First Pear!

It was a long and busy summer.  I upped my spray dilligence and added in Sea Crop, as an additional nutrient in my mix of Effective Microbes, dried kelp, seaweed and fish sludge along with neem and karanja oil.  June saw my father and I going through the orchard and removing most fruitlets, as all the trees are still in the roots and shoots phase of establishment.  Next year, I will let the first third of the plantings bear a crop.  

I have had apricots and apples in the orchard bear fruit so far.  This season the pears sprouted about half a dozen.  I only left one to see if I could get it to the end.  The plums have proven to be more reticent.  I will give them another couple of years before I make a real decision to either give up on them and replant in apples, or find that another year's growth is what they really need to decide to produce.

I left a couple dozen apples as well.  While they have been the most delicious apples I have almost ever consumed, the lopsided rainfall this year has, in my mind, hampered their texture.  All have been a bit on the mealy side.  Not good for establishing a market.  It has me considering that I may need to water the orchard even after my standard rootstocks have been in the ground for five years, as the common wisdom says you can leave them to their own devices at that point.  I wonder if the texture would not have been as fibrous, had they more access to moisture.

In any event, I will need to wait a week or so for a taste of the above pear.  It is rock hard picked off the tree, so I will leave it in the garages to hopefully ripen in time.  In the meantime I will start my fall sprays today to help compost leaves and set up the ground for next season.  Until then...