2024 Harvest!

 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 figs look great and I've tasted two that have ripened so far.

Gooseberries were productive and made a couple pies and some cans of jam. The plants in the backyard I'm going to move. Those got stripped as well with me only getting a taste of a few of the berries. The ones in the front aren't as good for fresh eating, but mostly got left alone. I picked most of them underripe as it doesn't really matter for pies and jam.

The Cot N Candy (white) and Summer Delight Apriums (orange) both produced about a dozen fruit this year. The Cot N Candy tastes like a standard sweet apricot and has a soft texture. The Summer Delight has more tartness and is more firm/crisp.

Veggies were mostly good. I grew Zozula and Indoor F1 hybrid cucumbers from a Ukrainian seed seller (got a USDA permit to be able to import them, etc). They are mostly female flowers and the cucumbers will set fruit without pollination, so they have been very productive.

I also grew yellow melons, purple potatoes, and GMO purple tomatoes. I'm still waiting to grow tentacles from the GMO tomatoes. 

The elderberries I planted last year produced about a dozen flower clusters. I bagged about six and picked the berries off them. I also propagated some from cuttings I took during the Winter to make a hedge of them across the back fence. (That's catnip growing four feet through the middle of them.)

I planted several types of watermelons. They got drowned or nearly drowned and off to a slow start. One cracked today because of all the rain and was a little underripe, but edible.

I'm a big fan of kumquats and buy a bunch when I see them at the store in January or February. Looking into citrus that can grow outside Florida/California, it's mostly trifoliate orange and awful tasting hybrids of trifoliate orange, but a few look promising. I grew out the seeds from some of the ones I bought.

The Mandarinquat was the happier to see me of the two. I planted most of them out under my pepper plants. I'll give them a plastic covering over the Winter and see if they survive. Probably not, but who knows?

I bought trifoliate rootstocks and scions of Yuzu, Marumi Kumquat, and Thomasville Citrangequat to graft. I only got the Yuzu to take, but planted the three rootstocks in ground. I gave the fourth to a friend. I'm probably going to try grafting Thomasville again next Spring.

The Yuzu is protected with chicken wire. The rootstocks are being brave. There's two blackcurrants and a peony to their right. 

I planted a pomegranate to the left of them. There's a few that can survive and fruit around here, but most have much harder seeds than the "Wonderful" cultivar that's sold in supermarkets. This one ripens early and may be able to survive our Winters.

The picture is from a month or two ago. It's a little bit less scraggly looking now. They're easy to propagate from cuttings, so I may try cloning it this Winter.

The Asian pear I grew from seed (the "D. Pear tree") woke up and has continued to grow. It got to be about six feet its first year as a single stem "whip." I cut it back to 2.5' in the early Spring and it's shot back up and branched out.

I'll prune two of the three new leaders off during the Winter. It grew four nice scaffolds fairly low and the leaders all have grown out short branches all the way up them. It doesn't look like it will fruit next year, but it may the year after. The pictures are in the wrong order, but Blogger sucks and I'm not going to try and fix it.

I planted Somerset and Concord Seedless grapes last year. They grew really well to the point I was able to train them up my ghetto upside down 'L' trellis.

I netted them so the birds don't eat them all. Mockingbirds love the shit out of grapes and bitch loudly. I learned how to train/prune them, but will modify it to make netting them easier next year. A thing with seedless grapes is they can end up *very* seedy sometimes if they're unhappy about rain, temperature during flowering or a half dozen other things.

These are some of the unripe Somerset I cut off while getting them manageable for netting. They have a lot of seeds. They should still taste good and I'll probably eat some and make a grape pie, which is a real thing people do.

I learned how to graft (it's easy) and a bit about taking care of the newly grafted plants (it's significantly more difficult). I saved and cold stratified seeds and started a couple rootstocks. Most of those are coming along, but are on the side of the house and need a protected area in full sun. The newly grafted trees need to be outdoors (spider mites repeatedly fucked them up badly indoors) and in soil that's been broken up sufficiently for their roots to develop. We've got very heavy clay here.

There's apples (Lucy Glo seeds), callery pear rootstocks, and persimmon rootstocks (wild Americans I found locally).

Several of the trees I grafted and planted out are doing OK. The rest I learned I need to remove most/all of the potting mix and plant in native soil as they'll drown if planted with all the potting mix.

The caged one is a Jonafree apple tree on G.935 semi-dwarf roostock that's going to replace the big apple tree that's in bad shape behind it once it gets older. The red-leafed sticks in the dirt are the tops of the B.9 dwarf apple rootstocks that I stuck in the ground after using the bottom half for grafts. Most of them have started growing new roots, so I can try again with them next year. 

The tree with two small branches is a Toka/Bubblegum hybrid plum I grafted to a plum rootstock sucker I dug up and grew out.

That was literally a three inch tall twig with some leaves growing from the base of a plum tree the previous early Summer. I dug it up in March.

And this is probably already far too long, so that's going to do it for now. It's mostly veggies, watermelons, a Candy Heart pluerry and a European prune plum that's left waiting to harvest for this year. I need to learn to can pickles next year or grow more melons. 

Happy growing!