July 1: In the Backyard Neighborhood

We’ve settled in to the fullness of summer and the backyard corner is in full bloom.

The clematis is past prime but the hostas are preparing to bloom and the peach tree is fully leafed out.  This year’s small peach crop was gobbled up by the local wildlife.  I’ve learned to be sanguine about such developments.  After all, I can't stop them without being cruel and we all must share in nature’s abundance.

We’ve had patches of dry weather in the last six weeks and are in danger of a localized drought.  I run the sprinkler on my vegetable garden but typically leave the rest of the garden and yard to fend for itself.  We had an inch of rain earlier this week; more is forecast for this afternoon and I hope that will help to ease the dry lawn.  

Whether it’s via rain or my sprinkler, I expect July will bring even more growth to the garden and the backyard, a lovely development to behold. 

The Patient Peach

In the Spring of 2008, my dad sent me three dwarf fruit trees for my backyard.  I planted the two apple trees on either side of the pear tree.  Then I began to dream of the fruit I would one day harvest.  It takes two years for new trees to set on fruit and I knew that patience was the order of the day.

The first fruit set on on 2010 and I followed my dad’s directions and culled the fruit so that none of the branches would be overloaded.  Then, just when I was confident that I would be picking my first harvest, a backyard predator cleared out my crop.  

It would be like this for the next four years.  The fruit would set on and I’d get excited only to wake up one morning and discover that all of my fruit was gone.  I came to expect that my harvest would end up being one lone apple lying under the tree with a bite taken from it.  It was disheartening.  This summer, I expected the same outcome.  As usual, an abundant amount of fruit set on to the apples and pear trees and things looked great.

Even the peach tree, in just its second year in the backyard, looked quite promising.

I didn’t get my hopes up because every year my early crop prospects have ended with some kind of critter disaster.   But this year, as the growing season unfolded, things looked promising.  Each morning, I held my breath and checked to see that my fruit crops were still on the branches.  I held quietly to my hope for an actual harvest.  

The peaches were ready first.  As I stood at the tree I could smell their musky ripening.   After seven years of cultivating the fruit trees, I had my first tree fruit crop!  This past Sunday, I picked my crop of peaches.  They smelled amazing and tasted delicious.

I feel like my patience has been rewarded.  There is plenty of fruit on the apple and pear trees steadily moving toward ripeness.  I’m hopeful that actual apples and pears will follow.  Time will tell that story; for now I wait.  Good thing that I've had all those lessons in patience.

Thinning the Harvest

My dwarf fruit trees will have their first significant harvest next fall.  Together, the trees set on more than two dozen apples and one pear, just on target for trees their age.  But the limbs are yet young and some are vulnerable and so the responsible gardener must thin the apples, so that they grow at least six inches apart and don't weigh down the branches too much.  So a branch may start looking like this:

Once thinned, it looks like this:

These apples have a good shot at successfully maturing and have me dreaming of a small bowl of fried apples and a few lunch box snacks.  The thinned apples, nine in total, went to the compost heap where they will likely serve as a sumptuous feast for a few bunnies of my acquaintance.

In my book, that's a gardening win-win.