Apple Harvest 2011

So! The results of the Great Fruit-Fly Experiment are at hand!

As you recall, I bagged about half the apples with fruit fly bags that were supposed to be for tomato plants:

...and this worked out pretty well. When I took the bags off today, voila! (These are Dwarf Annas):

Of course, the half that wasn't bagged was a dismal failure. Not only did the unbagged fruit have fruit fly stings on it, most of them were half-chewed. I suspected fruit bats (there is a large colony near here) until Action Man reported seeing a pair of King parrots making their morning visit at daybreak for a bit of an apple snack attack:

Apparently they were there at daybreak every morning for a couple of weeks. I don't mind sharing with King parrots, especially. But the harvest was only 6 or 7kg this time, instead of the 20kg we got last time. (Dwarf Golden Dorsetts):

Yay!

Start of Summer!

Some pics to show where everything's at for the (almost) start of summer.

After an amazing waterfall of pink blossoms, there are actual cab apples on the crab apple tree:

Finger limes are getting bigger:

And the mandarins are holding their ground, despite the loss of all the limes (again) from the two espaliers:

State of the espalier, finger lime

As you can see from the weeds, there has been zero maintenance. Not even weeding.

Luckily for me, neither of the espalier limes have died. Indeed, they are actually flowering and little limes are appearing. None of the fruit has ever ripened, but then, none of the trees have ever been watered and they are on a slope of pretty much pure clay.

Finger lime gets ever larger and happier.

Baggies on the apples

Green Harvest has, not very helpfully, stopped stocking the mesh that I used last year to protect my apples from fruit fly.

I put them in tomato fruit fly bags. I'll let you know how that goes.

Updated Interface? I don't like.

My mandarin post won't publish.

Test.

Yummy Seedy Mandarins

So, how can mandarins be yummy and seedy at the same time?

Easy. I don't water them. So they are small. And full of seeds. But very sweet. I can see why they are called honey murcott. YUM.

A week after picking them all (total harvest: about 2kg), the tree was already flowering and pollinated and rearing to go again.

Onya, little neglected mandarin tree!

Pomegranate

In the spot where the blueberry once flourished, I've planted a pomegranate tree. Shepherd's Red variety. Supposed to fruit in the year after being planted. Dark red exterior, pink seeds, ripening in late autumn.

A little bit of maintenance

Better late than never, right? A couple days ago, I noticed one of the espalier limes was heavily infested with red scale and swarming with ants. Seemed like the ants were farming the scale from their nest around the roots of the lime tree, waterproofing the rootball in the process (I HATE ANTS!). So I knew the lime trees were stressed, what with the heatwave and the poor soil, but this infestation is an indicator of really bad, stress, I guess, and if the lime dies I will be sad, but I am firm in my committment not to prop up the enchanted orchard with frequent watering. I pruned some of the worst affected branches. Maybe that will stress it more and push it over the edge, but those branches were so heavily encrusted I just couldn't picture them being healthy again. I gave both limes a seasol watering. Then, today I petroleum-oiled what was left and spread ant sand around the base. Good luck, little lime trees. ($30 for the ant sand and pestoil).

Twenty Kilograms of Apples

It's March and the Enchanted Orchard is looking rather grim.

I'm too sad to post pictures of my blueberry bush, which, after giving two or three punnets-worth of blueberries over summer, was killed by the February heat wave in which a week of over-forty-degree maximum temps took a serious toll on the garden.

I still don't water the front garden. It's survival of the fittest. Apparently blueberry was not sufficiently fit.

So I console myself remembering the 20kg of small, perfect, crisp apples that I harvested in early December:



Next time I will be more stringent about not only pinching off all but 3 or 4 fruit in a cluster: The weight of the apples on this branch broke it off, sadly:

If we price apples at $5 a kilo, I guess we can then subtract $100 from the running tally. Also, 250g of pink finger limes, retail value $10, and the blueberries worth about $15.

The mandarins remain small, hard and green, but show no sign of dropping off the tree, despite the heatwave. Hopefully they will ripen at some stage!