Thank you Janet and the mayor, orchard blessings!

Some time back I went into a nostalgice trip concerning my upbringings in Tennessee. A favorite was preserved fruits from the home orchard. I put out a cry for such delicious morsels, just reminiscing........... Well, our own AL THE MAYOR and the power of the house and stove, MS. JANET, airlifted three absolutely delicious jars of goodness!!
The family thanks you!

Glad they arrived safely. We have enjoyed sharing the results of our first decent fruit crop (2008).

Now the Apricot trees (5 of them) are covered with buds about to burst open into those lovely white flowers that are the annual introduction to Spring here. The odds are that a frost/freeze will take out the young fruit again this year, but we will hope for the best. We grew Apricots and Apriums in SoCal  but they tend to be "too early" a fruit for this area, despite what the nurseries say.

The Pears, Plums, Apples and Cherries will be coming along later in the Spring. We hope this year is even better than last.

Ah-HEM.

Well Folks, 2009 was a real bust 'fruit-crop wise'. A real KILLER Freeze hit us April 26th last year and did take out 95 % of all the fruit, except a few scruffy apples which suffered a bad case of skin blight. We made a few bottles of Apple Butter, but that was about all.

2010 (so far) is a totally different story. It was a very warm spring, so the trees seemed to burst into bloom everywhere. Instead of one specie at a time, all the apples opened at once allowing cross-pollination to work its magic. Same with all the other fruit as well.

After ten years of waiting and watching each crop freeze in the Spring, we have Apricots this year. Some are already over an inch in diameter, so it looks like we will have some to enjoy in June. We have 3 Apricot trees and 2 Manchurian Apricot 'Bushes'. All have fruit growing for the first time! Bushes is somewhat of a misidentifier...they are as tall as the trees!

3 Plums and 2 Plucots also have fruit. These are the first Plucots we've enjoyed here. They were 'Suckers' off one of our SoCal Plucot trees, transported in a bucket and planted after sitting in the garage for a year. I never expected them to survive, much less give us any fruit, but the proof is in the eating !

We lost 2 Cherry trees to some sort of blight, but the 4 remaining are healthy and loaded with cherries that should be ready in about 3 weeks.

Regular Pears are few and far between (2 trees), but the Asian Pears (2 trees) are continuing to give us a good crop and do very well in the Pear Butter recipes!

Apples?? Have We got Apples ! Prairie Spies and Fuji, Arkansas Blacks, and both Golden and Red Delicious all have bumper crops! The three new Arkansas Blacks are looking like growing 'children' But even one of them (one year old) has a few apples on it!  The 12 Granny Smiths are in their 5th year so they show a few apples here and there, but nothing like what the others are producing. Even the Crab Apple (1) that is strictly here to pollenate others, has a few small fruit on it! We have about 30 apples total. Even the single trees (Earliblaze, Honeycrisp, and Rome Beauty) are looking good this season.

Here are a few photos of the seasons crop as it grows!
 
One of the Apricots. We can hardly wait for this to ripen!
 

 
One of three Plums-

 
The PLUCOTS, a big surprise for us !!

 
One of the Cherry trees

 
AND Finally, As much as it breaks my heart to "THIN" the crop, here are some of the Arkansas Black Apples, before I thinned them to bunches of THREE. Not thinning would give us a lot of smaller apples....but it sure hurts to dump all those little ones !