Planting a small orchard.

xjwmx said:
^Those pecan trees up at Emma Long were great and didn't take any care at all. Huge, easy to shell, productive. People would collect bushels every day to sell at a stand or someplace
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Yeah, the village of Vevay has quite a few monsters throughout town, I'd guess some may be close to a couple hundred years old, serious. Some years there's a bumper, some years none. These are the small nut variety. Don't think any care is given to them aside from caring if one topples over and crushes a couple homes......
 
The Emma Long ones might be grafted varieties. They've been grafting since 1880.
Yeah, it's hit or miss. I'll crack open nuts from any tree I run across. Sometimes the native trees are pretty good. That tree in my front yard is the worst I have ever seen.
 
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Six years later, and I finally have a crop from my Mandarin oranges. This tree produced over fifteen. It could have easily bore 4 or 5 times that amount -- 80% of the tree had no fruit.
It's incredible how long these take to ripen. The tree bloomed in March, and now, at the end of November, some are still ripening.

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My other Mandarin, different species, planted at same time. This tree is way smaller, and it produced 5 fruits. But, they are very big. These still have a long way to go to ripen. They are yellow now, and will be bright orange when ripe.
I possibly have the only producing citrus tress in Central Texas. The lethal Texas freeze of 2 years ago wiped them all out. There were several trees in my neighborhood, all different sizes and maturities, and they all died. I went to a really lot of trouble to tent mine, and then I ran an incandescent bulb under each tent for heat.
 
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7 years after transplanting in my yard, and I have a full grown Santa Rosa plum tree, although I think it will keep getting bigger if that makes sense.
It was absolutely covered with blossoms this year, thousands of them. However I never saw a single bee. The blooming only lasts about 4 days, and I never saw bee one on the tree. There was a smattering of other flying insects that were very interested in the blossoms -- enough pollinators to result in a yield of about 50 plums this year, which I'm okay with. Last year it was 6. Might have been hundreds with bees.
As the blossoms faded, I finally saw a very small number of bees on some of my other flowering plants. Now, it's many weeks later, I'm harvesting plums, but I'm still not seeing a lot of bees around here. I'm pretty sure something not good is up with the bees.
 
DogBunny said:
but I'm still not seeing a lot of bees around here. I'm pretty sure something not good is up with the bees.
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Same here. My yard is full of clover, which is blossoming right now. Normally I'd see literally 100's of bees out there. Just looked and was hard pressed to see 5 of 'em. Not good. :cautious:
 
DogBunny said:
result in a yield of about 50 plums this year,
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The last house I owned we had a Santa Rosa plum tree in the back yard, it would put on thousands of plums and that was a problem. There was so much fruit they wouldn’t grow large, they looked like large cherries. The birds absolutely loved them! 😄
 
We have all the bees here? The crab apple trees had so many bees you could hear the hum in the house.
But....
We have a bee keeper a few hundred yards up the road. Must have been a 100 boxes out in his yard when I went by the other day.
The crab apples seem to alternate years with bounty. Some years the trees have broken off large branches from the weight of the crop.
 
When one crab tree died, shoots came up from the stump, let em grow and are we now starting to get some "legacy" apples of decent size.
Tree's kind of shaded by a large crab apple so the crops aren't huge and the apples aren't the tastiest but the horses seem to think they are just fine eating.
 
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Eight years after planting, and I finally have a real crop. Hundreds and hundreds of the the little Santa Rosa plums. Unfortunately, this little guy likes plums too. It will be interesting to see how many ripe ones I can harvest before he chows down on them.
Last year I had my typical (until now) extremely meagre crop. Last year I never saw the bees. This year, the tree was covered with them. Lots of other pollinator insects too.
I've said this before -- it's amazing how quickly these grow and ripen. The Santa Rosa is a native plum, and it's strategy is to produce before it gets hot. We typically get a good 60 days with no rain at all during the summer.
 
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Making prunes. Halved and pitted plums. Nothing added.

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After about 8 hours in the oven on low with oven door cracked. These are nothing like store-bought prunes, but neither are the plums. These are almost like candies. Really good. The red juice in the pic has been reduced to a syrup. I scraped it up with a credit card, and it was great too.
I'll get two more trays worth.
 
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Not an orchard, but agriculture-related. Dual-root carrots aren't that unusual, but this one is. Recently found in a bag of organic carrots.

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Not an orchard, but wildlife. Pair of skunks eating out of the cat food bowl last night. This probably isn't too noteworthy to you country folk, but I'm in a city. I've had a skunk for decades, but this is the first time I ever saw two at once.
 
Did a garden for a few years. I like tomatoes, she doesn't. She like Cukes, I don't. I like hot peppers, she doesn't. We can both agree on squash and salad leafy greens.
After about 6 years of tilling, improving the soil, buying plants, tying up rows, weeding, dealing with various inset pests, etc. etc. etc. year before last I skimmed off the extra soil to fill other areas and put down a 10' x 20' patch of the best looking Bermuda sod in the area :)
Just decided that for the expense and amount of work it took for what I got out of it the cost just wasn't worth the effort. I can do as well at the local farmers market.
 
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