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| An Asian pear tree. Mrs ERJ likes Chujoru best. I like Korean Giant. I also have a few Shinko sprinkled in. |
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| I find Asian pears to be easy to manage, precocious, productive, tasty and the fruit hangs on the tree waiting for me to get around to picking it. What is not to like? |
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| Enterprise apple over G.935 This is another easy-to-manage combination. |
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| A close-up of the limb. We saved a Jonafree and a couple of Enterprise until March last year. Mrs ERJ like the Enterprise better. |
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| At least a few of the Bald Cypress I planted last spring survived the summer. |
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| It took me a while before I saw the first one, and then I was able to start picking them out. |
That first pear photo looks like you have trained the limbs along a fence or something. How did you do it?
ReplyDeleteI used baling twine to pull the branches down to 45 degrees from horizontal. Gravity and fruit load pulled them the rest of the way.
DeleteI use baling twine because I can get it in enormous quantities for free.
At some point, the branches will arch and a sucker will burst forth at the highest point. Then I prune the old branch outboard of the new sucker. The new sucker gets bend down from vertical.
After a decade or so, it is necessary to lop the limb back closer to the trunk because it keeps inching out, growing the canopy outside its allotted footprint.
How much fruit do you pick in the fall? Do you can most of it? How much are you able to make?
ReplyDeleteThose questions are good for about six blog posts.
DeleteThe amount we pick is extremely variable. Life happens.
In general, we pick enough apples to make 50 quarts of apple sauce. I think we could use twice that much in a year but for now our target is 50.
We store some of the apples and pears in common cold storage. That amount varies by year. That would include Enterprise, Goldrush apples and Asian pears.
If we were hungry...we would harvest all of it.
Hunger is a great motivator.
Without exaggerating, the amount of fruit we could harvest from our property could be 20X times higher than it currently is. In an exceptional year, maybe even 50X higher.
Sad. There are children crying themselves to sleep in America because they are hungry and there are no Nacho Cheese flavored Doritos in the house.
Great point. The difference in cost between natural food and processed, bagged crap makes a shopping cart an IQ test, and the obese chip crunchers consistently fail.
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