We’re not going to successfully harvest anywhere near all of our apples and pears this year. That’s hardly a surprise, nor is it a problem. We’ll have plenty to eat, preserve, and share, and are getting good exposure to what and when the various trees in the orchard produce. That’s really all we hoped to accomplish this year.
There are seventeen (I think) fruit trees (excluding mulberries) – mostly apple and pear, with a few plums, one peach, and a young cherry tree. For our sanity, we’ve assigned them names from the phonetic alphabet. Today I harvested a big box each from Golf (a pear tree) and Lima (an apple).
Golf’s fruit is a bit on the ripe side, but samples were still pretty tasty. There was a fair bit of fruit with little holes that appeared to be entry holes for some little bug — these just went right on the ground, so as not to risk spreading problems to other good fruit.
Lima had prolific large apples, many of which were relatively blemish free. We’ve really enjoyed the few of these apples we’ve eaten so far.
While I was out, I noticed that Kilo had dropped almost all of its pears. I did manage to test a few, and they were fantastic. Juliet (an asian pear) is all done — we’ll have to remember for future years that it was ready very early.
Even though the temp still isn’t quite right, I put these in the root cellar — hopefully we’ll get it cooled down soon.
