Yesterday we got our first plum from a gold plum in the food forest:
It only set a single fruit, which fell to the ground when fully ripe. I fortunately found it before the insects and birds and we were able to taste it. Delicious! Sweet and almost slightly lemony. I thought this tree might be a seedling, but then I reviewed my old videos and realized it’s probably one of the two plum trees I planted in my previous Grocery Row Gardens at the homestead we rented when we first moved back to the States. I can’t find a graft, but it’s probably grown over it enough to render the division invisible.
This follows on the heels of the seedling nectarines, of which we harvested about 10lbs from the tree in the current Grocery Row Gardens.
Those were delicious, though they got very soft when ripe and did not keep well on the counter. Rachel made a nectarine and wild blueberry crumble that was delicious.
We picked the blueberries in our woods from an early-producing species with small, sweet-tart, very black berries. The combination with nectarines was incredible. Rachel added only a little sugar, so it was a sharp, sweet-tart crumble bursting with fresh fruit flavor. We also got a good amount of mulberries this year, along with blackberries from our various University of Arkansas bushes. We also got a few good handfuls of goumi berries from the bush in the food forest.
In another first, the jaboticaba in the greenhouse bloomed and set about a dozen delicious black fruits.
Our next fruit to ripen should be our seedling peaches. We have three of them bearing right now. One with weird, almond-shaped fruit, another with small orange peaches, and another with quite large white and orange fruit with reddish blotches.
After the peaches, we’ll get rabbiteye blueberries from the food forest and from the wild bushes in the woods. We also have a couple handfuls of purple plums ripening in the food forest. Then we should get a few apples. I have a Honeycrisp in the Grocery Row Garden with a single apple on it, plus a few apples on another tree that lost its label in the apple orchard.
Then the muscadine grapes will come in, and figs, followed at the end of summer by the persimmons on our one tree old enough to produce. Then, in fall, we’ll get pecans from the big old trees around our homestead.
We won’t get a lot of fruit this year as the trees are still young, but we’re getting more than last year. It’s fun seeing new trees come into bearing each year. The food forest is almost three years old and everything is really starting to grow.
Some of our pomegranates and chestnuts bloomed this year but haven’t set anything. It’s a good sign, though. Maybe next year. We might get pears next year, too, as a few of those trees are getting quite tall. The satsumas should produce as well.
In related news, this spring we grafted Keiffer pear scion wood onto a Bradford pear seedling we allowed to grow at the leading edge of the Grocery Row Gardens. I watched it for over a year and let it establish, then cut the entire top off and grated onto it. You can see the video here:
Look at the growth of that scion!
The speed of scion growth on an established rootstock is astounding. It’s almost my height, and I grafted it only about a foot from the ground! And that was in less than three months.
It could bear pears next year if it keeps growing like this.
In a few years, our homestead should yield baskets and baskets of fruit. Plus, we planted another thirty or so trees this year. The goal is to have so many fruit we can’t manage it all. Wouldn’t that be fun?
