Spring Blooms!

 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 out the rest of my apple and pear grafts. They're on Geneva 202 apple semi-dwarf (12-15') and OHxF97 pear (full-sized) rootstocks. I'll probably move them to the front yard in a fruiting wall/row sort of thing next year if they grow well.

I still have 12 semi-dwarf stone fruit Krymsk 1 rootstocks to graft. They're less cold tolerant, so I waited to do them until I had freed up the space from the apples/pears which should be fine even with a mild frost and the grafts can heal at 10-20F cooler temperatures than stone fruit which need about 70F.

These are two GoldRush on Bud 9 roostock. I saved the tops of the Bud 9 I bought last year, stuck them in the dirt on the west side of the house and 75% of them rooted. I killed two, and grafted these two. They're trying to flower already, but look like they have vegetative buds to grow larger from too. I'll pick the flowers off. GoldRush is known to be overly precocious and stunt its growth if you let it fruit too soon.

And my Shinseiki and Yoinashi Asian pears are covered in blooms about to open. Shinseiki is a smooth-skinned, yellow, apple-shaped pear, while Yoinashi is a russeted, brown/gold standard Asian pear.

And that's about it. The honeyberries, bush cherries, and blueberries also have blossoms starting to open, but I didn't take any pictures.