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Here are the peach trees before I pruned them this morning. There are 7 of them planted as bareroot last Febriuary.

A little later variety

The earliest variety has quarter size fruit

The first of the mulberries is waking up.

The Mysore raspberries are blooming and already have 1/2 grown fruit.

Southern Belle blueberries, they are my earliest.

Sweetcrisps

Emeralds

I decided in the fall to start a larger fig collection. I had two varieties and decided to go for 50 varieties. Currently have 40 different varieties rooted and growing. Here is a shot of some of the newbies in the mist bed, there are 72 in there currently. They were started from cuttings in November wrapped in newspaper and when roots appeared moved to 30 ounce cups and now outside in 1 gallon pots.

And last but not least......after 7 years of tending, fertilizing and swearing at my Ruby red Grapefruit has for the first time decided to bloom.

Very nice looking plants. You've done a great job with those figs. I'll look forward to a great report as soon as this year. As I remember I got 40 figs/plant last year on newly rooted plants in one gallon pots.

You are first on the list for choice of cuttings.

MrsG,

I did not fertilize them much. At the end of the season they were showing signs of lack of nitrogen. I think mostly it is just the mulch and our very long growing season.

I was struck by the difference in peach fruit development. Some are quarter size and others blooming. I've never had that much spread. Must be the warm climate of FL.

It will still be about 7 more weeks before the ice is off of our lake in northern MN, and things start to green up.

The good news is that I'm currently south of you in the Florida Keys sucking up the sunshine.

I am a little surprised I am ahead of you, we are normally pretty close. Part of the difference in the sweetcrisp Emerald is the beds. My BB are grown in 3 beds and they get differing levels of sun. Where the sweetcrisp picture was taken they get the most sun and where the emerald picture was taken that bed only gets partial spring sun. As the season changes it gets more and the difference is only a hour or two less sun but it makes a difference. I like it because it spreads out the harvest season.

Olpea,

You must have peach trees that bloom earlier than others? Are there no early mid and late peaches?

Bamboo,

Our earliest peaches start to harvest -30 and the latest is about +45, so the season lasts about 75 days. I have some later peaches planted, but they haven't started producing yet.

You'll soon discover harvest dates have nothing to do with bloom time. My earliest peach right now actually blooms a couple days later than most other peaches.

What makes a peach early or late is what happens after pit hardening. Once pit hardening occurs, later ripening peaches just sit there at quarter size for a long time, whereas early peaches move right from pit hardening into fruit swell, and then into ripening.

Most seasons, all of our peaches bloom within a few days of one another. I had a peach once, called White River, which bloomed a week earlier than the bulk of the other peaches, but it drowned the first year it set fruit, so I don't know if it would have always been such an early bloomer, or if it was just a fluke.

I have about 30 varieties in my backyard and they seem to bloom at the same time (maybe a 4 or 5 day spread from the earliest to the latest, but most bloom w/in 1 or 2 days of one another). None of them are the really low chill varieties which are commonly grown in places like FL. That may be the difference.