More blooms, buds, and such!

 

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 probably close. 

Two years ago I started it from seed and it grew to be a ~6' tall single stem whip with huge leaves by the end of the year. It was planted in ground around June. I cut it back to around where you see the first branches during the Winter last year, and it grew three parallel leaders/trunks above the cut and the four nice side branches. I cut two of the competing leaders off over the Winter, and that's where the tree is today. 

So maybe every other tree I'm growing looks super weird, but the one I'm fully responsible for the development of looks fairly normal. 😁

TONS of apriums have set and are sizing up. The plums have also set pretty nice, though I didn't take any pictures. The Flavor Grenade tree has probably 200+ fruitlets on it. The Flavor Queen has a few, but is pretty sparse. I cut a lot of last year's growth off the top of the Nadia Cherry plum, and that's where most of the flower buds were, so it is kind of sparse. The Candy Heary pluerry had a ton of flowers, but I forgot to check how much fruit actually set. I got a single fruit off it last year which was pretty good. The Castleton European plum has a decent amount of fruit and produced one fruit last year, and the Kenmore/NY9 euro has like a half dozen and this will be it's first year fruiting. European plums typically are slow to come into production, so I'm very pleased with their progress. The Castleton is probably self-fertile.

This is a close up of the Yoinashi Asian pear. It flowered profusely and has tons of fruit, most of it further up the tree.

This is my Shinseiki Asian pear. It's fruit has a smooth yellow outside with little russet unlike most Asian pears. It only flowered a bit and has three or four clusters of pears growing. It's from Stark Bros. and on an unknown Dwarfing rootstock (maybe OHxF87?) and noticeably slower growing than the other Asian pears on Betulafolia rootstock which is crazy vigorous.

My Baby Shipova on Quince rootstock graft. It's either very strange looking or very strange looking and infected with powdery mildew. I'm not sure which, but I sprayed it to prevent quince rust which will also fix the powdery mildew if that's afflicting it. The curled fuzzy on the bottom leaves is normal for it though. 

It's a cross between European pear and Mountain Ash or Whitebeam and produces slightly larger than a golf ball pear like fruit. Non-baby Shipova can take like 15 years to fruit and the tree can become huge. Baby is a different variant that doesn't get huge and produces a lot sooner. I'm hoping it grows on Quince and that being on Quince makes it fruit even sooner.

This is a pear graft I grafted onto a cotoneaster plant I found growing somewhere. Cotoneaster is supposed to be an ultra-cold hardy ultra-dwarfing rootstock for pears that's used in Russia. And so far, so good. Pear on cotoneaster is supposed to produce a tree shorter than a person.

This was a graft I did last Spring onto my Pink Lady apple tree of an unspecified red fleshed apple. The blooms are more pink than normal blooms.

This is my Lucy Glo apple tree on G11 or G41 (I forget). It's a yellow skinned, red fleshed apple that I love and barely got to eat because I couldn't find them at the store much this past Winter. It's got three flower clusters on it, they're only a little bit pink, and I hope to eat my own home grown Lucy Glo's this Fall. I love them. They're sooooo good.

I also planted out four fig trees I grew from cuttings.

The one on the left above is one of the four planted in the previous picture. I have a Chicago Hardy fig that's three years old and well-established and a Celeste tree which I grew from a cutting last year (and started a new one I gave to a friend this year).  The four new varieties are Verte and Atreano two cold hardy, green skinned figs with red berry flavored flesh, Deanna a very large yellow fig with red flesh, and Violette de Bordeaux a small-medium dark purple fig also with berry flavored flesh.

I've also been grafting apples and pears onto crabapples in the woods and feral Bradford/callery pears in vacant lots. I've done a bunch and most of them are leafing out. I leave some of the crabapple to continue growing (and pollinate what I'm grafting) and fully convert the callery as it's an invasive weed.