I did a bunch of pome and stone fruit grafts this Spring. A couple took more than one try, but they've all taken and grown at this point. This is a terrible video I made of the stone fruit ones:
I'm keeping those and putting in another row of them in the front yard. I'll get them into a V open center sort of thing. They're on Krymsk 1 which is somewhat dwarfing. The Dapple Dandy one is now like 9'. I pruned off most of the growth that I wasn't planning on keeping before recording that video.
This is my unspecified White Nectarine I grew from cuttings last year. It'll be fun to dig up. It's very early (Julyish), melting flesh, clingstone, and acidic for a white nectarine/peach.
Spice Zee Nectaplum
And a second picture of it. It's grafted to a Nanking Cherry as rootstock, which is supposed to be extremely dwarfing. It's got pink flowers like a peach, and the new leaves are red and look quite pretty. DWN link about it. I think it'll only get to be 5-6' tall/wide.
The fruit is a dull maroon and supposed to be mostly like a white nectarine, but with a bit of plum tanginess and slightly different texture than a melting flesh peach.
ORUS8 Gooseberry (hybrid with black currant) I pruned about half the bush off this year, so that I can move it during the Winter. It's very vigorous and very thorny. The fruit is small for a gooseberry and instead of red ripens to a brownish-black/very dark purple. They taste OK, the few that I've eaten. But they're not as good as Poorman (which was sweet before it even finished ripening), Hinnomaki Red, or Black Velvet.
This is a video of a guy picking one of his bushes:
I stuck a bunch of the cuttings from it in the ground and now have a bunch of young plants that need to be moved for next year. Separating ORUS8 branches from Trifoliate Orange branches is whatever the opposite of a good time is.
Black Velvet
I forgot to take a picture of the mother plant, which was on the other side of the deer fencing last year, but it's by far the most vigorous grower of any gooseberry I have. It's fairly upright with a bit of spreading. The thorns are, of course, truly vicious and probably why the deer mostly leave gooseberries alone (they'll nibble off a tip instead of 100% of that year's new growth). The fruit is tart, but really tasty. It gets this coppery purple color as it ripens instead of just going from green to red. It's less sweet than Poorman and Hinnomaki Red, but I like it a lot.
The branches also mostly stay upright when loaded with fruit. The fruit is a little bit smaller than Amish Red and Welcome. Like the size of a marble. It's a hybrid of either American or European gooseberry and black gooseberry. Black gooseberry is an even more thorny West coast native plant with small, sour black gooseberries.
The picture above is an ORUS8 I rooted by pinning a branch to the ground (it pinned itself, but I cut it off and moved it, so I'm taking credit for it) on the left and Black Velvet on the right. You can see the obvious difference in vigor. They were both a single stem about a foot long this Spring.
I've grown out a couple cuttings I stuck when I pruned the mother plant to move it during the Winter. They're in shade most of the day, and a bit neglected, but doing all right.
Glore De Sablons (pink currant)
It's my least unsuccessful white/red/pink (they're all the same species) currant. Birds got most of them this year. It has been growing really well, and had a lot of fruit on it. The secret to getting currants to grow seems to be snipping off the terminal bud during the late Winter. If you leave them alone, they grow one new node and do nothing the rest of the year. You snip off the terminal bud and they go gangbusters.
I stuck some cuttings last year during the Winter and rooted them indoors. Planted them out underneath tomato plants that entirely shaded them. Stepped on all of them. Thought this one was dead too, but moved it to the North of the house in the late Winter, it grew shaded out almost entirely again, but did pretty well considering what a terrible Plant Dad I've been.
I'm thinking I'm forgetting something, but I'm not sure what. TTFN!
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...
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...
Comments
Post a Comment