The fruits usually hang on the tree until late September and I've eaten them as late as Dec. They are not fully colored yet but the one I harvested today tested 21.2 brix with high acid. Actually pretty good eating.

The 21.2 brix fruit and a better colored, cracked specimen.

Crimson Royale should be ready soon and no cracking here.

I covered the outdoor grapes 5-6 times from freezes. Still can't make a decent crop. I'm feeling like milehigh and you have at times. Is it really worth thousands of dollars to continue with one disaster after another outdoors?

I do have very few apples this year, but its been worth the thousands of dollars and hours of work to see sour cherries ripen on my tree. That goes for the peaches, plums all my berries and the few apples I have. Growing fruit (short of berries) has a very steep learning curve. Why do we continue? How can we not? Mrs. G

I just checked my grapes and decided that it's mainly a coon issue. I've only seen one bird inside. Set the coon trap. I can clear them out. So much for live and let live. It doesn't work for coons or birds.

iowajer:

Iowa would be a pretty good place for a greenhouse.

If you aren't allowed to shoot, won't animal control come out and take care of the job?

A lot of my apples have hail damage, and for as religious as I've been on my insecticide applications, there are more bug hits than I'd like to see too.

Was over yesterday and see the deer are harvesting the lower ones off my State Fair. They must be too green for them too, as most on the ground just have teeth marks on them, enough to get the apple off the tree it looks like.

If I didn't fence my younger trees they'd ruin them just for sport!

I won't recommend a greenhouse for apples or pears. It could be done but I doubt the quality would be better than outdoors. When I tried apples in the greenhouse the fruit was large but I think I didn't water enough.

What a greenhouse would be good for is all the other fruits; stone fruit, vinifera grapes, kiwi, citrus, figs, trailing blackberry, and much more if interested, like tropicals. It's by far the best tasting and most consistent production I've ever had. It allows growing the best cultivars not those compromised by need for hardiness and disease resistance. That's a bigger factor than most realize.

I see what looks like galvanized wire. Are you growing espaliers or fans for these?

Mike

My new trees are trellised and spaced about 2-4ft by 6ft. They will be grown as a thin fruiting wall, fan shaped in wider spacing. In a close spacing just a single shoot. Rootstocks are mostly Lovell, Krymsk 1, and Citation.

Please send some photos while they are leafed out.

How do you handle it when they start to spread onto the next tree ? Do you let one overlap the other so that there are now 2 branches per wire each growing a different fruit or will you tip prune to keep them in check??

I am outdoors (upstate NY) and my espaliers 6,8 & 9 feet apart and seem to be getting crowded (to my eyes)

Some are already encroaching on their neighbors and I am now trying to figure out how to deal with this.

2-3 years ago I was just hoping that I would have this kind of problem because I was a total newbie digesting every bit of info ( some advice being 180 degree opposite from others) and not at all sure that it would work.

Mike

The key is controlling growth so that trees don't crowd. Since there is no rain and the soil is low in nitrogen I can control growth to a large extent by limiting water. This also increases fruit brix.

I also have quite a few trees on Krymsk 1 which is strongly dwarfing. Last option is to thin out trees and extend the fan in each direction.

With minor exceptions for some of the pears, the filter I used to decide which varieties to plant was "the ones I can't find in a supermarket" and how they were described by others and in the catalogs. So I don't really know which cultivars will be the favorites.

I hope that if I find a variety that I really like, it is next to one that I am not crazy about and I will let one spread more and prune and downsize the other.

decisions, decisions decisions !!!!!

Mike

In the past I've done a lot of budding and grafting of what I like onto what I don't. I would like to get away from that to limit virus spread.

So with my current replant I've alternated proven winners on proven rootstock with new varieties that are unproven. A good tree with good fruit can be spread a long ways to increase production. The trellis will facilitate spreading a tree without the weight of fruit causing issues.

Now just to figure out how to tame my peaches and nectarines. They are growing like weeds.

Mike