Planting a small orchard.

^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
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.
 
but I'm still not seeing a lot of bees around here. I'm pretty sure something not good is up with the bees.
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:
 
result in a yield of about 50 plums this year,

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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