Can the Fruit Tree Blossoms Survive the Ice?

Pear tree blossoms

So much for spring. My husband and I looked over pictures from last year at this time.  Last year, the fruit trees bloomed on March 14. This year - snow. I walked out of church on Sunday to hail and sleet. By the time I got home, it was snowing and the fruit trees were covered with snow and ice. I'd had the foresight to cut some daffodils before the snow hit. At least my kitchen smelled like spring.

Can fruit trees survive the snow and ice? My friend and Master Gardening mentor Liz sent me a great link I wanted to share with you. It is to a chart called Critical Spring Temperatures for Tree Fruit Bud Development Stages. Okay, so not the sexiest name in the world...but an excellent chart nonetheless. It shows you just how cold it has to get, and at what stage, before the fruit tree buds get nipped by Freeze Miser. It looks like we should be okay. Whew!

I was surprised when the snow melted to see that the blossoms were still on the peach tree that had begun to flower.  It's going to be cold this week, but Sunday's temperatures are going back up to 60. I can tell you one thing; if it gets warm and they bloom on a nice spring day, I'll be out there with my camera taking pictures!

Speaking of pictures, I was delighted to see one of my articles on Squidoo get a mention today. I entered it into a contest. We had to use our own photos, and I got to trot out all my pretty pictures of flowering trees from last year.  The article is called Flowing Trees in My Garden. Please feel free to share a link to the article if you would like to do so. Thanks!

Growing Peaches

Growing peaches has been one of the most rewarding aspects of planting the fruit orchard here at Seven Oaks. The ironic thing is that among the peach trees, the one we originally thought would die is the one producing fruit this year.

Peaches ripening on the tree

When we planted the fruit orchard trees in 2007, they came as bare root sticks called whips (I think) from the Arbor Day Society. This is an Elberta peach tree.  The first year, all of the trees struggled to develop roots, but this poor peach tree never thrived.  After two years it really looked as if it was going to die.  My husband wanted to build another little raised garden bed near the back patio. He came up with the idea of running a PVC pipe from the gutter and leader underground and into the soil under the raised bed.  Rainwater from the roof of the house now runs directly into that garden bed and to the roots of the peach tree. I was really on the fence with that idea. On the one hand, given Virginia's crazy hot summers and droughts, it sounded like a good plan.  On the other hand, I was concerned that the rainwater might rot the roots or over water the peach tree. The poor tree looked as if it wouldn't make it anyway, so we decided to take a chance and complete the project.

Peach tree blossoms at Seven Oaks, April 2012

After just about a year, that struggling peach tree took off! It now tops 11 feet tall.  It is the only tree in the entire yard that has peaches. At last count, there are about 25 peaches on the tree.

It dropped a lot of fruit early in the spring.  I'm still learning about growing peaches, but from what I understand, that is natural. "Thinning" the fruit enables the tree to put more energy into the remaining fruit so that they grow bigger.  I think our tree naturally dropped some extra fruit when it was still small.

Right now the peaches are turning gorgeous shades of orange-red.  They are hard as a rock, so no picking and tasting them yet!  I'm looking forward to the harvest.  Even if they don't taste as good as store bought, they're MINE...grown the way I want them to be grown...not waxed, not sprayed with all sorts of scary stuff, but grown about 20 feet from my kitchen window.

And you can't beat that for freshness.

Fruit Tree Pruning Workshop in Prince Edward County, Virginia

The Heart of Virginia Master Gardeners group is hosting a free fruit tree pruning workshop in Farmville, Virginia (Prince Edward County.)  It's co-presented with the Town of Farmville.  The event will be held on Saturday, February 18, 2012 at 1 p.m. at the town fruit orchard at the YMCA, 580 Commerce Drive, Farmville (near the Lowe's.)  Dress for the weather and bring your own pruning shears for some hands-on learning.  The program is free and open to the public.  And yes, if all works out, I'll be there with the Master Gardeners.

Growing fruit in the home orchard is a great way to raise your own organic fruit.  You don't need a huge amount of space, either. Dwarf varieties take up only a little room - maybe as much room as a dogwood tree. Many fruit trees have beautiful blossoms in the spring, offer attractive shade during the summer months, and produce fruit in the summer or fall.  It's like The Giving Tree in your own yard!  Friends of mine planted fruit trees in their front yard, all along the walkway leading from their driveway to the front door. They purchased mature dwarf trees from the nursery and each tree has so far produced delicious fruit within a few years.  Edible landscapes are wonderful.

Consider planting a fruit tree suitable for your climate and location. Remember to check a good reference book or with your nursery and garden center on whether or not you'll need one tree or two of different varieties. Some fruit trees are self-pollinating, meaning that one tree will bare fruit even if it's standing sentinel in your yard.  Others require a tree of a different variety for pollination. In our apple orchard, for example, we planted two varieties specifically for pollination at either end of the stand of 10 trees.  This way, we figured at least some pollinators would find their way around.

Check with your local County Cooperative Extension Office for more information on fruit tree growing in your gardening zone.

The Experience of Fresh Peaches

Last night, my husband came into the living room with a small plate.  On the plate was a peach sliced into quarters.

"Here," he said. "From the garden."

Gingerly, I picked up a slice. It dripped with juice. I bit into it. The initial flavor burst was a fresh, light peach taste, followed by an aftertaste of vanilla.

It was heavenly.

"This one was pretty good!" he said, happily munching on the rest of the slices.

We have four ripe peaches from the trees this year, a minor miracle considering:

• We were told that the young trees would take several years to establish before bearing fruit.
• The wet spring, followed by a hot and dry summer, seemed less than ideal for peaches.
• We remembered to use the organic spray only twice - once in February, once after blossoms formed. I think the ideal is every two weeks. (But only one insect found in four peaches. Pretty good!)
• Most of the peaches on the tree became moldy before ripening and fell off.
• Some critter got hold of most of what was left and disappeared with them overnight.
• Japanese beetles feast on the tree leaves every year.

But if this is a hint of things to come, I am glad we planted the fruit orchard. We have 27 trees total right now - apples including Golden Delicious, Stayman Winesap, Lodi and Jonathan; four Elberta peach trees;  Methly and Burbank plum trees, Bing and Black Tartanian cherry trees, Moorpark and Early Golden apricot trees.

When we see fresh fruit now, we rejoice. We sample it and marvel that we can actually pick fruit right from a tree in our yard.  I'm a city kid at heart, and nobody I knew in Floral Park had fruit trees. My grandma's Bellerose Long Island garden, with its apple and pear trees and European kitchen garden, was considered an oddity in our suburban area. If people grew food at all, they grew a few tomatoes, since everybody knows that fresh tomatoes always trump store bought ones!

Once the trees produce fully, I'll can the fruit, and we have plans to purchase a dehydrator so that I can dehydrate as much fresh fruit and fruit leathers as possible.  But that taste of amazing peach flavor was a taste of achieving a dream, one step closer to producing even more food right here on our own land.

Homesteading and Self Sufficient Living

Tomatoes and green beans from the garden

 Last night I tackled some vegetable garden chores and reflected on both homesteading and self sufficient living.  I pulled up the insect infested squash, cucumbers and zucchini; they're ruined, but I do have a bowl full of cucumbers begging to be made into cold cucumber soup, a delicacy I love each summer.

Dried beans

 
I harvested dried bean pods and thought about what it would take to grow food for completely self sufficient living. I planted one 4' x 8' bed with beans solely for drying - Dutch Brown and Jacob's Cattle.  Dutch browns make baked beans, and Jacob's Cattle supposedly keep very well.  After all my hard work, this is what I have so far -


Maybe enough for one meal?






Then I dug spuds. Potatoes. This is the first year I've grown potatoes. After a spring of plentiful rain, the drought and heat came.  I grew Yukon Gold potatoes from seed potatoes my neighbor Mel gave me and Russets from a $2.50 bag purchased at the local discount store, Roses.


Here's what I harvested so far - about 10 pounds of potatoes. The biggest ones are the size of baseballs, but most are the size of ping pong balls.  There are about a dozen plants still green and living in the potato bed, so I left them there.

First potato harvest on drying tray

I harvested herbs last night and placed a tray of catnip in the garage to dry. Pierre doesn't like fresh nip, so it's safe until dried. Then all bets are off.

Herbs solar drying

Here's what I realized from spending two hours last night harvesting and shelling beans, harvesting onions and cucumbers, weeding vegetable beds, throwing tomatoes with blossom end rot over the fence, pulling up bolted lettuce, and digging potatoes until it got too dark to see: homesteading is hard work.

Yeah, I know: "Duh!"  But seriously, did you ever consider as you pile your shopping cart full of Bush's baked beans, canned peas, plastic-wrapped loaves of bread and cartons of milk the sheer WORK that went into producing the food you buy so casually?

Self sufficient living sounds great on paper, but what do you do about droughts? I have a garden sprinkler on a tripod, but I don't like tapping into the household well too much. When you realize that if you drain your well you're going to have to pay thousands and thousands of dollars for a new one, not to mention dig up your lawn and garden, you treat water like the precious commodity it is.

Vegetables pickled for the pantry

I look at the beans and think about our pioneer ancestors for whom homesteading was a necessity, not a luxury.  Those dried beans formed the winter staple diet. The beets I pickled and canned last month, the peppers waiting to be canned along with things like the onions and potatoes dug last night, the beans drying in the kitchen - if I were truly homesteading, I would have to survive on this. Those herbs that looks so picturesque in the garden would be my medicine; the flowers I love to look at would supply medicine too, the Echinacea roots. The peaches in the orchard would need to be canned, dried, preserved to feed my family.

Not just a pretty face; if I were homesteading, this would be my medicine.

Could I actually feed my family from the garden like a pioneer woman? Yes, I could...but it's true; our ancestors did indeed work sunup to sundown. Think about tending the gardening, harvest, drying, canning, preserving the food. Think about sewing clothing and cleaning the house by hand.  Think about it.

Peach in our orchard today. The mesh keeps deer from the lower part of the tree.

As I consider the work needed to produce the scant vegetables, fruits and herbs I've managed to grow this year, I wonder how difficult true homesteading is in reality. We play at self sufficient living; we play at homesteading. Gardening is a hobby, albeit a passionate hobby for me.  What if I had to live only on what I could grow? What then?