if you have some.  I added 1 cup sugar to the cherries and about 1/3c of whatever the no boil, freezer stable starch the Amish like is called. I forget and don't feel like looking. You could probably remove some of the cherry hot goo without thickening it and temper and add the 4 egg yolks (separated to make the meringue; 1 egg yolk per 1/4c sugar was what I did, you could go a little lighter on the sugar) and add less starch thickener.  Parbake the pie crust for like 15 minutes. I poke it with a fork and it's fi...

 Well, they're not done yet. But there's a whole bunch that look pretty and pretty promising! Lucy Glo apple tree has two or three apples on it. Not bad for being a stick last year. Old Mixon Free (an very old cultivar white peach) has two. It was my first stone fruit graft last year, and I think the only one that survived (me, mostly, rabbits destroyed the Toka Plum tree).  Silver Gem nectarine is loaded. I should thin it out a lot more, but I expect a bunch to be stolen by animals, again, and want to at least get a few. It's supposed to be tart for a white nectarine. It's super early (July, I think) and very vigorous. Also loaded with peach leaf curl this year because Infuse doesn't cover that. No other problems with it though. Sverkhanniy (or whatever) pomegranate. It's not fruiting, but it survived the Winter here. Shiro Plum has a bunch of plums on it. The Aprium trees are also loaded.  So hopefully I get to eat them! :D

  The Thomasville Citrangequat (a cross of a kumquat with a citrange; a citrange is a cross of a sweet orange and trifoliate orange; TF are golf ball sized, fuzzy-skinned, sour, bitter, piney, floral, lemony, sticky-with-resin citrus relatives that can survive to like -20F and are mostly considered inedible and make some people sick) is flowering! They're known to be very precocious and this one seems determined not to disappoint. My Yuzu grafted on trifoliate orange survived the Winter and is leafing out again! We had single digit nights several times and were in the 20s for about a week. I covered it with a trash bag and stuck like 15 gallons of water near it, but didn't have huge 50 gallon drums of water or incandescent Christmas lights wrapping the tree or anything exotic. The Asian pear I started from seed two years ago has leafed out and is looking very pretty. I may Summer prune it in August or September to try and encourage the formation of fruit buds. I think it's ...

 A bunch of stuff is in bloom! The Cot N Candy aprium, Summer Delight aprium, Shiro Japanese plum, Flavor Queen and Flavor Grenade pluots are all bloom or close. They'll hopefully be totally loaded. I'm planning to shorten the apriums by cutting tall branches off when it's time to harvest the fruit. Hopefully, we don't have any hard freezes until November or December. I planted a Thomasville Citrangequat (cross between a kumquat with a citrange, with a citrange being a cross of inedible trifoliate orange and a sweet orange). It grew some flowers in the two weeks it was in the house. So I'm hoping to have some lime-like fruit around Winter. I also planted a US942 citrus grown from a mature cutting. It produces a sour mandarin-like fruit. It's used a rootstock, but it can survive into the teens or single digits. I'll wrap the citrus trees up when it's going to be very cold. They're somewhat sheltered, so hopefully they can survive in-ground. I planted ...

 Like usual, some stuff did really well. Other things, not so much. Apples, honeyberries, and nectarines got completely stripped by squirrels. So squirrels may have to die a bit next year. They (or something else) also broke both persimmon trees in half. The persimmon trees didn't even have any fruit on them, just a few flowers. Novaspy apple, honeyberries (there's three other bushes that were similar), and Silver Gem nectarines. Like ~50 apples, a couple pounds of honeyberries, and five or six nectarines. I can't find any pics of the persimmon trees, but I assume they got jumped on or something. There wasn't anything edible to steal on them or missing flowers from the top halves of the trees. They would have had five or six persimmons, possibly. The Chicago Hardy fig woke up from the Winter and started growing breba figs on the previous year's growth. They all turned yellow and dropped off, but it's not known to make reliable breba figs.  The current year's...